On Wednesday, Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR), whose leftism demanded that he refuse to answer when asked if he agreed that America should never be a socialist country, attacked President Trump with a vile tweet in which he unfavorably compared Trump to North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.
Tweeting about Trump meeting with Kim Jong-un, Merkley tweeted, “A president and a dictator met in Hanoi. One has demanded unquestioned loyalty, bragged about his nuclear arsenal, attacked the press, and employed family members as his advisors. The other is Kim Jong-un.”
Merkley’s comparison is malevolent and ignores what a monster Kim Jong-un truly is. As The Washington Post noted in 2017, Thomas Buergenthal, who served on the International Court of Justice and was in the Nazi death camp Auschwitz as a child, said Kim Jong-un should be tried for crimes against humanity. He said, “I believe that the conditions in the [North] Korean prison camps are as terrible, or even worse, than those I saw and experienced in my youth in these Nazi camps and in my long professional career in the human rights field.” Buergenthal was one member of a three-judge panel that listened to former prisoners and prison guards from North Korea and said there was enough evidence to charge the Kim regime with 10 of the 11 internationally recognized war crimes.
The Post wrote, “Anyone who questions the leaders or the system is liable to be thrown in a penal labor colony — often for life, and often together with three generations of their families to eliminate the ‘seed’ of ‘enemies of the state.’”
130,000 North Koreans are rumored to be held in four huge camps; there are also “reeducation” camps that are widely reputed to be monstrously brutal. In 2017, U.N. investigators, gleaning information from North Korean exiles, said inmates in North Korea’s prison camps displayed “unspeakable atrocities” comparable with the Nazi atrocities in World War II.
Merkley’s hostility to Trump provoked him to call for Trump to resign in January after Buzzfeed claimed, in a report that was later debunked by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team, that the president had told Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about his business interests in Moscow. Merkley tweeted, “If this report of Trump suborning false testimony is confirmed, then Trump committed a felony and must resign or be impeached.”
But calling for Trump to resign was nothing new for Merkley; in December 2017, he said, “The president should resign because he certainly has a track record with more than 17 women of horrific conduct.”
Merkley has said of Trump, “You have a president who wants to use the suffering of children for political leverage, and that is completely unacceptable.”
After a fatal stabbing in Portland in May 2017, Merkley was asked if Trump bore responsibility for a “wave of violence” in the United States. He answered, “”You probably can’t tie him directly to one particular act of violence. But to the wave of violence, yes, he bears responsibility,” adding, “I feel like much of what has happened with these hate crimes falls directly from who he is.”