Well, it happened: The president and the dictator met, shook hands, looked each other in the eye, smiled for the cameras — and lied through their teeth. The visuals, we witnessed; the lies we infer — from experience, history and redundant prescience.
But the summit was definitively historic. Let us count the ways.
Donald Trump, the unlikeliest president in U.S. history, traveled to Singapore to meet with the leader of North Korea, which no other American president has done (for excellent reasons), and hand-delivered to Kim Jong Un — an untrustworthy, murdering, torturing, enslaving, nuclearized global menace who starves his people and regularly threatens the U.S. and its allies — what he covets most.
Trump gave him power.
It’s true, as you say, Mr. President, that you’ve done what no other would. You’ve traded American authority and legitimized a petty provocateur. For what? For the possibility, as you suggested, of a beachfront hotel overlooking the Yellow Sea?
Don’t get me wrong. I’d love to be mistaken. I’m not lobbying for failure, but there’s little reason to believe that Kim will honor Trump’s expectations — or vice versa. The so-called agreement includes nothing substantive to justify optimism — no defining terms of what denuclearization would look like, no outline for verification, not even a timeline.
