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In the spring of 2016, Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, were both backstage at a National Rifle Association conference in Louisville, Kentucky. The two men are political opposites. McConnell is a poor orator but a gifted Senate tactician. He plays the long game. Trump is a great showman but barely knows the basics of the constitutional system. He improvises. In Louisville, McConnell noticed that Trump, who was by then the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee, was holding pages of prepared remarks in his hand. I see you have a script, McConnell said, according to a former adviser who heard the story from the Majority Leader. Put me in the category of supporting that.

I hate it, Trump said.

But this is what you should be doing, McConnell told him.

Until this week, the relationship between Trump and McConnell was one of the less fraught ones among senior Republicans in Washington. Unlike Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, who held out from endorsing Trump for months last year and who has occasionally spoken outgingerlyagainst Trumps worst excesses, McConnell has always viewed Trump with a calculating eye. He had two priorities in 2016: to hold the Republican majority in the Senate, and to help elect a Republican President who would get to name a Supreme Court justice for the seat that he had refused to allow President Obama to fill. No matter how deep Trumps flaws, McConnell believed that antagonizing him would hurt those twin goals. He supported Trump when he won the Republican nomination, and he has rarely criticized him in public since.

McConnell was extremely pragmatic about the relationship, the former McConnell adviser told me. He never said anything if it wasnt in the interest of him, or his partys interest, to say it. He didnt want to create any intra-party feud that could hurt his members.

Last year, McConnell cared less about anti-Trump conservatives than he did about Republicans such as Roy Blunt, the Missouri senator who was facing a tough relection fight in a state where Trump was extremely popular. It wouldnt have helped Blunt if McConnell was out there trashing Trump, the former adviser saidMcConnell saved any rebukes for personal conversations with Trump. Thats the way the relationship looked up until this week.

What happened this week is that when Trump wasnt busy threatening North Korea , he was busy threatening McConnell. The attacks were provoked by a speech McConnell delivered on Monday in Kentucky, in which he said, Our new President, of course, has not been in this line of work before. I think he had excessive expectations about how quickly things happen in the democratic process. On Wednesday, Trump responded. Senator Mitch McConnell said I had excessive expectations, but I dont think so, he tweeted. After 7 years of hearing Repeal & Replace, why not done?

Trump woke up on Thursday with McConnell still on his mind. Can you believe that Mitch McConnell, who has screamed Repeal & Replace for 7 years, couldn't get it done, Trump tweeted, a few minutes before 7 A.M. Must Repeal & Replace ObamaCare! Later in the day, he tweeted a slightly more encouraging note: Mitch, get back to work and put Repeal & Replace, Tax Reform & Cuts and a great Infrastructure Bill on my desk for signing. You can do it!

Also on Thursday, reporters asked Trump if he wanted McConnell to step down as Majority Leader. His answer was coy. If he doesnt get repeal and replace done, and if he doesnt get taxes donemeaning cuts and reformand if he doesnt get a very easy one to get doneinfrastructureif he doesnt get them done, then you can ask me that question, Trump said.

Disagreements between a Senate Majority Leader and a President of the same party are not a Trump-era innovation. They have a long history. They used to say that the best situation was to be the Majority Leader with a President from the other party, Donald Ritchie, a former historian of the United States Senate, told me. Majority Leaders are expected to go to bat for the President even when its not in the best interest of their party.

Ritchie pointed to the relationship between John F. Kennedy and Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, a fellow-Democrat. He was criticized as not being strong enough at getting Kennedys program through, Ritchie said. Nixon, too, had trouble with a member of his own party: High Scott. Scott eventually supported impeachment and conviction of Nixon, Ritchie said. More recently, George W. Bush pushed for Trent Lott to resign as Majority Leader after Lott said that the country would have been better off if Strom Thurmond, who ran for President as a segregationist, had won the election of 1948.

Still, Republicans in Washington were distraught at Trumps attacks on McConnell this week. When political heavyweights get into a public fight, their aides generally try to play down the rift when talking to reporters. But people close to McConnell whom I talked to didnt play anything down. I think this is a different moment, the former McConnell adviser said. Im not saying its going to define the relationship or persist, but it is different and it should be acknowledged as such. McConnell is not a shrinking violet. He very jealously guards the prerogatives of the Senate.

