Democrats Responsible for Collapse of Talks with Kim Jong Un
After nearly a week of speculation about whether he would finally take responsibility for one of the shortcomings of his administration, President Trump once again put blame squarely on the shoulders of Democratic lawmakers for his failure to secure an agreement with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un at the latest summit between the two leaders in Vietnam. This would mark the first major setback in the high-stakes negotiation to denuclearize the Korean peninsula, an on-going process that has scored a number of successes for the President, including a very warm and sincere thank you from Chairman Kim after receiving everything he wanted without giving anything in return.
In the tweet sent late Sunday night, the President appears to take issue with the decision by Democrats to schedule testimony from Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen before the House Oversight and Reform Committee on February 26th, a highly anticipated event that had been on the calendar long before the administration finalized the details of the Vietnam summit with Chairman Kim. Some Democratic lawmakers have, in fact, postulated that the summit itself was designed to be a distraction from the Cohen testimony, but Republican apologists posit that the summit was meant to be a success and that the President did not expect for it to be derailed by domestic issues, such as whether the media would be examining claims that Trump rawdogged a pornstar in 2016 and directed Cohen to use personal funds to prevent the story from becoming a campaign issue. Those making this argument point out that the logic technically makes sense and that it isn’t at all circular.
Sources close to the White House describe the President’s mood as despondent Monday morning as his long anticipated second meeting with the reclusive North Korean despot revealed no progress for denuclearization beyond the distorted and exaggerated promises that were issued in the first meeting last summer. Some strategists in the President’s inner circle speculate that Mr. Trump’s reelection team may drop North Korea as a campaign issue altogether, that there is no sense in bragging about a legacy in which North Korea fleeced the United States for sanction relief, an end to joint military drills in the Pacific and legitimacy on the international stage in exchange for 3 prisoners, the corpse of another and a few bags of dog bones that Kim Jong Un assures us are the remains of US servicemen from the Korean War. Other sources familiar with the President’s thinking are skeptical, however, that Trump will refrain from talking about the “progress” made on North Korea, with one source saying, “of course he’s going to brag about it. Are you fucking stupid? There is literally nothing that he won’t brag about.”
As to the personal relationship between Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim — a relationship defined by hot and cold moments in which the leaders once exchanged insults and threats and then grew a deep fondness for the autocratic tendencies of one another and exchanged long, passionate love letters — time will tell whether President Trump can forgive old wounds or whether he’ll resort to savagely twittershitting on Kim like he does to everyone who falls out of favor with him, such as he did for his former attorney general, secretary of state, defense secretary, director of communications, national security advisor, press secretary, White House chief strategist, campaign chair, EPA director, interior secretary, Speaker of the House, director of communications for the office of public liaison, Senate and gubernatorial candidates who lost after Trump endorsed, Chris Christie, two chiefs of staff, most of his generals, and pretty much every lawyer who has ever worked for him.
Some take the way he is still willing to lie about and excuse Chairman Kim’s involvement in the mistreatment and death of US hostage Otto Warmbier as evidence that Trump is willing to stay warm and open to a reconciliation between the two leaders. Others just think he is pathologically incapable of telling the truth.
