This morning Ed reported that President Trump had canceled his planned summit with Kim Jong-Un. This afternoon, Trump called the cancelation a “tremendous setback for North Korea” and for the world. But as Allahpundit noted, Trump also left the door open a crack saying, “If and when Kim Jong-un chooses to engage in constructive dialogue and actions, I am waiting.” It turns out Trump didn’t have to wait long. From Bloomberg:
In a statement Friday by state-run KCNA that cited Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan, North Korea vowed to continue to pursue peace and signaled it would give Washington more time to reconsider talks.
“Our goal and will to do everything for peace and stability of the Korean peninsula and mankind remains unchanged, and we are always willing to give time and opportunity to the US side with a big and open mind,” according to the statement. “We express our intent that there is a willingness to sit at any time, in any way to resolve issues.”
It recalls a Trumpian maxim on Twitter:
Negotiations 101: The best deals you can make are the ones you walk away from…and then get them with better terms.
— Donald J. Trump
I assume the deal is done and this is all theater, designed to appear real, perhaps to make the Cabal Psych people who may be analyzing it for inconsistencies report to their bosses that it definitely appears real.
This is a brilliant touch in that regard, and one which even makes me wonder if Q might have overstated how done the deal was.
A lot of psychology is patterns of behavior, triggered by broad patterns perceived in the moment. You do something repetitively as a child, and as an adult when you see similar patterns around you, it can trigger the same behavior responses, emotions, and desires.
Kim grew up in a world where he only had two different hierarchy situations. Either he was above everyone around him by some measure and could do whatever he wanted and make any demands he wanted, or, in the presence of his father, he was far, far below that person and needed to fear them.
These probably burned in as psychological patterns and as an adult, he will either be demanding and expecting of his every whim to be satisfied when he detects subservience, or he will enter a submissive, subservient state where he will be eager to please when he detects dominance. Notice when dealing with him initially, Trump was quick to act as the dominant figure, who would think nothing of dropping a few Nukes on Pyongyang, and who would love to fuck Kim up just for looking at him.
All the rabbits freaked out. “You’ll provoke him! You’ll provoke him!” “OMG, he’s going to create a nuclear war!” “Trump’s going to get us all killed!”
The truth is, Trump was operating on another level, where he was not in the moment, responding according to the base, reflexive emotional drives which control most plebes. Trump was operating with a detailed knowledge of psychology, and how behaviors are burned in during childhood, and how this would have operated on Kim. Trump was presenting stimuli to Kim which were evocative of his father’s dominance, and this would draw out of Kim a subservient desire to avoid conflict and please his superior.
In high school I once felt my brain lock up in confusion. A kid two years ahead of me stopped me from going into the cafeteria, and thought he was going to turn me into some sort of freshman slave. I said to him something like, “Oh, so when you were a freshman, if a Junior came at you, you’d just have buckled under and eaten his shit?” His response was an immediate, “Of course.” I was baffled, both that he would have done that, and that he would eagerly admit to it, like it was just common sense. I actually locked up at the response as I tried to process it.
By that point I had an excellent background in striking and grappling, so he didn’t know it but even with the weight difference I liked to fight, and this was looking like it was going to scratch a real itch. When he picked himself up off the ground, his leather jacket had actually caught on the ground as he slid backward and was now down around his waist, and his eye immediately began to visibly swell. I got ready for a battle royale, because if anybody did that to me and I could make it to two feet, it was going to be on.
He muttered something about how crazy I was to fuck with him, threw his arms to bring his jacket back up on his shoulders for emphasis, and stormed off. For the rest of our time together in that school, he would not even make eye contact with me, and was completely subservient when we were in the same group. Again, I was puzzled, because I couldn’t figure out why he would challenge me in the first place if he didn’t want to fight, and why he would try so hard to be dominant, and then so comfortably fall into a position of total subservience.
I realize now he only had two modes to deal with people. In one, maybe among younger neighborhood kids, he was completely dominant and everyone bowed down to him. I am an easy going guy, and when he had seen me, he must have assumed I was a good subservient psychology in search of a master, and he was simply going to put me in my place. I didn’t know that, and I was just dealing with people as they came at me. Had I tried to appease him or show kindness to defuse things, in a way that someone else could have manipulated me into not being aggressive, he would only have gotten worse. I didn’t realize it at the time, but liking fighting made things a lot easier, because I did not try to deal with him in a way that would have pacified me.