Scott Jennings, a former senior adviser to McConnell, noted that Trump this week wasnt talking about the three Republicans senatorsLisa Murkowski, John McCain , and Susan Collinswhose votes doomed the Partys latest effort to repeal Obamacare . Two of them were personally insulted by the President, Jennings said, referring to McCain and Murkowski, whom Trump has attacked in the past. And the other one is far more liberal than the rest of the conference. Jennings added, Is Mitch McConnell to blame for the personal relationships of Donald Trump and Murkowski and McCain? I dont think so.

Jennings, like many of McConnells supporters, was mystified by Trumps lack of gratitude toward the senator, for his support during the campaign and for the Supreme Court seat that he delivered. Their relationship is rooted in one thing, he said. McConnell kept open the Scalia seat, which likely delivered the Presidency to Donald Trump. Putting Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court, Jennings said, is Trumps only legislative achievement. He added, While a lot of Republicans were having mood swings about Trump during the campaign, McConnell stayed the course.

Some Republican senators have also come to McConnells defense. McConnell has been the best leader weve had in my time in the Senate, through very tough challenges, Orrin Hatch, of Utah, tweeted on Thursday. I fully support him.

Could Trumps attacks on McConnell mark some kind of a turning point? Sometimes, a dispute between a President and a Majority Leader can rock a Presidency. In 1944, President Roosevelt, a New Yorker with a sense of showmanship, and Majority Leader Alben Barkley, a Kentuckian who was often criticized for not standing up to F.D.R., clashed over a tax bill passed by Congress and vetoed by the President. In his veto messageTwitter had not yet come alongRoosevelt said that the bill was not for the needy, but for the greedy. Barkley considered this such a personal affront that he immediately resigned as Majority Leader. The Senate rose up against F.D.R., overriding his veto and reinstalling Barkley. One senator, Elbert Thomas, of Utah, remarked that before the incident, Barkley spoke to us for the President, but since then, he speaks for us, to the President.

In 2007, McConnell himself told this history in a speech on the Senate floor . The Majority Leader and the President mended the breach soon after, and continued to work together, McConnell, who has long had a picture of Barkley hanging above his desk in his Capitol office, said. But you could say their relationship was never again the same.

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Will the Rift Between Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell Last? - The New Yorker

A few years ago Mr. Kim poured millions of dollars into a museum in the farming town of Sinchon that serves as a mecca of anti-Americanism, a house of horrors with room after room cataloging in full, bloody, life-size detail the (largely unsubstantiated) war crimes pinned on the Americans. All spring and summer, students are taken by bus to the museum for field trips intended to scare them into hating and fearing the United States.

There is method to the madness. Mr. Kim is using the threat of attack from the United States to enforce a sense of unity among North Koreans. He knows that few things work better to inspire nationalism and patriotism than the threat of invasion. (Mr. Trumps xenophobic presidential campaign suggests that he recognizes that, too.)

This propaganda is especially effective with Koreans, whose cultural identity has been shaped by thousands of years of aggression from outside forces: the Chinese, the Mongols, the Japanese, the Americans. Thats why Korea became known as the Hermit Kingdom. For centuries, long before the Korean Peninsula was divided, guarding against foreign infiltration was a national creed.

Now in his mid-30s, Mr. Kim inherited in 2011 the leadership of a people who didnt know anything about him until three years before he took power, and perhaps were disgruntled by another hereditary succession. To maintain power and promote stability, Mr. Kim and his strategists have worked to obtain the modern equivalent of a hedgehogs quills nuclear weapons and the simple narrative that with this treasured sword, and the clever wits of his atomic scientists, Mr. Kim will protect his country from imminent destruction by the marauding United States.

The regime has used this narrative to justify pouring more than a fifth of its meager national budget into defense at a time when millions of North Koreans go hungry every day, according to the World Food Program. The leadership also uses this David vs. Goliath narrative to explain to North Koreans why they must suffer ever-tightening sanctions that, if enforced, will make their already difficult lives even more onerous.

Mr. Trumps fiery rhetoric mainly serves to advance Kim Jong-uns agenda by giving him more reason and justification to build nuclear weapons under the guise of protecting his people.

This is not to say the North Koreans werent thrown off by Mr. Trumps comments. No previous American president since Harry Truman has returned rhetorical fire with fire quite so enthusiastically, not even George W. Bush when he grouped North Korea in with the axis of evil in his 2002 State of the Union speech. And the North Koreans know they would quickly be overwhelmed in a conflict with the United States, which has stationed powerful weaponry in the Pacific and conducted sporadic flyovers of B-52s and B-1 bombers to remind and warn them.

