There’s been a certain je ne sais quoi quality to the White House’s discussion of the summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un. Today we learned what it is.
President Donald Trump told North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during their Singapore summit in June that he’d sign a declaration to end the Korean War soon after their meeting, according to multiple sources familiar with the negotiations.
This was number one on Kim’s wish list. And Trump gave it to him, free for nothing.
You probably could have selected any one of the people I follow on Twitter, and they would have done a better job. That includes the artists and people who tweet mostly cats.
It’s hard to know how to approach this analytically. It is about the stupidest thing that Trump could have done, except for sending the missiles.
Trump probably went into the negotiation thinking that he would overpower the non-white, non-English-speaking ruler of a tiny and poor country, while finding common ground in their dictatorial propensities. They would shake hands, exchange a few nice words, and the deal would be done. Without a note-taker, nobody but he and Kim would know what went on. The photos would be taken, and Trump could go home and tweet out to the faithful that he had a good deal and Kim would soon be sending his nukes to us. We would then remove sanctions, and the North Koreans would have The Best Economy Ever, better than anyone ever thought.
Except international negotiations don’t work like real estate deals in which you intend to stiff the other party.
All of this was predicted on national security Twitter, and in my posts and others’ articles. Probably Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and any number of other people in the administration thought it.
It’s hard to know what Trump was thinking. He’s badly out of his depth in terms of understanding the complexity of international relations, but he has felt for a long time that he could do better than anyone else. His negotiations have been one-off, which does privilege a willingness to stiff the other side, and, most likely, others in his organization have handled the details beyond the photo op and handshake and told him he was a brilliant negotiator.
One can imagine his debriefing to his aides and their inability to hide their horror. That would be followed by his feeling of shame or betrayal by his aides, who were supposed to continue the custom of congratulating him. Puzzlement, perhaps, too, that Kim was not keeping up what Trump felt to be his side of the deal.
Pompeo’s bizarre behavior in parroting Trump’s unrealistic expectations now becomes more understandable. It’s hard to know what to do when your boss has given away the store, so humoring him makes some sense. The payoff comes from the other side, who have expectations of their own. That was why Pompeo’s trip was canceled, and Kim Yong Chol’s acid remarks via letter and in person. The Americans weren’t coming through with their promised end-of-war agreement.
I need to think more about what kind of agreement would be best. The basic requirement of negotiation, though, is that you get something for something. Trump gave a promise with nothing expected in return. The North Koreans have made gestures in their partial decommissioning of their nuclear test site and and a missile launcher. They are looking for something from the American side beyond demands to give up 60% of their nuclear weapons.
The Vox scoop has obviously gotten under Trump’s skin. He felt it necessary to tweet, but what he tweeted didn’t make sense.
…considerable aid, including money, fuel, fertilizer and various other commodities. This is not helpful! Nonetheless, the President believes that his relationship with Kim Jong Un is a very good and warm one, and there is no reason at this time to be spending large amounts…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 29, 2018
…differences, they will be resolved in time by President Trump and China’s great President Xi Jinping. Their relationship and bond remain very strong.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 29, 2018
There’s quite a bit to unpack in those tweets, but I won’t do it just now. The best we can hope for out of this situation is that the talks fall apart and North Korea goes back to testing its weapons. Perhaps Pompeo can be obsequious enough to get both sides to continue the talks.
Lapassionara
Can we just go back to the alternate universe where Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election? I’m ready.
Baud
@Lapassionara: Not until we learn the true meaning of Christmas.
Oh wait, that’s Dickens. Nevermind.
lollipopguild
I and several million people would like to play high-stakes poker with trump.
tobie
Thanks, Cheryl. I was hoping you would write a longer post explaining what today’s revelation means. It’s hard to imagine a worse negotiator than Trump. Everyone knows how to play him.
oatler.
He savors the smegma of every dictator.
lollipopguild
@Baud: Baud/Dickens2020!
