While President Donald Trump receives no shortage of critique from Democrats, far rarer are instances of full-throated criticism from conservatives. This week, however, Trump made a move that so blatantly contradicts U.S. interests, the conservative magazine National Review was forced to admit that his decision “does not make sense on any level.” The “doddering octogenarian” American president, it asserts, is a “sucker” who was easily “fooled” into disaster.
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“Alas,” writes the Review, “the president of the United States, who began his term by taking an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help him God, says the United States is minimizing its joint defense exercises with the South Korean military because those exercises are ‘very insulting’ to North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un.” As Trump told reporters on Wednesday, “I didn’t like the fact that we’re doing these massive military exercises really against North Korea.” Trump noted that South Korea was not participating in the war with Iran, and then claimed the joint military exercise would be “very insulting to somebody that frankly has been, during my term at least, very well-behaved.”
“Got that?” writes the Review. “Joint U.S.–South Korean military exercises, which have occurred in some form or fashion every year since the end of the Korean War in 1953, are ‘very insulting’ to North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un. Oh, no! Heaven forbid that the U.S. ever insult a man who boasted a couple of years ago, ‘The whole of [the United States] mainland is within the range of our nuclear strike and the nuclear button is on my office desk all the time.’”
While the president praises “very well-behaved” North Korea, as the Review notes, his own administration disagrees. According to the Trump administration’s 2026 National Defense Strategy, North Korea “poses a direct military threat to the Republic of Korea as well as to Japan, both of which are U.S. treaty allies,” “South Korea must stay vigilant against the threat of a North Korean invasion,” and North Korea’s “nuclear forces are increasingly capable of threatening the U.S. Homeland. These forces are growing in size and sophistication, and they present a clear and present danger of nuclear attack on the American Homeland.”
According to National Review senior political correspondent Jim Geraghty, “I wish I had something more optimistic to write than the fact that our president is a doddering octogenarian who just blurts out the first thing that pops into his head, and who ardently believes that dictators of hostile states are not so threatening to the U.S. and its allies because they personally flatter him. But that is where we are.”
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While the Review argues there are valid criticisms to level against South Korea, and that the country could theoretically provide some support for the conflict with Iran, it also notes that “Trump didn’t consult South Korea before launching the war against Iran, which set off a major energy crisis, the biggest stock market drop in South Korean history, a huge drop in the value of the South Korean won currency, and a spike in inflation in that country.” And just a month before launching the war, Trump announced high tariffs against the U.S. ally. According to the Review, “If you take the most aggressive and combative stance on trade possible, you cannot be surprised that the same country you’re hitting economically doesn’t want to put its soldiers and sailors in harm’s way to help you militarily.”
In the Review’s assessment, “Trump rarely knows what he is talking about and just blurts out whatever sounds good. He is incontrovertibly wedded to a narrative that all of America’s allies are useless mooching freeloaders, while he keeps getting charmed and flattered by some of the worst and most dangerous men on the planet, and downplays the threat they present to U.S. interests. He is an easy mark, a sucker, easily captivated and fooled.”
With all this in mind, the magazine draws a grim conclusion: “The president may not intend to leave America weaker on the world stage than when he found it. But that is the course we are on, with his accumulated erratic decisions, fits of pique and spite and dumb and insulting comments.”
