Ron on the Trump/Kim summit.

The Trump/Kim summit is just a come-on, a trick, a ploy. Kim has no intention of declawing his fragile regime by unilaterally Un-nuking. No way he’s gonna give up his ace-in-the-hole trump card . . . ‘cause once that’s gone, he loses face, and losing face means losing power, and to dictators that means being Mussolinied by an angry, starving mob.

It’s a giant game of whack-a-mole NorKor style. Show a little leg, take it back. Demand concessions, but then withdraw your own once you get what you wanted. And what he wants is reunification of the entire peninsula under HIS regime.

Kim lusts for the SoKor food and wealth but without the US presence anywhere around. He’s all for denuking, but only up to the point that it’s the American nukes that are withdrawn; he’ll keep his own, of course, as the big-bang ack-ack gun to the head of the rest of the world.

What he wants is removal of sanctions and a platinum Pezzonovante membership card in the World Political Posturing Club. I mean . . . c’mon – a paranoid pipsqueak who has his own brother killed? who only a few months ago was waving his Taepodong around but now is waving an olive branch?

This guy cut his teeth on Mao and Stalin, not Wilson and Chamberlain. Does ANYbody read history any more? Releasing those 3 prisoners cost him absolutely nothin but put him in the international spotlight as a reasonable guy with a big smile and myopic barber.

Well, I gotta throw the BS! flag on that’n. The only reason guys like him keep political prisoners in the first place is to use as “negotiation” pawns later. Extortion, plain and simple. Kidnapping for ransom.

And Trump . . . just a few weeks ago he was throwing verbal bombs such as “rain fire and fury” and “shit they’ve never seen before” but now is basking in the faux warmth of Kim’s “good will.” Farkle!

I’m gonna go with Abe on this one: “Just because North Korea is responding to dialogue, there should be no reward,” he said after spending two days with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. “Maximum pressure should be maintained, and actual implementation of concrete actions towards denuclearization demanded.”

And Bolton – HFS! He’s in favor of the meeting for one simple reason: It’s doomed to fail because Kim’s a Clintonesque asshole. And when it does, that’ll leave only the military option and we can get on with what Patton wanted to do with Russia in‘45 and MacArthur wanted to do in North Korea 65 years ago.

Three previous US administrations were suckered in by the Kim dynasty, and in 2012, right after taking power, Kim Phat One agreed to suspend nuke tests, missile launches, and uranium enrichment. Yeah,right! A month later he launched a satellite into orbit and then did a nuclear detonation only a year after the 2012 “Leap Day” agreement.

Y’know .. . could be he’s willing to shut down his nuke testing for a while simply because his techs have all the data they need for the meantime and are building a new secret facility somewhere else. Besides,the test site he’s shutting down is collapsing anyway, causing Xi to tell him to stop radioactively polluting the region.

Just sitting down with a US president is a major shiny bauble on his charm bracelet. His daddy didn’t do it, and neither did his granddaddy. Out-dealing the guy who wrote The Art of the Deal would be a major coup for him.

Kim is Lucy van Pelt with a plutonium football inscrutably kneeling and posing for Moon and Trump to turn off the sanctions, turn on the aid, stand down their troops, and pancake on their butts when he snatches it away after all the concessions he demanded are in place.

He’s the Beetlejuice of compromise, the Kardashian of credibility, the Baghdad Bob of diplomacy. As Michael Corleone tells his nephew Vincent Mancini, “You are what you are. It’s your nature.” Reminds me of the fable about the frog and the scorpion.

A scorpion asked a frog to let him ride on his back to get across a river. The frog refused, saying that the scorpion would sting him and kill him.

The scorpion argued, “No, because if I did that, you’d die before you got across the water and I’d drown once you go under.”

So the frog allowed the scorpion to ride on his back and began swimming across the river. About halfway across, the scorpion stung the frog. As he was dying from the venom, the frog asked, “Why did you do that when you said you wouldn’t? Now we’ll both die.”

“I have no choice,” said the scorpion. “It’s my nature.”

All we can hope for is that Trump’s nature is more like the turtle in another similar fable about a scorpion and a turtle in the same situation. The scorpion attempts to sting the turtle,but fails because of its protective shell. The turtle then drowns the scorpion.

Trump’s pretty thin-skinned, tho. But maybe he can sense the sting coming and get out of reach of the tail before it strikes. He’s gotta be ready to get up from the table and tell Kim to shove it when and if the time comes. I’ll trust him more than I would Dubya or DingleBarry.

And there’s this chocolate cake on the counter top calling my name. So, ciao.