But with nuclear weapons, they feel somewhat invincible. North Korea responded to Mr. Trumps recent threats with a warning that it was devising a plan to fire missiles into waters near Guam, a United States territory with two military bases and 160,000 residents. Whether or not it follows through on that threat, the North will keep test-firing missiles, improving the technology with every launching.

The savvy move by Washington would be to find a face-saving way to back down from the escalating rhetoric and to stop giving Kim Jong-un what he wants: propaganda victories and a justification to keep building bombs and missiles.

But perhaps Mr. Trump is taking a page out of Mr. Kims playbook: Hes drumming up fear and provoking Americas enemies in order to distract from his own problems and establish his reputation as a leader who can defend his people, even if it comes at a cost to global peace and security.

Jean H. Lee, a former correspondent for The Associated Press, is a global fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 13, 2017, on Page SR1 of the New York edition with the headline: What Kim Jong-un Wants.

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Donald Trump Is Giving North Korea Exactly What It Wants - New York Times

Ever since Donald Trump appeared on the horizon of presidential politics, he has mirrored the pop culture of the past. Thats because Trump, in one way or another, has always been an actor a man whose image precedes his reality. For 35 years, he has been a genius at one thing: stroking and manipulating the image machine of modern media. Trump went on the campaign trail as an insult-comedian/talk-radio-host/pompadoured-Elvis/reality-TV-mogul/badass-in-chief, and whenever I read now about how Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush blew it, I always think: None of those mere mortals ever stood a chance. They were fighting a superhero of populist sleaze who didnt need facts and figures he just needed the best lines. Trump remains one of the only people you could name who is not primarily in theentertainment business yet created himself as a character, a figment of larger-than-life fantasy. Thats what autocrats do: They dont sell reality, they sell mythology.

Pop culture is the metaphysical realm in which Trump operates. To most Washington insiders, his signature phrase of Youre fired! on The Apprentice was just a catchy piece of kitsch. What they missed is how Trumps use of that phrase, for all its comic braggadocio, was profoundly nostalgic, because it returned you to an earlier America, one in which you could be fired. (Yes, you can still be fired, but now, for the most part, youre downsized phased out of the workforce, replaced by a robot or a worker in Guangdong Province.) Trump was never an old-fashioned patriarch-executive who had the backs of his employees, but he played one brilliantly on TV.

Now, he plays the president on TV. But, of course, he isnt just playing.

With Trump, the reason the pop metaphors keep coming is that theyre often the only things that explain whats going on. The rise of a monomaniacal entertainer-in-chief like Trump was prophesied by A Face in the Crowd, the still-startling 1957 Hollywood drama in which Andy Griffith played a folksy demagogue with a sixth sense for how to harness the power of television. It was prophesied, as well, by Network, where Peter Finchs Howard Beale becomes a cult of personality riding the waves of his viewers rage (Im mad as hell, and Im not going to take this anymore!), though how telling and Trumpian it is that Beale turned out to be a tool of corporate forces. When Ned Beatty makes his big speech near the end of Network about how the whole world is one giant corporation, he might be the representative of Big Oil or the Russian government, explaining to Trump what will be required if he wants their continued support.

Early on in Trumps presidency, when he was making his bumbling phone calls to Taiwan or the leader of Australia, he became, briefly, a Sacha Baron Cohen character: the tyrant-buffoon of The Dictator. And now, just this week, he has become a figure out of Dr. Strangelove: a version of Gen. Jack. D. Ripper, lashing out at North Korea with the threat of nuclear attack. At the end of last year, I said that Rogue One: A Star Wars Story had become a powerful (if inadvertent) metaphor for the coming Trump presidency, because of its dramatization of the force of the Death Star through the imagery of nuclear detonation. Many readers responded by saying that no, the Rebel Forces were the Trump insurgents those who would now drain the swamp and deconstruct the administrative state. (One wants to ask Steve Bannon: Hows that working out for you?)

