Trail Mix

President Trump celebrated Russia’s expulsion of American diplomats, saying he’s thankful they’re off the payroll: “We’re going to save a lot of money.”

He treated his own party’s Senate Majority Leader like a loser on his former TV show, “The Apprentice.”

Trump appealed to many voters because they wanted a CEO to run government like a business. Is this how successful business leaders operate? Ridiculing their own workers?

He’s turning his own government against him, and my guess is he’ll regret it. No more so than how he’s alienated the intelligence community, which is obviously behind stirring the pot against him on several fronts. They’ll never forget how in January he compared them to Nazis: “Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to “leak” into the public. One last shot at me. Are we living in Nazi Germany?” he tweeted.

If there wasn’t a “Deep State” before Trump got here, there is now. And he is in their crosshairs.

Reviewing the options I don’t see any reasonable way out other than accepting North Korea as a nuclear power, then invite them to the big-boy table and insist they play by the rules.

There are plenty of countries we tolerated going nuclear when we didn’t like it, going way back to the Soviet Union many decades ago. Deterrence, as in mutually assured destruction, has worked so far. In North Korea’s case it would be more like unilateral destruction — and it won’t be us. And that’s all we can do, have ever been able to do, ever since we “distinguished” ourselves as the only nation every to rain down a nuclear holocaust on an enemy.

Letting North Korea go nuclear isn’t ideal, but I don’t see an acceptable alternative.

On The Backend

For the long-term big picture, it seems overdue for the U.S. to seriously (and secretly) talk with China about a unified, peaceful and non-aligned Korean peninsula that sends Little Kim and South Korea’s corrupt government packing. This could be a good time to start anew on this question. China and the U.S. each would have to give up long held policies to get there, but surely this crisis demonstrates our combined self-interest in putting this ridiculous running gag of two Koreas behind us.