Skip to main content

Jilted

By



I guess when the military mints a shiny new medallion for the event, you do get second thoughts about pulling out.  After all, this is a man who loves shiny objects, and this is definitely a collectible.  Twenty per cent discount today, although I wouldn't count on it arriving any time soon.

Trump's ghostwriter chalks it up to His Trumpness' morbid fear of being humiliated and shamed, but I'm guessing it is his inner circle that got cold feet, afraid Trump might pull a "Reykjavik."  This was the time Reagan almost gave away the farm to strike a deal with Gorbachev, but in the end got nothing.  Bolton and Pompeo and to some degree Pence worried that Trump would either go all in or botch the deal so best not to risk it.  Instead, Bolton and Pence taunted Kim, who retorted as expected, leaving their Commander-in-Chief with no choice but to sign a letter to "His Excellency," backing out of the highly anticipated date.  It's rather obvious from the carefully worded statement that Trump had no hand in writing it.

Given Trump's refusal to take notes and in anyway prepare for such events, it is probably a good thing.  Our president is no diplomat.  He isn't ready to go through the long process of negotiations anymore than Reagan was back in the 80s.  This isn't something you can do all in one meeting, which is probably what Trump expected to come out of the Singapore Summit, and collect his Nobel Peace Prize in December.  Hence, the Soviet-looking medallion in anticipation of the even shinier object he would get at the end of the year.

I don't think Kim is too upset over the broken date.  He pretty much got what he wanted out of the last six months of awkward negotiations.  His athletes competed in the Winter Olympics.  He received a whole lot of international attention and got the White House to call him "Supreme Leader," and "His Excellency."  The letter of rejection itself showed an incredible amount of respect from a President who had petulantly taunted him all last year and well into this year.  So, in that sense Kim won.

It might take awhile for this to sink into Trump's thick skull, but he already appears to sense he lost a golden opportunity.  His advisers may not have thought him up to the task, but in his heart Donald felt he could pull off the "Deal of the Century," better than any Iranian nuclear deal or reopening relations with Cuba that his predecessor negotiated in the last two years of his administration.  You can almost here Marlon Brando moaning, "I could've had class.  I could've been a contender.  I could've been somebody."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro
228 comments
Read more

Dylan in America

By
Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.
182 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more