Yet for some of us who greeted Trumps presidency, from day one, with fear and loathing, the issue of nuclear weapons has always been at the center of our trepidation. Now, here he is, threatening to rain fire and fury down on North Korea in a way that echoes Harry S. Trumans ominous warning to the Japanese, and then when challenged doubling down on the threat. Anyone who thinks that this is just a way of diverting attention from the Mueller investigation is guilty of diverting their own attention. Earth to people with heads in the sand: This is terrifying! And its real.

To say, however, that the Trump presidency has entered its countdown-to-zero Hollywood thriller phase is not to trivialize whats going on. Its to understand that Trump is suddenly acting like an unhinged president out of a movie because he has unleashed this egregiously reckless threat through the lens of his pop-culture-fed imagination. Hes a leader who has begun tofeel cornered: not just by the provocations of North Korea, but by a presidency that isnt going his way and by a Russia investigation thats heading directly his way. And so hes lashing out, asserting his nuclear manhood. Its policy by toxic tantrum. Hes tweeting his way to Armageddon.

What the Trump presidency could now be turning into, for the first time, is a nightmare-suspense drama in which the people around the president regardless of their political affiliation come to realize that the man in the Oval Office has decided to play a game of nuclear chicken in which he threatens the survival of the planet, and that something has to be done. Kind of like Air Force One, only with the president asthe man who must be stopped.We could all sit around and cast that movie. But the point is that we dont have to, because its already a movie (at least, in parts of Donald Trumps brain). Its key dramatic question may come down to this: Who will be the hero? Who will step in to save the day?

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Donald Trump's Pop-Culture Presidency Enters Its Thriller Phase (Opinion) - Variety

Dusk outside the Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC, onJuly 14, 2017.

By Evelyn Hockstein/The Washington Post/Getty Images.

In what many believed was an improbable coup for a New York billionaire, Donald Trump managed to win the presidency in part by promising to drain the swamp in Washington. He would excel in this purgation of corruption, he argued, because he had so much experience benefiting from it. The phrase was repeated at rallies, in debates and television interviews, at town halls and in tweets until it became a sort of mantra. Under his administration, gone would be the days of greedy politicians lining their pockets and looking out for their own interests instead of worrying about the American people, he promised.

Nine months after the election, however, it seems the opposite is true. A distinctly Trumpian swamp has displaced the old as a new breed of G.O.P. and foreign lobbyists have ascended alongside the young administration. At the center of this new Washington power structure is Trumps D.C. hotel, which has quickly become the best place to see Trumps swamp creatures at workmixing and mingling over sabered bottles of champagne while pouring money into the presidents pockets. According to The Washington Post, the Trump Organization has turned a close to a $2 million profit in the last four months at its Trump International Hotel. The historic, gilded building, carved into the Old Post Office Building, sits just five blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House and has drawn the president for dinner several timesbecoming a de facto parlor room for members of his Cabinet, his innermost circle, and his most fervent supporters hoping catch a glimpse of it all.

A $1.97 million profit in a third of a year, especially in a hotels first year, is nothing to sniff at. Its particularly impressive, however, since the Trump Organization had projected that it would actually lose $2.1 million during the first four months of 2017 as it established itself in Washington and tried to gain its footing with guests and the local convention business, according to the Post. The Trump Hotel swung open its doors last fall, in the final stretch of the presidential race. Two days before the election, I stayed a night, and was one of a small handful of people who had booked a room, sat at the bar, and dined at the lobby restaurant.

But the election unexpectedly swung Trumps way, and so did profits. The Post reports that guests paid an average of $652.98 a night to stay there, likely making it the most expensive hotel in the city and surpassing what the company had anticipated by 57 percent (in November, I paid about $200 less for my room). Visitors to the hotel have also hurdled over what the Trump Organization expected in terms of food and drinks, as well, topping $8.2 million.

While President Trump turned over the management of his properties to his two sons before he took office, he still retains an ownership stake in the hotel. This prompted immediate ire from ethics experts and lawmakers, who questioned whether or not he was in violation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which prevents a president from accepting gifts or money from foreign governments. At issue was whether a foreign official staying at his hotel, which hed continue to personally profit from while occupying the Oval Office, constituted a violation of the clause.

A number of people believed it did, and were ready to act on it. On the day of his inauguration, the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington sued the president, claiming that Trumps seat in the White House has given his new International Hotel in D.C. unfair benefits and advantages. The suit was followed by a similar one brought by a D.C. restaurant a couple months later. In January, Trump tried to quell concerns by promising to donate any foreign-government profits he receives at his properties to the U.S. Treasury Department. A few months later, however, a spokesperson for the Trump Organization argued that it was proving difficult to calculate the exact amount and said that the company is not totally keeping track of where hotel guests come from.

