How Trump lost the summit before the photographers even left the room
By Jennifer Rubin
June 12 at 8:45 AM
The spectacle of the murderous dictator Kim Jong Un on equal footing with the president of the United States — each country’s flag represented, a supposedly “normal” diplomatic exchange between two nuclear powers — was enough to turn democracy lovers’ stomachs. President Trump naturally made things worse. He gushed: “It’s my honor, and we will have a terrific relationship, I have no doubt.”
An honor to meet the man who maintains slave labor camps, who periodically attacks the ships of our ally South Korea and whose regime is responsible for the death of Otto Warmbier? That should stun Warmbier’s parents — and every decent human being. Trump envisions a “terrific” relationship with a country that conducts mass hacking, is arguably the worst human rights violator, threatens us with nuclear weapons, detains our people and seeks the reunification of the Korean peninsula under its rule of terror. Imagine if President Barack Obama traveled to Iran, shook Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s hand, proclaimed it was a great honor and spoke about his conviction that Iran and the United States would have a terrific relationship. John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, among others, would have had a conniption.
Trump’s impulsive decision to have a summit and his insatiable need for attention provided Kim with a historic victory that no other U.S. president has handed to a North Korean leader. With not a single bomb dismantled or a single gram of fissile material shipped out of the country, Kim got more than he could have dreamed of — and all before the photographers departed.
It went downhill from there. The Post reports:
But Trump provided few specifics about what steps Kim would take to back up his promise to denuclearize his country and how the United States would verify that North Korea was keeping its pledge to get rid of its nuclear weapons, saying that would be worked out in future talks.
This is what happens when one puts a man-child who imagines that characters such as Kim or Chinese President Xi Jinping are his “friends” or “like him” in a room alone with one of them. Giving Kim a major concession such as discontinuance of the “war games” plainly took Seoul by surprise:
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2018/06/12/how-trump-lost-the-summit-before-the-photographers-even-left-the-room/
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