“We Cool?” - Trump Turns the Dictator Into a Buddy, and the World Stays Silent

On his own account, Donald Trump posts a ridiculous and yet dangerous image montage showing Kim Jong Un sitting at an old-fashioned telephone, surrounded by his generals, asking with an anxious look on his face: “Hey Donald, we cool… right?” The ruler of a country of prison camps and missiles appears as a nervous buddy checking with his powerful friend to make sure everything is still okay. The image did not come from some joker. It came from the President of the United States, posted for everyone to see and applauded by tens of thousands. And it flatters the person who posted it, because the tyrant appears as the one asking for reassurance, checking with the boss to see whether he is still pleased. Trump clearly enjoys being the man even a dictator has to check in with.

Original image URL: https://static-assets-1.truthsocial.com/tmtg:prime-ts-assets/media_attachments/files/117/112/658/669/040/709/original/8983af018d9bb075.jpg

Kim rules over a people he locks up and starves, and over warheads that threaten half of entire continents. Behind every silent uniformed man in the background stands an apparatus that makes families disappear and punishes children for the sins of their fathers. All of that shrinks in this image into a phone call between friends. The people in the camps do not appear in the picture. They are the absent ones, cut out so the joke can work. Their disappearance from view is the first condition for being able to laugh about their jailer. An image that keeps his victims outside the frame absolves the perpetrator before a single question has even been asked.

This is how the monstrous becomes manageable. Turning a nuclear dictatorship into a joke takes away its horror and takes away the viewer's obligation to take it seriously. The laughter works like an anesthetic. It settles over the starving and the executed and turns the regime into a piece of entertainment. The joke disarms opposition before it can even form, because getting serious while everyone else is laughing makes you the killjoy. A people that laughs at its enemy stops fearing him, and soon stops fighting him as well. That is the service the joke performs for the dictator. It takes away his monstrous face and leaves him his weapons.

A single misstep could be forgiven. But this image joins a long series in which Trump places himself alongside the great figures of history and reaches out his hand to despots. Just recently he praised his splendid relationship with this very same Kim. In other images he plants a flag on a seized ship. In still others he rides alongside George Washington through golden halls, and posters are already calling for a third term that officially should not be possible. There is a method at work here. The public gets used to it, governments get used to it, and getting used to it is the quiet victory. Every single image on its own would be an outrage. The sheer volume turns it into a condition nobody even bothers to object to anymore.

Behind Kim in the image stand his generals, silent and obedient. Around Trump stands the same thing, a line of loyalists who nod along with everything. And around both of them sits a third circle, the governments of the world that say nothing about this performance. The outermost ring weighs heaviest, because that is where you would expect an objection. A general in Pyongyang stays silent out of fear, a government in Europe out of calculation, and the second kind of silence weighs more heavily than the first. Fear excuses some things. Calculation excuses nothing.

Kim is not the only one reading that silence. In Moscow and Beijing sit men watching very closely, and with approval, how cheaply a dictatorship gets off the hook once it has the American president as a friend. Sucking up buys you freedom from consequences. That is the lesson, and it spreads faster than any threat. Every performance like this that goes unanswered is an invitation to the next strongman to try the same thing. What passes as a gag in Washington is read as permission in distant capitals. The world order also depends on what its most powerful people allow to pass without objection.

A joke stays harmless as long as the person making it has nothing in his hands. This man holds the codes of a world power. “We cool?” then carries the entire substance of a foreign policy built on affection for strongmen and not much else. What comes across as a casual greeting is the language in which the lives of millions are decided. Between the grin and the red button lies only the mood of a man who uses both in the same hour. A statesman separates the office from the person. This president mixes the two together and turns the state of the world into material for his moods.

The highest office in the United States once stood for principles, or at least pretended to. Now it speaks in joke images, and the difference between leadership and entertainment is dissolving. Where there once was a statement, there is now an image caption that a tyrant can read as proof of friendship. A single sentence from one heavyweight head of government calling this what it is would break the spell. The fact that this sentence never comes weighs more heavily than the image itself.

For weeks now, we have been researching one particularly horrifying chapter of the North Korean system: forced child labor. Even minors are drafted into so-called “Shock Brigades” and forced to perform dangerous work in coal mines or on construction sites. Children from poor families are hit especially hard, while wealthier families can sometimes buy their way out of this state-organized exploitation through bribery. The article will be published in October 2026.

“Young people in cities across the country are racking their brains trying to figure out how to escape the authorities' pressure to volunteer for difficult and grueling assignments. Some are now going from one official to another carrying bundles of bribe money.”

And the world watches and stays silent. Heads of state who usually have something to say about every incident cannot find a single word for this image. They call it diplomacy, when what they really mean is tolerance dressed up in polite language. But every word left unsaid teaches the dictator that cruelty costs nothing at the highest table. Every day without pushback lowers the bar for the next one. A tyrant made cute today makes tomorrow's atrocity cheaper, because he is already sitting harmlessly in people's minds. What would have been a scandal yesterday is just another post today, and the free world answers “We cool?” with a silence the man asking the question can take as a yes. No warhead has to fall for a regime to win. It is enough for the world to get used to looking at it.

No one knows how many people North Korea has executed in 2026 alone. The regime publishes no figures. Human rights organizations continue to document public executions, however. A new report recorded at least 148 people executed between 2020 and 2024 - and explicitly says even that number is incomplete.

You have to ask what still has to happen before the politicians of this world finally open their mouths. A president turns a mass murderer into a playmate, publicly and without shame, and the serious people of the world choose to look away. Everyone waits for somebody else to go first, and so the whole line keeps waiting while the images keep coming. If even this does not shake them awake, the question is what ever will.

Help us keep going. We look where others look away - at human rights abuses, climate change, corruption, the victims of ICE, the authoritarian course of the Trump administration, and the rise of right-wing populism. Every contribution to our independent work keeps the documenting and the pushback alive that those in power would most like to ignore.