Duterte snubs White House invite. What was Trump thinking?

[WhiteTara]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-finds-another-tough-guy-court-013042012.html

Does Donald Trump have a new favorite strongman? Trump, who as a candidate basked in the approval of the authoritarian Vladimir Putin, has used his time in office to embrace tough guys around the globe, praising the growing power of an autocrat in Turkey, respecting the survival instincts of North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, and recently calling China’s unelected leader, Xi Xinping, “a very good man.” Now it’s the Philippines turn. In another spontaneous foreign policy initiative, Trump used a Saturday phone call to invite the country’s controversial president, Rodrigo Duterte, for an official White House visit. Duterte played coy, sending a message back that he might be too busy to meet with the American president, and Trump’s naive diplomacy is likely to boomerang back against America.

Calling Duterte controversial is like calling the Titanic wet. Duterte relishes making transgressive comments to inflame his opponents and rally supporters. He has vowed to personally kill drug addicts, called them zombies unable to rejoin society, and once offered to eat the liver of a terrorist, if it was served with salt and pepper.

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The death squads aren’t just a matter of “bad optics” in Washington. I spent almost a month covering the killings in Manila. I visited about a dozen murder scenes throughout various Manila slums, and interviewed police officers and politicians around the islands. In jails and at the scenes of gruesome late-night assassinations, I saw evidence that points to state involvement in these mysterious murders. There are now confessions by numerous police officers or contract killers who said they carried out killings orchestrated by police and political leaders in support of Duterte’s campaign. Two men have separately testified to Duterte himself participating in an earlier wave of vigilante killings.

Maybe Trump thinks he can rub elbows with such men and come away clean. Certainly, the American president’s agenda is to win the Philippines, which under Duterte has made friendly overtures to China, back to its traditionally close relationship with Washington. This is naive, both because the Philippines isn’t going anywhere (it has literally the most pro-American public in the world, including in America itself) and because Duterte himself is one of the few Filipinos who hates America, and is an unlikely convert to Trumpism. A White House dinner will probably help the Filipino president look statesmanlike, but it will leave traces of blood.

[tazkcmo]

1. This is why Yahoo is sinking.

No decent anything would assume Shit Gibbon is capable of thinking.