Donald Trump’s North Korea deal is toast and so is he
Back when Donald Trump first scheduled a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, Palmer Report characterized it as Trump betting the last of his remaining political chips on the notion that he could get an unstable and mischievous two-bit dictator to play along with the ruse that they were creating some kind of lasting peace. Trump couldn’t get anything from Kim during the summit beyond a photo-op, so he settled for spinning the loss as a win. If nothing else, Kim played along – until he decided to blow it all up today.
Kim Jong-Un is who he is. He’s an ambitious totalitarian and a cold blooded murderer. He’s also someone who gets a kick out of thumbing his nose at everyone involved. We still don’t know what Trump (or Vladimir Putin) might have privately offered Kim in order to convince him to play along with Trump’s farce of a choreographed summit. But Kim gave away literally nothing during the summit, as the “deal” didn’t include a single binding concession on his part. It was a matter of time before Kim began gloating about it, and now that time has arrived.
The North Korean government is now humiliating Trump’s newly anointed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, accusing him of “gangster-like” tactics and calling the entire negotiations “regrettable.” So not only did Kim Jong-Un manage to shake the hand of the President of the United States while giving up nothing at all, he’s now found a way to condemn Trump for trying to get anything out of him at all.
Kim Jong-Un is winning this by a mile. That’s not a good thing for the United States, or for the world. But it’s an even worse thing for Donald Trump. He bet everything on the idea that he could smooth-talk a murderous lunatic into doing his bidding. Now Kim is flaunting his total victory over Trump in such direct fashion, it’s painfully obvious to everyone involved that Trump got played. Keep in mind that this North Korea thing was Trump’s last ditch effort to stabilize his failing presidency. Now Trump is a sitting duck, waiting to be politically ousted, spinning out of control in the mean time.
