Some of you may remember that dramatic night last December when scores of South Korean civilians, some of them just stumbling out of bars after a night out, quashed a fascist coup attempt in pitch black darkness by literally boosting lawmakers’ asses over the barricades around the capitol to enable them to vote. I wrote about it at the time, despite having no business writing about Korean politics, because it was such an incredible sliding doors situation compared with what had happened over here and how we had just…re-elected our coup guy.
Given that context, I’m especially amused by what happened with Trump in South Korea this week, where he was given a crown and a state dinner menu that you have to see to believe. The situation is funny on its own in a “this could be a Veep episode” kind of way, but also useful for giving us a bird’s eye view of exactly where we stand in terms of the breakdown of international diplomacy and how our president is being dealt with. And I genuinely can’t tell whether South Korea is pandering to Trump here or trolling him harder than he’s ever been trolled. Let’s discuss.
Barely a week after Trump posted an AI video of himself dumping shit from an airplane all over protesters at the No Kings rally on October 18, President Lee Jae Myung has gifted Trump a replica of a gold crown believed to have been worn by an ancient Korean ruler. The gift by appears, on its face, to be a kind of pathetic way to get Trump to lower tariffs on South Korea: by prostrating themselves before a corrupt narcissist who demands flattery and literal gold in exchange for favors. That said, it’s also pretty pointed to give a fake crown to a rival president who is currently trying to deny that he’s a monarch—in the process, splashing photos across international media of Trump gazing at this stupid large, Burger King-ass crown—amid a “No Kings” rally that was the biggest single-day protest the United States has ever seen. And the photos definitely highlight the irony of South Korea having managed to impeach, remove, and arrest its own Trumpian dictator for declaring martial law and attempting a self-coup, while ours just continues to fester in power.
But my favorite part of the summit is the menu they designed for Trump. For context, South Korea is known for using state dinners to troll other nations. They terribly pissed off Japan in 2017 by serving shrimp from Dokdo, a group of islands that the two countries had long been fighting over, and inviting a sex slave who was forced to work in Japanese brothels during World War II. Japan called the dinner “anti-Japan,” which it was.
With that said, here’s what they served Trump, as shared by Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt:
We’ve got a salad called “Reminiscing the Success Story of New York” with Trump’s favorite Thousand Island dressing, which is basically Big Mac sauce. We’ve got a Korean Platter of Sincerity with US Beef. We’ve got a “gochujang-ketchup glaze” and mini beef patties with ketchup, in case Trump can’t find anything else on the menu to eat, because they know he’s got the palate of a toddler. And we’ve got a “Peacemaker’s Dessert” that includes a gold-adorned brownie, because what else do you serve Scrooge fucking McDuck besides literal gold on a brownie.
So yes, South Korea basically gave Trump a Burger King crown and a happy meal with extra ketchup and patted him on the head and told him he’s been a real good boy. They mocked him right out in the open while making him feel like they were kissing the ring.
And you know what he did? He lowered the tariffs. (Which he shouldn’t have imposed in the first place.)
The president is in obvious mental and physical decline, and being a citizen of the country whose leader can be manipulated with gold and ketchup is deeply humiliating. On the bright side, Trump did acknowledge this week that he is not allowed to run for a third term. So we got that going for us, which is nice.