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"The greatest trick that Trump pulled on Americans was to make many of them believe that he understood how to negotiate when he has never been any good at it." via @DanielLarison theamericanconservative.com/larison/trump-… Absolutely. This is way under-discussed. Trump's core 'skill' is a fraud. /1
This is best illustrated in Trump's pseudo-negotiations w/ North Korea. NK is an ideal case for the negotiator Trump fancies himself to be: a tough, skilled bargainer takes on a canny opponent & claws out some unexpected gains through clever stratagems or whatever. That sounds /2
great actually, and in the run-up to Singapore, with all the hype around CVID and a Nobel Prize, it looked for a moment like this might actually be the case. The day before the nothingburger Sentosa Declaration was released, Pompeo was still talking about CVID. I was in SG for /3
for BBC to cover the summit and I remember thinking that night, maybe Trump really pulled it off; maybe he is what he says he is; his people were sure talking that way. But the next day, the declaration revealed what a fraud the previous 3 mos of hype were. Trump didn't learn /4
anything about NK, nukes, or missiles before the summit. He just got off the plane and winged up. Bc he was grossly unprepared, his strategy was compliments and concessions. And that's what it's been ever since. Complimenting Kim Jong Un, an orwellian gangster, criticizing /5
allies, and normalizing NK through summits while getting nothing in return - not a single warhead, missile, or launcher has been ceded, & there's been no improvement on human rights either. It's all been just another Trump snow-job. But I guess Kim's letters were beautiful... END