Jeffro
Well hey lookee here, president* know-nothing mcMadman is tweeting away at…well, what, exactly? Who knows? And one would think when it comes to hostile, paranoid, nuclear-armed powers, we might want to speak clearly and thoughtfully, after much internal discussion.
Ah, never mind…what’s the worst that could drop (pun intended)?
It’ll be unthinkable until it happens. But hey, Gorsuch + tax cut! Happy, GOP?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud:
p.a.
Unpack? UNPACK? It’s gibberish.
TenguPhule
Year is not yet over.
debbie
How long until Trump tweets it’s really China who’s been poisoning Russian dissidents and we should stop blaming it on poor Russia?
MattF
This is what ‘negotiate’ means to Trump– make promises, then back out. I guess that the next step is to get Michael Cohen to threaten everyone.
mad citizen
Cheryl, you made me laugh with this “You probably could have selected any one of the people I follow on Twitter, and they would have done a better job. That includes the artists and people who tweet mostly cats.” so there is that as we proceed headlong to oblivion.
mad citizen
He probably signed off on the WWIII surrender at the Putin summit.
TenguPhule
@Baud:
This life is not wonderful.
japa21
Almost like he is using the royal we, referring to himself in the third person.
TenguPhule
This has driven many to madness. Don’t look in that abyss, Cheryl!
YetAnotherJay formerly (Jay S)
I don’t remember Donald tweets that refer to himself in the third person, except in quotes from others. Strange.
TenguPhule
Donald Trump: “Death first!”
Brachiator
One hope seems to be for aides and staff to work around an obviously incompetent president. Has this ever worked out in the long run?
The temptation to abuse power would be as great as Trump’s fumbling.
What a mess.
TenguPhule
And how often have we gotten the best results from one of Donald Trump’s fuckups?
Mike in NC
Around the middle of October we’ll be hearing a lot about the dangers of “Little Rocket Man” again, just to get Trump some national security points with his base as the midterms loom.
TenguPhule
@lollipopguild:
Why? You know he’d welch on the bets.
Platonailedit
My bestest bf’s are america’s worst enemies. #maga
Corner Stone
@YetAnotherJay formerly (Jay S): Trump sometimes refers to himself in third person while speaking ex tempore. It’s hard to determine who is doing his tweeting but I remember many times where a tweet was in third person.
Calouste
@p.a.: Yeah, why bother unpacking it? Just throw it in the bin unopened.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@YetAnotherJay formerly (Jay S): Somebody else wrote those tweets.
Corner Stone
@TenguPhule:
Cash on the table and/or Ivanka in the room in a golden bikini, bunned hair earpieces and light chains as a further motif.
Redshift
The same thing he’s always thinking – that he’s a genius and everyone else is an idiot.
Cheryl Rofer
@YetAnotherJay formerly (Jay S): He’s done it before. A number of people on Twitter are pointing out that he used to call New York newspaper reporters pretending to be someone else with news of the great and wonderful Donald Trump. They see this as being similar.
TenguPhule
@Corner Stone:
There will only be one Princess Leia.
John Revolta
Trump promised to do something? Pardon me if I don’t lose a lot of sleep here.
MattF
Hey, I get it now. It’s zero-dimensional chess.
The Lodger
@TenguPhule: “Death it will be… but first, a little Snu-Snu!”
Platonailedit
Platonailedit
As the totus said, everybody does it.
Adam L Silverman
Well this explains why Abe’s government leaked to WaPo for yesterday’s story:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/i-remember-pearl-harbor-inside-trumps-hot-and-cold-relationship-with-japans-prime-minister/2018/08/28/d6117021-e310-40a4-b688-68fdf5ed2f38_story.html?utm_term=.a14da9251241
And that statement from the President he tweeted out is pretty incoherent. But what is more worrisome is that if he unilaterally told Kim he was ending the Korean War when they were alone together, what exactly did he offer up/give to/promise to do when he was alone one on one with Putin?
