Donald Trump’s failure is complete

| 2:12 pm EST February 28, 2019
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Donald Trump can’t even make himself go through the motions anymore. His pointless summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un was never anything more than a very thinly disguised front for coordinating with the Russians while he was there. We all knew it, but he still had to pretend to take the nonsense with Kim seriously. Then Michael Cohen happened.

We don’t yet know precisely what impact Michael Cohen’s testimony will have on the fate of Donald Trump. All we know for now is that Cohen kicked open the door that Trump had been hiding his financial corruption behind, allowing everyone from the public to the media to prosecutors to begin feasting on what’s on the other side of that door. But we do know what impact Trump thinks the testimony has had on his fate. He took it as a sign that there was no longer any point in pretending the Kim summit mattered.

It’s not that Trump could have gained any sort of victory by completing the summit. Kim was only playing along at the request of the Russians, and he wasn’t willing to give Trump anything this time, just like he wasn’t last time. And this time around, the media wasn’t going to let Trump falsely spin it as a success. But still, just completing the summit might have prevented it from being branded as a total failure.

Instead, by packing up and going home in the middle of his own highly touted major summit, Donald Trump just admitted failure. Worse, he’s creating the impression that he gave up and went home because Michael Cohen’s testimony rattled him just that badly. Trump appears to be past the point of caring what things look like, past the point of being able to make himself go through the motions, and thus past the point of thinking he can still survive this.