Matthew sent me this tweet from the verified White House Twitter account, which contains the letter from Trump to Kim Jong-un calling off next month’s summit with North Korea. Take it with a slight grain of salt, as it’s so recent that news sources haven’t yet reported it. (UPDATE: It’s been verified by the Guardian.)
A letter from the President to Chairman Kim Jong Un: "It is inappropriate, at this time, to have this long-planned meeting." pic.twitter.com/3dDIp55xu1
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) May 24, 2018
This is after Kim Jong-un curtailed talks with South Korea, but also blew up the tunnels to an underground nuclear test site. I’m not sure what the “latest statement” from Kim was that prompted this letter, but both sides were spoiling for a cancellation from the get-go.
Although I predicted that any talks would go nowhere, I didn’t predict that, once scheduled, they’d be canceled.
Do I approve of Trump’s decision? Not really. While I’m pretty sure that nothing would have come of this meeting, as there is no way the DPRK would have given up its nukes, and that country has a long history of abrogating agreements, I would have like to have seen, just out of interest, what was on the table. The only thing I worried about was that Trump would be too mercurial and stupid to see through any promises the DPRK would make.
Well, we’re apparently back to square one—or rather, square zero.
If this proves to be some kind of hoax, I’ll be sure to let you know.
The BBC is reporting it as genuine news.
So does this mean he won’t get a Nobel peace prize ?
And is there some kind of sale on commerative medals?
“Well, we’re apparently back to square one— or rather, square zero.”
Not at all! The President encouraged his followers to chant “No-bel! No-bell!” at his rallies- so he’s won that thing. Or it’s in the bag. And there’s a super cool commemorative Peace Talks coin.
What, he has to *do stuff,* too? His followers are happy. So, mission accomplished!
It is no Hoax unless the Hoax worked on all TV stations as well. I did not think this would happen and to avoid failure, just call them off. Most likely Trump did this to save face that does not exist or he has other things to worry about. Today are the meetings he called to demand information on the investigation into him so that massacre may be just around the corner.
This is right outta Trump’s traditional playbook — when a deal goes el busto, grab the mic and shout that you backed out first.
His MO has been consistent now for many years. The issue of the Mueller investigation is classic. As time goes by and the heat comes on, Trump and his puppets simply attack the investigators, attack and make up stuff on the FBI, DOJ. He does this on every issue, providing no actual facts for his noise. Now he demand to know the details on his own made up spy story about the investigation. It is nuts and the lid is coming off.
That’s precisely what I was about post. This was always going to happen: the equivalent of one of those pathetic, highschool, I-dumped-her-before-she-could-dump-me scenarios.
The depressing thing is that this pointless, deeply neurotic display of cock-waggling insecurity will be hailed as ‘tough leadership’ by his apologists.
In reality the man is so terminally terrified of losing face that he’ll junk the chance of a genuine, lasting achievement that might have turned around his entire presidency(yeah right, I know) just because he can’t stand the thought of Stephen Colbert taking the piss.
Whole thing reminds me of how I first became aware of Trump (other than as a loudmouth, self-promoting NY real-estate jockey).
In the early ’80s Trump owned the NJ Generals in the USFL, which was trying to poach talent from the NFL. Trump attempted to lure Super-Bowl winning coach Don Shula from the Miami Dolphins. (I didn’t much care, but I was living in Miami then, and it was a big deal in the local papers, so I kinda followed along.)
Trump and Shula got down to the quick strokes and heavy breathing of their negotiations, and the last item on the table concerned Shula getting a unit at Trump Tower. Trump started hondeling Shula about which unit. Shula got a belly-full of this bullshit and withdrew from the deal. A New York second after Shula announce he was out, Trump called a big press conference to claim he actually backed outta the deal first.
I knew right there we were dealing with a special sorta asshole.
Thanks, I learned a new word, “hondeling.”
Thanks I thought it was a typo for “hounding”
The joys of goy Yiddish. 🙂
Love it!