Major Major Major Major
No wonder I had a panic attack around when those tweets went up. I must’ve felt it in the air.
Mike in NC
@Adam L Silverman: Crimea
SiubhanDuinne
@Adam L Silverman:
Adam, O/T but I am hoping you plan to write something about the Paul Ryan-linked PAC that released private info on former CIA employee Abigail Spannberger. Thanks.
Adam L Silverman
@Platonailedit: The quality assurance/quality control on Russian windows is terrible!
MagdaInBlack
@SiubhanDuinne:
I second the motion.
Adam L Silverman
@Mike in NC: Miami.
El Caganer
Wonder when we find out that his deal with Mexico includes the return of California and Texas.
Platonailedit
@Adam L Silverman: A french window?
Major Major Major Major
tobie
@Adam L Silverman: @Mike in NC: I think we can add the lifting of all sanctions and any republic in the former Soviet Union that Putin wants and possibly restoration of the old Warsaw Pact.
Brachiator
@Platonailedit: Hmmm. Russian oligarchs don’t believe in golden parachutes when they fire people.
Ken
Assumes facts not in evidence.
Ken
But seriously… Would ending the Korean War require a treaty, thus a two-thirds vote in the Senate? If so, then Trump’s promise is worth about as much as, oh, one of those souvenir medals he had struck for the meeting.
Mnemosyne
@Lapassionara:
I’m wondering which asshole stepped on a butterfly by mistake. ?
James E Powell
@Baud:
I thought all we had to do was realize the power of the ruby slippers.
Gvg
@Adam L Silverman: he may leak classified info,but it seems to me he can’t actually do the really serious stuff like end a war or give back Alaska (current sort of joke) because the really big things have to happen in public. He never understood president isn’t King. Sometimes it looks like the worlds dictators don’t get that either. I wonder if Putin understood the president can only sort of urge this huge population of Americans is his preferred direction. This may also explain some of why Trump and the hard core republican’s freaked about Obama being elected too. I always thought their fear of a secret Muslim showed they didn’t understand the limits of presidential power. Also they don’t know history, especially the wars of the reformation.
Adam L Silverman
@SiubhanDuinne: As soon as I can figure it out. SF69 material are compartmented in a place where no HR officer or FOIA officer for USPS, or any other Federal agency, can get to them because they’re subject to protection under the Privacy Act – Walter Shaub is all over this. The documentation provided so far looks like no USPS FOIA response documentation. And as of 7, when I went to the gym, the USPS hadn’t said anything. So I honestly have no idea how this GOP oppo shop got this info to pass on to Ryan’s leadership PAC. There is a huge piece missing from this story.
I will say, that the accusation that Spanberger is problematic because she taught at the Saudi funded school for a year is garbage. If this was a problem, then the CIA wouldn’t have awarded her an adjudicated clearance. So that line of political attack is garbage. But there should be a full FBI national security investigation ongoing already looking at all the aspects of this from the oppo firm and its FOIA request to whomever at USPS or anywhere else received it and acted on it as a tasker, back to the oppo firm and their not contacting the FBI to indicate they were sent material that they’re not entitled to see, to the folks at Ryan’s leadership PAC for doing the same thing. And they’ll be able to figure this out very quickly because they’ll go in and pull the access logs and identify who accessed and printed out the SF86.
A Ghost To Most
@TenguPhule:
The week is not over.
MagdaInBlack
@Mnemosyne:
Nice ☺️
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Mike in NC:
Futer Trump Tweet
“When will we have justice with little lying Hilary. Look how she messed up those negotiations with Little Rocketman and told us North Korea had ended their nuclear program. Looks like I will need to step and clean the mess she made up. SAD”
Adam L Silverman
@Platonailedit: Muscovy window.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Ken: Well, the Korean War is a UN Police action under the approval of the Security Council. I doubt it would require congressional approval.
Gvg
@El Caganer: trump is more likely to want to confiscate more of Mexico. Incredibly stupid idea, so I hope no one mentions it to him. This would be a bad time for Mexico to discover oil for instance.
