A Creepy Coin

In our latest Need to Know podcast, Mona Charen and I discuss many issues, including the coin: the Singapore summit commemorative coin, ordered up by the White House Communications Agency. The summit is off, but, apparently, you can still order the coin. Read about it here.

The coin shows two leaders in profile, facing each other. On the left is “President Donald J. Trump.” On the right is “Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Un.” Trump’s country is identified as “United States of America,” and Kim’s as “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”

To my mind, this is creepy, Caesaristic, and sick.

I have a fond memory of Robert D. Novak, the late and famed journalist. In advance of some summit, the White House handed out lapel pins to the press corps: the U.S. and Soviet flags intertwined. Novak refused to put his on. I understand him (and agree with him).

In 2015, President Obama welcomed Xi Jinping, the brute who rules China, to the White House. Pennsylvania Avenue was festooned with the U.S. and Chinese flags, intertwined. There are all sorts of things you have to do in the diplomatic realm. You don’t have to do that — or that creepy, sick coin.

(In recent years, I have profiled two escapees from North Korea — unfathomably brave, of course. Yeonmi Park and Jung Gwang-il. Jeane Kirkpatrick described North Korea as a “psychotic state,” as well as a gulag state. The evil done by that regime is almost unimaginable. “Democratic People’s Republic” — like Pol Pot’s “Democratic Kampuchea,” yes.)