The real reason Donald Trump canceled his meeting with Kim Jong-Un
We saw it coming this morning when Donald Trump began speaking about his meeting with Kim Jong-Un as a mere hypothetical while talking with his pals on Fox & Friends. Sure enough, in the hours since, Trump has announced that the upcoming meeting with the North Korean leader has been canceled. So what’s going on here, and why did Trump really decided to abruptly pull the plug?
Some have suggested that Trump made this announcement today to try to distract from new bombshells that he expects to surface about his scandals. But we can rule this out for two reasons. First, Trump hastily issued a pardon of the late boxer Jack Johnson this afternoon in an attempt at distracting us from the North Korea cancelation, so it’s clear that Trump sees the cancelation as the bad news he’s trying to distract us from. Second, Trump had put down nearly all of his remaining chips on pulling off some kind of win with North Korea.
After more than a year in office, Trump has zero popular and meaningful accomplishments. He saw a peace deal with North Korea as his salvation. He was trying to give away the farm in his negotiations with Kim, because he was just that desperate for anything he could call a win. By canceling this meeting, Trump is admitting that his failure is complete. He’s acknowledging that he can’t fulfill a single promise, can’t negotiate with anyone, can’t make anything happen. This is so humiliating for him, even the least rabid of his supporters will see it as evidence that he’s full of crap. So why on earth did he pull the plug?
Three explanations come to mind. The first is that Donald Trump figured out Kim Jong-Un was about to cancel the meeting, and so he realized he had no choice but to cancel first. The second is that Trump thinks he’s about to get so thoroughly swallowed up in scandal, he won’t be in position to pull off such a meeting by June 12th. The third is that as Trump continues to circle the drain he’s become so bitter about his inevitable ouster and imprisonment, he canceled this meeting out of nothing more than pure spite.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report