By Bryan Gould
Comment: It may be that we have all misinterpreted the somewhat surprising "bromance" between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un. It has been all too easy to assume that it is Kim
who is cosying up to Trump rather than the other way round, that it is Kim who sees himself as a supplicant and as an acolyte of the American president, and who seeks to gain some reflected glory from his association with Trump.
But recent events suggest that this is a misinterpretation of the relationship - that it is Trump who is star-struck and who seeks to learn from, and to inflate his image through, his links to his apparently junior partner.
The evidence for this is Trump's obvious keenness to emulate his North Korean counterpart in so many respects. Trump's unprecedented Independence Day military parade, for example - jets overhead and tanks rolling down the streets - seemed more typical of Pyongyang than of Washington and to have been lifted straight from the North Korean dictator's playbook.
But this surprising departure from American practice is not the only evidence of Trump's admiration of the North Korean way of doing things.
It seems clear that Trump is impressed not just by Kim himself but by the whole Kim dynasty. He seems to cast an envious and admiring eye on the Kim family's ability to perpetuate its rule from one generation to the next. This, surely, is what lies behind Trump's stated wish to remain President for an unending future, his warning that he might refuse to accept an election defeat, and his attempts to insinuate his daughter Ivanka, and other family members, into the higher reaches of world leadership.