In the lexicon of Donald Trump, the insult of choice is “weak”. He hurled it at Justin Trudeau last weekend, though not to his face: Trump waited till he was safely on Air Force One, having made an early exit from the G7 summit hosted by the Canadian prime minister, to tweet that Trudeau was “dishonest and weak” on the matter of trade. Thus Trudeau joined a long list – one that includes multiple Democratic politicians, former Republican rivals and Trump’s own attorney general – of those branded weak by the would-be strongman in the White House.
It doesn’t take a professor of gender studies to spot the male insecurity that might underlie Trump’s obsession with strength. He seems to specialise in projection, attributing to his opponents the very quality he most fears in himself. (Recall his insistence that Hillary Clinton was a Russian “puppet”.) As one former foreign policy adviser to Trudeau put it, noting the way Trump waited until he was in the air before dishing out the insults: “Can’t do it in person, and knows it, which makes him feel weak. So he projects these feelings on to Trudeau and then lashes out at him. You don’t need to be Freud. He’s a pathetic little man-child.”
But psychology only takes you so far. There’s politics in this too. For Trump’s insults to an elected Canadian prime minister were followed 48 hours later by a gushing torrent of praise for the hereditary dictator of North Korea. Kim Jong-un was not just “very talented”, blessed with a “great personality and very smart”, he was also, crucially, a “tough guy”. As Trump explained to Fox News: “Hey, when you take over a country, tough country, with tough people, and you take it over from your father … if you can do that at 27 years old, that’s one in 10,000 could do that.” As a man who had also gone into his father’s business, Donald seemed to relate. “I think we understand each other,” he said, adding his admiration for the “fervour” with which North Koreans greet their leader, apparently unaware that adulation of Kim in that country is not exactly voluntary.
This preference for Kim – a man who murders his rivals and maintains an archipelago of labour camps – over Trudeau is hardly a one-off. The same Trump who becomes irritable and impatient with elected western allies can’t get enough of China’s unchallenged ruler, Xi Jinping, whom he calls a “very special person”. Trump still glows when talking about the welcome he got from the dynastic dictators of Saudi Arabia, the barbaric regime currently pummelling Yemen in a long, cruel war. When faced with Trudeau, Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron, Trump’s arms remain folded. Yet when, by contrast, he meets a North Korean general, linchpin of a lethal junta, he does not hesitate to raise his arm in salute. (Those Republicans who condemned Barack Obama for bowing his head when he met the Japanese emperor have become much more forgiving these last 18 months.)
  North Korean TV airs awkward moment between Trump and military official – video