Susan Wright on the Right
Well, this is exactly what we should be expecting from President Trump’s second planned summit with the murderous dictator, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
After the first summit in Singapore, back in June 2018, the president returned singing Kim’s praises and declaring the nuclear threat from the rogue nation “over.”
The subsequent days, weeks, and months proved that to be anything but truthful.
While there were no missile tests, all intelligence sources showed that Kim’s regime continued to work at developing nuclear weaponry.
Trump is of the belief that if you deny something long enough, no matter the evidence present, then those denials become reality. He has gone so far as to insult his intelligence chiefs for suggesting that North Korea still poses a threat. He will not be contradicted.
That’s a dangerous stance for any president to take. We have an intelligence community for a reason.
Trump has also openly declared his love for the dictator.
The two exchange letters and glowing words, even as Kim continues to starve and terrorize his own people, and imprisons and persecutes Christians at a greater rate than any other nation on earth.
That’s an important tidbit to keep in mind, while you take notice of how American evangelicals continue to embrace this president, without any effort to push him away from singing Kim’s praises. Likewise, they make no mention of the plight of their North Korean brothers and sisters.
It really is all about America and her new king, first, isn’t it?
President Trump will be meeting for the second time with Kim in Vietnam. Given his words of adoration and proclamation of love for the bloody tyrant, we can expect a spectacle of grand proportions.
Prepare to cringe hard.
We already have a heads up of what may be coming, and it is peak Trump.
Instead of approaching the summit from a position of strength, we’re now hearing that the administration will be going in with the lowest possible expectations.
As President Donald Trump prepares to meet face-to-face with North Korean leader Kim Jung Un for a second time, his administration is weighing backing off an earlier demand that North Korea agree during the upcoming summit to make a full accounting of its nuclear and missile programs as a prerequisite for US concessions, multiple administration officials tell CNN.
In other words, if you go in expecting nothing, asking nothing, when you get nothing, you can call it a “win.”
There’s also talk of easing sanctions placed on the Kim regime, so, bonus for them, thanks to a compliant, weak American president.
Oddly enough, they were singing a different tune, not that long ago.
Since the first meeting between Trump and Kim, the talk has been about having North Korea be a little more transparent, as it pertains to giving up the information on their nuclear capabilities. The net from those efforts has been zilch.
Still, they talked a good game:
As recently as November, Vice President Mike Pence called such a nuclear accounting an “imperative” at a second summit.
“I think it will be absolutely imperative in this next summit that we come away with a plan for identifying all of the weapons in question, identifying all the development sites, allowing for inspections of the sites and the plan for dismantling nuclear weapons,” Pence said.
Why? Trump has already made up his mind that all is well. Our intelligence community are liars and dictators like Kim and Russia’s Vladimir Putin are credible.
With that in mind, what comes now should shock no one.
The bar has been lowered.
Administration officials are aiming low.
“Eventually we are going to need a full declaration in order to complete the process of denuclearization,” a senior administration official told reporters Thursday. “I expect that will come well before the end. And it is basically the international standard on how one can go about addressing the issue of elimination of weapons of mass destruction.”
Oh. Eventually.
Another adviser further expressed everyone’s lack of enthusiasm for Trump-Kim II.
“I don’t know that there’s real high expectations for anything substantial for something to come out of the meeting,” a person close to the White House said, saying that many inside the West Wing do not expect “anything earth-shattering” to come out of the summit.
“There are very tempered and cautious expectations on what may come out of this,” the person said. White House officials view the second summit as a “next step,” but don’t anticipate it will result in much progress toward denuclearization.
Now let’s toss this out there:
Trump’s meeting with Kim coincides with the public testimony of his former attorney/fixer, Michael Cohen.
Given what we know about Trump, and how utterly, completely unhinged he becomes whenever one of the multiple investigations he is steeped in begins to heat up, what are the chances that he does something really reckless to draw attention away?
On NBC News this week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that some US sanctions would be removed when “We’re confident we’ve substantially reduced that risk” from North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. In June of last year, at the time of the first Trump-Kim summit, Secretary Pompeo tied sanctions relief to full denuclearization.
“We are going to get complete denuclearization; only then will there be relief from the sanctions,” Pompeo said in June.
But we all know that is dependent on Trump’s mood and how much Kim flatters him in this next meeting.
It doesn’t make for good foreign policy, and allowing a man like Kim Jong Un to get away with lying about his nuclear ambitions is absolutely foolhardy.
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