If you can recall the days of “fire and fury,” wherein Donald Trump threatened Kim Jong Un with fearsome retaliation should North Korea attempt to intimidate the U.S., then you are most assuredly living in the past.  This month’s Singapore summit, it seems, opened the president’s eyes to what a delightful specimen the North Korean leader is—one who is “very smart” and has a “great personality.” “ Anybody that takes over a situation like he did at 26 years of age and is able to run it, and run it tough—I don’t say he was nice,” Trump said during the summit. “ Very few people at that age—you can take 1 out of 10,000 probably couldn’t do it.”  The president was even more impressed with certain elements of Kim’s regime, such as the “fervor” of his people, and the way they “sit up in attention” when Kim speaks—“I want my people to do the same,” he remarked in an interview after the summit.  And it seems the afterglow of his Singapore trip has yet to fade: speaking at a rally in South Carolina Monday night, the president drew some parallels between Kim and the White House’s own propaganda machines. 

“They took down anti–United States signs all over North Korea,” he said, wonderingly. “ They’re down.  They took ’em down.  Anti-U.S. signs, like I put up anti-media signs all over the place.” 

In addition to comparing his administration’s misinformation campaign to that of a notoriously bloody dictator’s, Trump declared the media the “enemy of the people,” and approvingly cited a supporter who had successfully undermined CNN.  Asked by the presenter what Trump could do to lose her support, she responded: “nothing.” 

In North Korea, of course, such answers are given on pain of death.  But that distinction seems to be lost on Trump, who has praised Kim’s strong-handed approach to government—an approach aided by the imprisonment and execution of thousands of his own people—before.  Last May, he called Kim a “smart cookie” and said he would be “honored” to meet him.  Nor is Kim the only dictator Trump has singled out for distinction; he’s used the same awed tones to discuss Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte, whose brutal crackdown on drugs has led to the death of thousands (“I just wanted to congratulate you because I am hearing of the unbelievable job on the drug problem,” Trump said, according to a leaked transcript of a phone call during which he invited Duterte to Washington), and his fixation with Russia’s Vladimir Putin has been documented extensively. 

It is seemingly impossible to shame Trump out of his sick fascination with totalitarian regimes—when confronted by reporters about his “sit up in attention” comments, the president blamed the press: “I’m kidding,” he said, according to a White House pool report. “ You don’t understand sarcasm.”  But perhaps more alarming is that the same fascination seems to be taking root among those who are loyal to him.  A new Ipsos poll of 1,000 adults conducted just after the Trump-Kim summit showed that 19 percent of self-identified Republicans had a favorable view of Kim, while 68 percent said they had an unfavorable view. ( Among voters overall, Kim’s approval and disapproval rates were 12 and 75 percent, respectively.)  Notably, Kim fared slightly better than House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, whose approval among Republicans was just 17 percent. 

The difference in numbers may be slight, but Trump’s most loyal followers have embraced the North Korean regime in other, more visible ways.  On Sunday, The New York Times rehashed the Virginia Women for Trump’s birthday tea for the president, which the organization’s head, Alice Butler-Short, described as an alarming compound of “God, fashion, and politics, or God, politics, and fashion, whichever.”  Kicking off with a prayer for Trump, the afternoon’s main event was a fashion show featuring designer Andre Soriano, who made the “Make America Great Again” gown worn by singer Joy Villa to the 2017 Grammy Awards.  At one point, a model bedecked in a black and white Asian-inspired costume stepped onto the runway. “ As martial-sounding music played, she walked the runway with arms outstretched, carrying what looked like a red velvet and gilded Valentine’s Day candy box,” the Times’s Elizabeth Williamson wrote. “ The women cheered as she paused, lifting the box to the heavens.”  Then Butler-Short took the stage. “ That signified our great president and the negotiations he is having with North Korea,” she said.  The music, she added, was the North Korean national anthem.