Ugh. Yes, that sounds spot on. I still think JK Rowling summed him up best, when she captioned that moment of pathetic chest-beating ape-man behaviour at a European summit, where he elbowed aside all the other leaders and made his way to the front of the photo op.: ‘you tiny, tiny, tiny little man’. He really is too.
Oh, Colbert will be taking the piss regarding this.
Pull out Donald like your daddy should have !
I find it difficult to see things like this as anything more than game play. In the current administration, a game more akin to boxing than United States Football, or even chess for goodness sake.
It’d be nice if everyone and everything meant what it says -i.e. “I will meet with so-and-so”, or there will be “talks”, “we will reduce the number of widgets by such and such amount”. But that’d be too simple, wouldn’t it.
Now Trump can huddle up with NSA John Bolton and SecState Mike Pompeo to plan his retaliation. Bolton and Pompeo are much, much smarter than Trump and both are stone-cold Hawks who’re spoiling for a fight with NoKo. They know they can manipulate Trump by appealing to his vanity and to his macho insecurities, especially once Trump is cornered by the pending criminal investigations and needs to distract the nation’s attention — once, for example, his fixer Michael Cohen flips on him in the SDNY.
Grab your socks, folks; we’re in perilous times.
Unfortunately, you are probably right.
Geez, he lasted longer with Stormy Daniels.
Or at least longer than Trump lasted with Stormy. (And, unlike here, Trump didn’t pull out of his tête-à-tête with Ms. Daniels.)
Trump: pulling out of everything except Stormy Daniels.
I’ll leave now.
lol
No! Don’t leave!
Why, Stormy, why?
The BBC also had reported that Mr. Plastic Face Automaton Pence had made some really stupid comments to North Korea about ending up like Libya, so it comes as no surprise that the talks were cancelled. I’m sure this is still somehow Obama’s and the Democrats’ fault, or maybe just maybe tRump and Plastic Pence are even dumber than we had previously supposed.
I believe the Korean’s referred to Pence as a stupid politician. Truth hurts apparently.
CNN reports them calling Pence a “political dummy”. I wonder what he said to deserve this.
I’d say the Koreans are keen judges of political horseflesh.
Nearly everything he’s ever said.
John Bolton and Mike Pence have said publicly that they wanted N. Korea to end up like Libya, where its dictator Muammar Gaddafi was captured and executed extra-judicially, sodomized with a bayonet, by US backed rebels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Muammar_Gaddafi
As the military industry mavens will be quick to emphasize, this situation calls for a rapid increase in the need for hardware😬.
My guess is this is part of a game. It would not surprise me for a rescheduled meeting around mid-term elections.
Or a military strike. No better way to rev up his deplorables.
Can he still haz Nobel Peace Prize?
Why not? Obama got one for doing exactly nothing, other than being not Bush. It is a worthless prize.
Well, Trump does have his commemorative coin.
Wow. Obama turns up in discussions about Trump almost more than Trump does. And I could’ve sworn he’d finished his two terms.
Stick a sock in it. It was a comment about the prize, not Obama.
I’m a fan of Obama generally but I don’t think he deserved a Nobel. It seemed like it was given only for having a better attitude towards other countries than his predecessor. Of course, Republicans turned this against him by claiming he was putting other countries’ interest over that of the US.
I saw it as a pat on the back of the sort given a badly behaved, big bully after it does one tiny little not-bad something in hopes of encouraging more not-bad behavior from it.
In this view the bully is not Obama personally but the US government as an entity.
Yes, that sounds right.
Yes.
Yes, it was pretty ridiculous that he received that prize. I still don’t understand the rationale behind choosing him.
My problem is that it gets brought up a lot as a way of saying ‘sure it seems weird to give it to Trump, but Obama got it too’. Which neatly ignores the vast difference in moral and intellectual character between the two men.
Obama getting it was confusing and a bit silly at worst. But Trump getting it would be a complete inversion of every ideal the prize is meant to stand for, and a tacit sign of international approval for maybe the most morally rancid leader in the history of western post-war politics.
Trump getting the Nobel would essentially dynamite their legacy.
I doff my cap. That was a subtle reference that only nerds who know about Alfred Nobel’s background will get.
