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On 12 June 2018, the same day President Donald Trump and North Korea's Chairman Kim Jong Un met for an historic summit in Singapore, social media erupted with reports that a brand-new Trump Tower hotel had already opened in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital: Nearly all the posts link back to an article titled Trump Tower Opens in Pyongyang on a web site called Duffel Blog, described in its masthead as the American military's most-trusted news source. The article said the Trump-branded enterprise had been hastily ensconced in an existing, never-completed hotel building: But although the ill-fated Ryugyong Hotel does exist in downtown Pyongyang (and is popularly known outside North Korea as the hotel of doom), there have been no mainstream news reports of its being rebranded as a Trump property, nor any evidence that the president issued a public statement praising the hotel's tacos. In point of fact, the article is an obvious spoof on the aggrandizing hype surrounding the Trump/Kim summit, not least Trump's own claim that he enticed Kim Jong Un to give up nuclear missile testing by promising that North Korea could have the best hotels in the world instead. As explained in a disclaimer on the site, Duffel Blog's stock-in-trade is social and political satire: Even before the Duffel Blog article appeared, jokes and memes predicting or announcing the construction of a Trump Tower in Pyongyang were getting significant social media play: No actual plans to erect a Trump-branded hotel in North Korea have been announced ...yet.
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