Ignore the mainstream media. They haven’t been right since Moses defied the Pharaoh and they got it wrong in papyrus. Some of the same folks are still in charge.

Donald Trump’s broad handling of Kim Jong Un is a study not just in artful diplomacy, but in the simple wisdom of interpersonal relationships. At the outset, Trump spoke firmly and even threateningly regarding American willingness to play tough and employ overwhelming force to settle a difference between nations. He set the terms.

Since then, Trump has affectionately embraced Kim Jong Un, a petulant boy ignored and spurned by his father, shipped to Swiss boarding schools and pawned off on relatives he later killed, with a kind deference and fatherly affection that quite possibly has been the only genuine affirmation of Un’s personal stature and leadership that he will ever experience.

In a nation where rote worshipful sycophancy of the Dear Leader is required under penalty of death and in an Asia-Pacific region where Kim Jong Un is derided in various translated iterations as, “The Little Dumb Fat One,” Trump has been willing to make Un appear the bigger man to his people in order to calm the compensatory urges of an insecure boy struggling to live in the cold shadow of Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il and shrug off the incessant nagging doubts about his own abilities to fill their looming legacy. Or far better yet for the world, to help the young man seize the courage to create his own legacy in an antithetically different way.

The absence of a signed and delivered denuclearization deal under Trump’s watch is no more an indicator of present or future diplomatic “failure” than Obama’s unwillingness to even meet with Kim Jong Un was a hallmark of success. Dennis Rodman did more.

In the span of two years, Trump has refashioned Un’s clear requirement for grandiose accomplishment from a portrait of world conflagration lit with a tiny North Korean fuse, to a vision of a capitalized, prosperous, robust and economically reborn nation with North Korea participating fully in the new Asian harvest of technological and manufacturing supremacy. With Kim Jong Un’s cherubic face emblazoned boldly on a new era of opportunity, material plenty and expanded freedoms for the captive slaves of the Hermit Kingdom.

“Dear God in heaven, let it be so,” should be the world’s hopeful prayer.

In any negotiation, the artful and generous use of humble deference toward an inferior is a powerful operational directive in curbing the sturm and drang of a competitive or hostile aggressor by fulfilling extant unmet ego needs and gaining their trust. By being willing to do Kim Jong Un’s bragging for him, Trump has enabled the boy leader to set aside his nuclear toy box and talk humbly about things like cognac, basketball and pretty girls. Simple guy stuff. Buddy talk. And every bit of it interspersed with the grand suggestion that Kim Jong Un put away childish bluster, try his hand at actual statesmanship and quite possibly, become the George Washington of the North Korean people. Or, at the very least, Mikhail Gorbachev.

It’s a world errand long worth doing with something other than a United Nations broom handle and a constant air of neoconservative condescending “we’d rather just bomb you-ism,” that became hilarious fodder for mockingly profane comedies, without a hint of irony, made with creepy puppets.

Authentic or not, for anyone doubting Donald Trump’s skills as a student of the human condition, you’re simply not savvy to what you’re watching, which I would submit is nothing less than a clinic in the application of intuitive psychological diagnostics in the acquisition of diplomatic leverage.

The absence of a signed and delivered denuclearization deal under Trump’s watch is no more an indicator of present or future diplomatic “failure” than Obama’s unwillingness to even meet with Kim Jong Un was a hallmark of success. Dennis Rodman did more.

History will show that after more than 200 North Korean missile launches during the Obama years, there hasn’t been a single one since Donald Trump first met with Kim Jong Un face to face. In terminology even Obama-worshipping lefties might understand:

“Scoreboard.”

And if a final end to the Korean War and defusing of that global Armageddon tripwire at the 38th Parallel bring the Nobel Committee calling with Peace Prize in hand, it will be just another example of President Donald Trump earning through performance the trappings of world esteem Barack Obama was given preemptively for being a socialist poseur in a slickster’s suit.