Korean Conservatives Draw Parallels Between Fates of Trump and Their Imprisoned Standard-Bearer, Yoon Suk-yeol

Korean conservatives are finding common cause between their impeached president, Yoon Suk-yeol, now in jail, and President-elect Trump as he begins his second term Monday after twice warding off impeachment.Pouring into Washington for the inauguration, Korean fans of Trump are comparing his tangles with the law after he lost the 2020 presidential election to the legal obstacles Mr. Yoon faces as he fights off the impeachment motion voted by Korea’s national assembly after his failed attempt at imposing martial law.“The commonalities between President Trump and President Yoon are uncanny,” says a statement issued by the influential Korean-American conservative political action coalition, KCPAC. “The situation Korea is in now mirrors the path the U.S. has been on only a few years ago.”KCPAC’s leader, Annie Chan, called for an investigation of election abuses that she said accounted for the strong showing of the opposition Minju or Democratic Party in elections last May for the national assembly in which the Minju won many more seats than Mr. Yoon’s People Power Party.Ms. Chan, who made a fortune in real estate before founding KCPAC several years ago, sees parallels between Mr. Yoon’s battle to avoid ouster as president and Trump’s recovery from two votes by the House of Representatives to impeach him after the 2020 presidential election. He was acquitted both times.Just as Trump survived impeachment when the Republican majority in the Senate each time voted against conviction, Mr. Yoon’s future now rests on the judgement of Korea’s constitutional court. Six members of the nine-judge panel, which now has only eight sitting judges, must decide on whether to approve the impeachment motion and oust him as president.“The Minju leaders are traitors,” Ms. Chan, in Washington for the inauguration, told the Sun. “They are pro-Chinese and pro-North Korea. They are betraying our country. They should be in jail.”The one in jail, however, is Mr. Yoon, on the order of a judge who ruled he might destroy or alter evidence against him if permitted to return to the presidential residence where he held out until submitting to detention last week. He still is refusing to answer questions posed by the high-level Corruption Investigation Office and has balked at testifying before the court.Mr. Yoon, who surrendered last week after a standoff between police and the presidential security service, now must remain in jail for nearly three more weeks awaiting a decision on whether to indict him for insurrection for imposing martial law. Although his martial law decree was quickly rejected by the assembly, his foes believe he conspired for months to overthrow democratic rule as enshrined in Korea’s “democracy constitution,” promulgated in 1987 after massive protests.If Mr. Yoon is indicted, he will remain in prison awaiting the decision of the constitutional court on his impeachment.The views of KCPAC, based in Honolulu, reflect the bitter divisions in Korean society as tens of thousands of Koreans demonstrate both for and against Mr. Yoon. His approval ratings have risen markedly to the point at which some polls show him and his party catching up with the Minju and its leader, Lee Jae-myung, whom Mr. Yoon defeated by less than one percent of the votes in the 2022 election.While the polls are subject to controversy, there is no doubt that advocates of Mr. Yoon are winning sympathy and support against what conservatives see as the Communist Chinese infiltration of political decision-making. Korean podcasts are filled with denunciations of the influence of China, Korea’s biggest trading partner and foreign investor.Korean conservatives are publicizing the parallels between Trump’s battles against the law and Mr. Yoon’s struggle for survival.“Both the peoples of the US and Korea wanted outsiders to come in and clean the house ,” said the KCPAC commentary. “President Trump, a Washington outsider, had a very difficult time in his first term because of the pre-existing establishment. It’s exactly the same for Korea and President Yoon.”Although “not a politician,” Mr. Yoon “has been struggling because of the swamp,” said KCPAC, drawing a comparison with Trump’s allusions to “the swamp” of Washington bureaucracy. “Just as there is a deep state controlling the establishment in the US, Korea has its own version.”

Korean Conservatives Draw Parallels Between Fates of Trump and Their Imprisoned Standard-Bearer, Yoon Suk-yeol

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