Even so, the Department of Justice defended the Trump Organizations right to accept payments from foreign governments, in a legal brief filed in the CREW case in June, arguing that because stays and service at a Trump-owned property are fair-value exchanges, they do not violate the Emoluments Clause. The presidents critics arent convinced: that same month, attorneys general for the state of Maryland and Washington, D.C., filed a suit claiming that he has violated the Constitution. The suit alleges that Trump is deeply enmeshed with a legion of foreign and domestic government actors, constituting unprecedented constitutional violations.

These cases face uphill legal battles, but they add to the list of areas in which President Trump is under siege. He faces an investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into his campaigns connections to Russian actors who interfered with the presidential election. On Capitol Hill, Republicans are paying less and less attention to the presidents legislative demands or domestic agenda (that hes spent the last couple days attacking Mitch McConnell likely wont help this matter). The courts, too, have proved generally unsympathetic to the administrations arguments in favor of its travel bans, immigration orders, and environmental deregulations, many of which have become tied up in litigation. Infighting among his own staff has made it nearly impossible to keep any of this under control.

Governing, it turns out, is hard to do, and unbelievably, being president of the United States is not a walk down easy street. Being president and someone who owns a hotel within spitting distance of the White House, however, is much simpler. Certainly, it is more lucrative, and Trump doesnt need McConnell or Muellers help to cash those checks.

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Donald Trump, Swamp King, Is Officially Swimming in Washington Money - Vanity Fair

Photo Illustration/Getty Images

Threatening to nuke someone is a "violent threat," no?

While Donald Trump was running for President, his Twitter account was an obnoxious clearinghouse of racist MAGA nationalism, unfounded attacks on his opponents, and Pepe avatar replies. Since Donald Trump has become President, his Twitter account... well, honestly, it's still all of those things. But now that he has the power of the office of the presidency behind him, his Twitter has additionally become a place where random and seemingly improvised rants double as actual policy statements. When Trump tweeted about his decision to ban transgender people from the military, it came out that he hadn't even consulted with the heads of various branches of the military. He was just flying by the seat of his golf pants.

This combination of Trump's improvisational style, the immediacy of Twitter, and international politics has proven to be a potent and terrifying one. When news broke that North Korea had successfully miniaturized a nuclear warhead, what we'd hope a president would do is gather with his top foreign policy advisers and go over all the implications of what every possible statement could be. How will any statement affect our relationship with South Korea and Japan, countries that are more directly in North Korea's line of fire? How will it affect our relationships with the United Nations, an organization that just unanimously voted to sanction North Korea (which means the not-so-small feat of getting support from China)? How will North Korea receive it and are we escalating or deescalating the situation? But that's not what happened. Instead Trump "improvised" and said that we'd bring "fire" and "fury" like the world has never seen if North Korea keeps threatening us.

This is terrifying as it is, but this morning things got scarier as Trump took his threats to Twitter. Yes, Donald Trump is going to use Twitter as part of his means of handling a Nuclear crisis. This means that the most delicate of all geopolitical conflicts will likely be navigated at the whims of Trump watching Fox News.

So that right there is Donald Trump threatening North Korea with nuclear war via tweet. That's a thing that happened in the real world. GQ's Jay Willis predicted this might happen! This is the latest and most clear-cut example of why we need Twitter to shut down Donald Trump's account. They certainly have cover to, as Kal Penn pointed out this morning:

The fact is, Donald Trump is terrifying without Twitter. He's the kind of President who is going to make sweeping and off-the-cuff statements threatening nuclear war from his golf course. But at least if we limit him to needing to make actual statements to say things, his (few adult) advisers will occasionally get the chance to explain to him why something is a bad idea. But as long as President Trump has Twitter, he will always be exponentially more dangerous. Who knows, if Sean Hannity is in an extra bad mood one night, and makes the case why nuclear war wouldn't be so bad, we may find our President tweeting us into World War III. So please, Twitter. Do the right thing. Delete the President.

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Donald Trump's Twitter Account Is Very Much in Violation of Twitter's Terms of Service - GQ Magazine