Adam L Silverman
@Gvg: Yep, pretty much.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Cheryl Rofer:
So Trump’s up his game to pretending to be one of his staffers using Trump’s tweet to praise Trump. That is just…well. What else can one say?
Adam L Silverman
@A Ghost To Most: I LOVE Infrastructure Week!!!!
NotMax
No tweet yet that “Of course the islands in the South China Sea belong to China. Look, it’s got the word CHINA in it!”
Yet…
Millard Filmore
@Brachiator:
I took this death as a way to scare a noisy and annoying billionaire, not as a retirement option.
YetAnotherJay formerly (Jay S)
@Cheryl Rofer: So Donald thought he was tweeting from a sock puppet account? No one can see me behind these Groucho glasses? I suppose that’s plausible.
Millard Filmore
@NotMax:
In 100 years the oceans will have risen a meter or so, and with a big typhoon, the sea will take back what is hers. I can’t get too worked up over this controversy.
PhoenixRising
@lollipopguild:
We’d like to play *against* him, but this game where he’s betting our lives is a bit unnerving.
Adam L Silverman
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Abe’s people leaked about this to WaPo, which published it yesterday.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/i-remember-pearl-harbor-inside-trumps-hot-and-cold-relationship-with-japans-prime-minister/2018/08/28/d6117021-e310-40a4-b688-68fdf5ed2f38_story.html?utm_term=.b0e96d236f0a
Jay
@Adam L Silverman:
Have they confirmed the SF69 is the USPS form and not the CIA one?
Have they conferred there was a FOIA request from the PAC?
Have they ruled out China as the source?
GxB
@TenguPhule:
I’d go with:
“Two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun! – Yeah!”
-or alternately-
“Dental Plan!…
LisaBarron needs braces!…”God, I’m getting old.
Adam L Silverman
@Jay: Buzzfeed published an article that made everything, as far as I’m concerned, even more confusing. That was the last thing I saw. I got home about 9:30 and am just now getting caught up. So I honestly don’t know if anything new has been reported and/or revealed. That said, figuring out who accessed and printed the SF86 is going to take no time at all. They just have to pull the system logs and see who accessed her SF86 and sent it to a printer.
Platonailedit
Brachiator
@Adam L Silverman: World leaders are reluctant to face the uncomfortable truth that Trump is unstable and unreliable. But what do you do when the US is still an economic giant and has the world’s largest military, with nukes.
Sadly, what Abe and other leaders will see that understanding where Trump is coming from may be worse than simply being puzzled by him.
NotMax
@<a href="https://balloon-juice.com/2018/08/29/nobody-expected-such-a-great-negotiation/#comment-6999883" GxB
More like “Why doesn’t Sessions go after the Hamburglar?”
;)
Adam L Silverman
@Brachiator: Yep, unfortunately.
Cheryl Rofer
@Ken: There are various proposals for an End of War declaration. I need some time, preferably in the morning, to think them through.
The Dangerman
@debbie:
Well, first it has to show up on Fox and Friends, Hannity, or Infowars.
Trump’s having a bad month; what’s the bat signal for Hope Hicks to come around and take the edge off.
Suzanne
Assumes facts not in evidence.
Cheryl Rofer
Trump has tweeted something like nine times this morning and a dozen tonight. This is not good.
SiubhanDuinne
@Adam L Silverman:
Thank you. That was kind of my sense too, but I was blaming myself for being too ignorant to track the story coherently. More to come on this, clearly, and I’ll look forward to your further insights when there’s more information available.
Platonailedit
Millard Filmore
@Adam L Silverman:
A possible path is it was given to the Russian IC, who then conspired with the GOP to release it.
Why yes, I do subscribe to outrageous conspiracy theories. Why do you ask?