Absolutely agree. Giving it to Trump would be ludicrous and utterly destroy it.
And about the dynamite too 😉
cr
No. At best it was a comment about both, since you also pointed out that Obama didn’t deserve the prize. And it was precisely the kind of irrelevant whataboutery that gets dragged up any time someone questions the wisdom of giving a Nobel Peace Prize to this lunatic.
And don’t tell me to “stick a sock in it”. I’m not a fourteen year old, this isn’t the playground.
No apologies. You had it coming. If it gets me banned, so be it.
I could have chosen Henry Kissenger or Yasser Arafat for other examples of the worthlessness of that prize, but Obama was one of the most egregious examples. The prize is worth exactly as much as its reputation and that reputation has been ruined more than once. Awarding it to the Toddler in Chief wouldn’t have sullied it any more than it already is.
Instead you tried make it seem I was equating Obama -a flawed but otherwise excellent president and man and “the most morally rancid leader in the history of western post-war politics.”
“You had it coming. If it gets me banned, so be it.” Wow. What an outlaw. I can hear the Ennio Morricone music playing in the background.
As for your comment; I’d no idea whether you were equating the two, and in fact if you go back and check the original comment you’ll note the complete absence of any such suggestion.
I just pointed out, correctly, that it was a non-sequitur. I also found it irritatingly reminiscent of the whataboutery and distraction techniques that Trumpites engage in wherever they go, and I have no reason to give you a pass on that since I know nothing about you.
Hey, Obama was waging two wars at the time — if that don’t merit a peace prize, what does?
Perhaps Bolton’s “Libyan model” comment was calculated to have this result. While what he says is generally abhorrent, he’s not stupid like his boss. I fear Bolton and Pompeo are now preparing their “punch in the nose” military operation.
Bolton and Pompeo are both smart and both can play the long game. They also both know a little sumptin’ about international relations. I think they were setting this thing up to fail, so they could take Trump in another direction.
If they think they can manage Trump, they are setting themselves up to fail. This is one case where I would be ok with that. Both Bolton and Pompeo are way too hawkish.
Trump can’t be managed; he can, however, be played.
I detest all the players in this farce, but to suggest (and repeatedly) that Kim Jong Un should behave like Gaddafi was either the height of stupidity (nothing new here) or cynically calculated to make No. Korea go nuts.
Now I hear that Trump’s saying that the cancellation is just a negotiating tactic.
I’m also hearing some speculate that neither leader really wanted this meeting. I think both were ambivalent — in the strict sense of the word, not wishy-washy, but swinging from pole to pole.
As I just heard a pundit opine: “Now we’re back to ‘my button is bigger than your button.'”
‘Though many considered Ludwig peculiar, the question of clinical insanity remains unresolved.’–Wikipedia on ‘Mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria’
As the comments above show, we critics of Trump are reluctant to say, directly and conclusively, that he’s crazy. He is that, you know. . . .
I don’t think he’s crazy. That’s not right. He’s just lavishly ignorant, pathologically dishonest, vicious, insecure, petty, crass, dim, boring, unqualified and morally rancid. But not crazy.
That doesn’t make him a bad person … oh, wait. 🙂
You forgot a class-A self-obsessed narcissist, among other things.
I think your assessment is accurate. But if that doesn’t equate to crazy, it will do till crazy comes along.
cr
Incidentally (and apropos of the discussion that ensued in a previous thread over the British monarchy) – I was just reading the Wikipedia page on George III (you know, the famously insane king who ‘lost’ the American colonies). And it seems to me that Parliament had considerably more control over George III, even then, than Congress + Senate have over Trump.
cr
There goes his Nobel Peace Prize. 😃
It seems to ne that North Korea by blowing up its testing facility is trying to take away justification of a US limited “bloody nose” strike..at least in the court of world opinion.
Reports say he merely blew up a facility that was unusable. This and releasing the hostages were easy for NK. Perhaps Trump will roll them up into a “win” and things will go back to the normal (ie, a standoff). Let’s hope so anyway. The “bloody nose” would lead to disaster.