Once I struck him I sent him into his other mode, and he became subservient and conflict avoidant around me. Had I been him, I would have gotten more aggressive. Again, it was different from how I would have behaved, and I was puzzled at the time. But the reality was he was programmed, perhaps by an abusive bullying parent, and some other experience where he was dominant and got to be the bully himself. He only had the two modes. Once I hit him, he behaved as he would have with his bullying parent. You can’t reason with people like that. You can only present stimuli, and put them in modes.
Kim’s latest tweets were probably probes by a leader who was beginning to feel powerful and slip into his bullying mode. If Trump had been nice, or tried to appease, Kim would have become totally unmanageable, and no deal would have happened. Trump detected Kim was beginning to slip back into his old mode of bullying those around him and getting expectant and demanding. So Trump snapped his whip, canceled the meeting, blamed Kim’s bad behavior, and then reminded Kim of all the power Trump wielded, how much bigger his military was compared to Kim’s, how much more damage his nukes could do, and how violent he could be if he wanted to.
Kim is a robot. Instantly he subconsciously saw his father’s dominance and aggression, so he flipped into his submissive and eager to please mode, and Trump can now dictate terms to him. Again if you are looking at it instinctually and reflexively, as you would deal with somebody like yourself in a social situation, aggression requires trying to calm the person down and giving them something to assuage their heightened amygdala. But with that kind of bifurcated psychology, it is the exact wrong thing to do.
Trump doesn’t live in the moment or view everyone else as just an extension of himself and his own psychology. He sees the reality and the entire mechanism in people, from its creation to how it operates today, and when he presses a button, he knows exactly how it will affect the system. It is why everyone is left baffled as he cruises to success after success, often doing the exact opposite of what everyone else thought was common sense.
This is all so brilliant, I almost wonder if Kim was momentarily deluded into thinking of pulling out of the deal somehow, or trying to get more out of it. Either that, or this part of the theater was so brilliantly constructed by masters of the art, that Cabal’s psych people will not be able to detect whether it is real or made up.
The truth is, I have no idea myself, though I tend to believe Q, and think it is all theater.
On the issue of China interfering, if this was a real negotiation, it would have been interesting to have people talk again about Trump getting the Nobel, and then have Trump emphasize publicly how it is almost a done deal. But then he should add it does require China’s help, as an integral partner to finish it. And so if it happens, China’s Xi should also share in the Nobel for his hard work in the region, because without his hard work, it wouldn’t happen.
I’d couch the last part in a way that says the deal is done, but for the work Xi still needs to do, so Xi will feel as if the world is watching him, and if it doesn’t happen, it will be seen globally as Xi’s failure. The combination of the Nobel carrot, and the stick of being blamed for the failure, might mix with Chinese culture of blame assigning and shame to hasten things along some.
Trump comes off as magnanimous to a public who knows this is all his deal, Xi ends up owing him one for his graciousness and spotlight sharing, and the deal is not held up by petty political bullshit.
Then again, it is all a done deal already, but it makes for good speculation.
Tell others about r/k Theory, because it will affect their programming
The NorK pullout had the smell of his advisers telling him to break contact for a better deal. When that didn’t happen (and appeared to be blowing the entire deal up) then the psychology you identified kicked in.
So it’s even worse for Kim — now TRUMP feels like a better adviser than the advisers around him, and isolated him from his strategists and consigliere.
Trump is the guy who came up through adversity. Making it in New York, dealing with unions, and the Mob, and smarmy Loy-ya’s requires a fighters psychology. A lot of lower-T guys, multi-millionaire inheritors in their own right, would and have just get eaten alive. Kim just survived his dad, then immediately starting killing off his family with anti-aircraft guns. Big difference.
Kim’s mentality is not an unusual one. Churchill spotted it years ago when he said of the Russians that they were always at your throat or at your feet. The mentality is also common to most leftists and narcissists – they either want to rule or be ruled. Neither option appeals to a person with a healthy mind
AC,
I would not underestimate China’s involvement with Kim’s supposed anger as they are in trade negotiations with the US. The Indochinese were looking to use NK’s situation as leverage against Trump’s trade team.
Trump basically told them to Fuck off by cancelling the deal. Shocked China and the deal was then back on.
Over at the conservative treehouse they laid this out pretty good over the last few months.