Adam L Silverman
@SiubhanDuinne: Honestly, I’m loathe to say any more than I did in my response to you because none of what is being reported other than a Republican oppo shop somehow got their hands on a Democratic candidate’s, who is a former CIA officer, SF86 and then handed it over to Paul Ryan’s leadership PAC to be used in support of Dave Brat. And that neither the folks at the oppo shop or at the leadership PAC thought they should contact the FBI about this. Almost all of p. 2, before you ever get to any information is about disclosure and privacy. In fact 2/3 of p. 2 is either under the bolded section header Disclosure Information or Privacy Act Routine Uses.
https://www.opm.gov/forms/pdf_fill/sf86-non508.pdf
Something is very weird here, beyond just the basic facts of what has been reported. And as I’ve indicated in other comments, this should not take long to figure out who accessed the SF86 and who printed it out.
Adam L Silverman
@Millard Filmore: It is possible this was scarfed up as part of the OPM hack, then made available for sale, and the oppo shop and leadership PAC are trying to cover up making an illicit purchase. But it is also possible that someone entered the system, accessed her SF86, printed it out, and then handed it over. That is an equally bad breach. Perhaps even worse, because it would indicate that there is someone with access to that system who is willing, for partisan purposes, for money, or for both, to commit multiple felonies on behalf of this oppo shop. The reporting that this somehow got printed out by mistake by someone at USPS replying to a FOIA request makes no sense to me. The USPS personnel file is in a completely different data system than where the SF86s are.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Adam L Silverman:
USPS isn’t even technically part of the government.
Adam L Silverman
@SiubhanDuinne: @Millard Filmore: @Jay: This appears to be the most recent/up to date reporting. I still find this very, very bizarre and hard to believe, but it makes more sense than what was being reported yesterday. So everyone understands the acronyms: NPRC is the National Personnel Records Center, NARA is the National Archives and Records Administration, and USPS is, of course, the US Postal Service.
Suzanne
@Ken: Um shit. Apparently great minds and all that.
Cheryl Rofer
Robert Kelly ignores the good advice of the jackals above and tries to unpack the Trump tweets in a long and frustrated thread. I’m just going to give you the first tweet, which links to the rest.
SiubhanDuinne
@Cheryl Rofer:
I seem to recall that there’s someone out there in the cyber who counts, tracks, and charts out Trump’s tweets. I don’t mean the content — other people do that. I mean the sheer number of tweets, and maybe the times of day. He does seem to have been especially twitter-trigger-happy recently, and by happy I mean furiously deranged.
Adam L Silverman
@SiubhanDuinne: @Millard Filmore: @Jay: Here’s some more details. For clarity sake: Ned Price is a former CIA officer who was assigned to the National Security Staff and served as one of the National Security Council’s spokespeople during the Obama Administration. Eric Columbus is a former DOJ official in the Obama Administration. Walter Shaub is the former head of the US government ethics watchdog agency. He was originally appointed by Bush 43, kept on by Obama, and quit a month or so into the current administration in protest of what was going on with the White House.
Adam L Silverman
@?BillinGlendaleCA: All the personnel info is in a different system from the SF86s.
Adam L Silverman
@?BillinGlendaleCA: From Walter Shaub:
Adam L Silverman
@SiubhanDuinne: @Millard Filmore: @Jay: @?BillinGlendaleCA:
Cheryl Rofer
@SiubhanDuinne: I have seen graphs of tweet frequency. I try to limit the attention I pay to the tweets and the time I spend on them. That barrage in response to the Vox article may be worth some further attention, although Kelly’s frustration suggests to me that my sanity may be better served by spending my time elsewhere.
Millard Filmore
@Adam L Silverman:
If someone at the NPRC will dive into highly secret records and deliver them on the whim of someone at the USPS, there is a whopping big procedural problem right there. There must be a paperwork trail spelling out the Need To Know and all that to try to justify this action.
SiubhanDuinne
@Adam L Silverman:
Good for Cummings and Connelly.
