We gave the world’s worst rights abuser a regime-legitimating meeting with POTUS for nothing. A massive concession for which the art of the deal got us zero. No other prez was lazy, impulsive, and ill-informed enough about North Korea to make such an obvious error. Stop lying.
And no, the hostages and other minor swaps to grease this thing along don’t count: .
ADDENDUM: Minor swaps have post-dated the summit decision & don’t effect my argument. Yes, the NKs gave us the hostages & test freeze. But we gave them the B-52 rollback, Pompeo’s groveling ‘Chairman Kim cares about his people’ interview w/ Chris Wallace, & the recent slapback /1
of Bolton. All this is small-time trades to grease the wheels, hardly the major concession we should demanded upfront. Recall that US hostages have always been released in time & that a freeze is both easily reversible & low-cost as NK already has functional nuclear missiles. /2
More importantly, all this came AFTER Trump’s decision; the decision itself was tied to no NK concession, a huge missed opportunity given how much the Kims have craved a one-on-one meeting w/ a POTUS. And Trump likely made this error for the same reason he makes so many others:/3
he's lazy, impulsive, and doesn’t pay attention to his briefings or experts. So he walked into something he didn't understand and missed trick. Now think about what could happen if Trump is this clueless at the Singapore summit. Yikes. END
