Kim Jong Un isn’t the first tyrant to play Trump, and he won’t be the last

The undisputed master of Trump-whispering, of course, is Vladi­mir Putin. Whether the former KGB operative has some kind of personal or financial hold on the incoming president is unknown to the American public. But Putin’s public ma­nipu­la­tion of Trump has offered a master class for the likes of May and Netanyahu. Take his cynical chiding of the Democrats for failing “to lose gracefully,” after Russian intelligence services tried to tip the election by hacking the Democratic National Committee; or his faux-gracious decision not to respond to the U.S. sanctions imposed afterward. In both cases, he elicited exactly the responses he wanted from Trump, who called his critique “so true” and his non-retaliation “very smart.”

What are foreign governments learning from all this? Unfortunately, the main lesson may be that this U.S. president can easily be played. He can be steered into adopting a U.S. adversary’s ideas as his own; he can be appeased by public flattery. Perhaps most disturbing, he can be goaded into statements and, perhaps, actions that play into the hands of enemies or undermine U.S. interests. If Kim Jong Un does, in fact, manage to stage an ICBM test in the coming weeks, expect him to remind the world of Trump’s “it won’t happen” boast — the first of what may be many Twitter traps to be sprung on the 45th president.