B.B.A.
dmsilev
@Adam L Silverman: So, has anyone yet asked Paul Ryan, Wonk Of Integrity, about what his minions have been up to? I’m sure it’s worth at least a furrowed brow in response, possibly even an expression of concern.
(and yes, sorry to be flippant about what sounds like a potentially pretty serious breach of behavior by someone)
sukabi
@Mike in NC: well we could hope that Stormy’s recollection of Minuteman’s prowess is more prominent than any Rocketman tweet…
“Minuteman says what?”
sukabi
@Corner Stone: probably when John Barron or John Miller is using the account.
danielx
@TenguPhule:
I can hear the chittering of the shoggoths…
Adam L Silverman
@Millard Filmore: It goes beyond that. If I’m understanding the Buzzfeed reporters clarifying follow on reporting, then the request didn’t even get routed to the normal USPS channels at all. It still isn’t completely clear to me, but it seems that the request went to USPS Corporate Personnel Management, they then queried NPRC, and NPRC just sent them everything, which was released. But no one at NPRC should have pulled an SF86, let alone included it, nor should it anyone at USPS Corporate Personnel Management have approved it when it was going through the checks prior to release. And none of this should have taken 3 weeks from start to finish. I’m beginning to wonder if someone at the oppo research firm has a friend who works at USPS Corporate Personnel Management.
Cheryl Rofer
@Adam L Silverman: Or with the Chinese hackers, who have decided to emulate the Russians.
Platonailedit
@B.B.A.: What’s your point? That dems should do what the traitorous party does and should not play rules?
opiejeanne
@Major Major Major Major: What do you want to bet that he defaces a portrait or two before this is all over, like that of Hillary or Obama.
opiejeanne
@Mnemosyne: They need to go and put that damned butterfly back, and STAY ON THE PATH!
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Adam L Silverman: The USPS part confuses me quite a bit, they’re a separate corporate entity.
Platonailedit
sukabi
@Adam L Silverman: Nunes and Jordan if it was a MoC or someone in the WH that has a clearance and is invested in maintaining control by any means (yes that means all of them as they don’t want to end up in prison)
AnotherBruce
@Platonailedit: Wow, that seals it, I’m much more impressed with McCain in death than I am in life. That is some world class trolling from beyond the grave.
B.B.A.
@Platonailedit: Why the hell not? Let’s close poll sites in rural precincts and ban hunting permits from being used as voter ID. Make the open secret of Mitch McConnell’s sexual proclivities into open fact. And for god’s sake find ourselves a better ratfucker than Lanny Davis.
Chetan Murthy
@B.B.A.: There’s nothing illegal about voter caging. It might be break norms. It might be dirty. But So. The. Fuck. What. Pretty soon, the only choice before us is gonna between submission and civil war. Play dirty? 100%. Absolutely.
Remember the Black Panthers? They showed up with rifles, and next thing you know, RoNnIe RaYgUn is passing gun control legislation in California. Make the fuckers beg for a level playing field.
danielx
….in other words, pretty much the way Trump has acted throughout his career and life. The North Koreans were prepared for Trump to break his word – I mean, it’s what he does, deal-wise. But an ambush is only an ambush if the ambushee* doesn’t know about it. If you know going into a negotiation that the other party is going to break the deal, you are motivated to maximize short term gains. Or not to negotiate at all, for that matter…
*If ambushee isn’t a word, it should be.
Adam L Silverman
@dmsilev: I do not know.
Adam L Silverman
@?BillinGlendaleCA: A lot of this still makes no sense at all.
sherparick
@lollipopguild: Except he would never pay off. That is part of his racket.
Aardvark Cheeselog
IDK how much I agree with this.
The current situation with N. Korea smells rather like our decades-long preoccupation with pretending that Cuba was not in fact governed by Castro and his comrades. The world would be a better place had we faced reality about that much sooner than we did.
The world is a different place than it was in 1954, and the official US attitude about peace with NK stinks of insisting that we keep old shibboleths because we’ve always kept them so there.