I agree.
Very clever move on his part. All at once those Singapore Summit commemorative coins (only 250 minted!) are worth a fortune!
Trump’ll get his taste; he always does.
But…but..there was a medal made…Nobel prizes planned…and like everything!
Who could have predicted that North Korea would do exactly what it has done on all previous occasions to get itself recognised as an international player and try to wring concessions out of this?
Oh yes–all the historians did say that…and the politicians who had read some history…and the military historians. In fact, everyone whose opinion was worth listening to did, in fact, say that.
Our nukes are massive and powerful, so there!
Nah nah, boo boo.
What. An. Idiot.
+1000
The embarrassment is almost too much to bear. I used to complain about how embarrassing it was to have Bush Jr. talking to the rest of the world on the US’s behalf. Trump is at least an order of magnitude more embarrassing.
Dubya seems quite likeable now he’s retired and is speaking out against Trump. It’s amazing how many conservative/right-wing politicians from the last two decades now seem positively delightful by comparison with Trump. I feel slightly ashamed for having done the equivalent of cry wolf about relatively harmless right-wing figures like David Cameron, Dubya, Romney, McCain, etc. Now the wolf really is here.
Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. I do think it is important, though, that it not be forgotten just how thoroughly the Bush Jr administration screwed the US. And much of the rest of the world for that matter.
But yeah, I’d take that over Trump in a heart-beat. Even though it meant financial devastation for me.
Dubya screwed up his syntax, and sometimes couldn’t figure out which door was unlocked.
Trump confirms the rest of the world’s worst stereotypes about Americans — book-dumb, loud, vulgar, incurious, and arrogant.
Trump is much worse than that. He lies all the time, doesn’t care about anyone but himself, and is very likely a criminal many times over regardless of what the Mueller investigation uncovers.
True, but I don’t think those other things are part of the rest of the world’s image of the American archetype — yet, anyway; they may be by the time Trump’s through.
….but on a positive note, he’s made the dream of being President of the United States much more realistic for all of us. Odds are that all of us here, and any random person you see walking down the street for that matter, would be a much better President than Trump!
I know right? I was always quite pessimistic about my chances of being POTUS, due to my lack of education, my intense stupidity, my propensity for swindling pensioners, my many bankruptcies, my hatred of foreigners and the fact that I’m English. But Donald has given me hope where before there was none.
All true.
Lucy van Pelt strikes again!
🙂
Who wrote this thing? It is an embarrassingly bad bit of prose.
Surely not the Donald — not enough random capitalization, excess exclamation points, and de trop quotation marks. The punctuation and spelling are much too standard, too.
I don’t care how many book covers his name appears on, Trump hasn’t written anything other than tweets his entire adult life. And half of those (the less ungrammatical half, presumably) have been written by Dan Scavino, his “social media guru” (and former caddy).
Well at least he didn’t announce it by tweet!
cr
Oh by the way, it struck me that, though the contents of the letter may have been dictated by Trump – some of it (‘wonderful dialogue’ and the nuclear threat) are pure Trump – the letter has certainly been edited by someone literate.
cr
I predict there will be blowback over Trump referring to the detainees as “hostages” To the NKs the detainees were potential criminals and they were presumably investigating them. By referring to them as hostages he’s essentially calling the NKs terrorists or at least kidnappers.
I have no doubt that the NKs were detaining them on BS charges. It might be appropriate to state this publicly. But to take the friendly tone of this letter, while using the term ‘hostages’ – a blatant inconsistency- shows that not much thought went into it.
Actually, not much thought went into Trump’s announcement on their arrival of how kindly they were treated. The press made a big deal of how wrong this was. The letter is consistent with Trump never admitting his mistakes.
Not much thought went into Trump’s decision to meet with Kim Jong-un in the first place. It was a spur-of-the-moment lark, reached while a delegation from South Korea was meeting with him in The Oval.
I heard that the Koreans were first to cancel based on the Pence remarks and that Trump released his statement so that he could say “No, I called it off before you did”
That sounds fitting given what we know about his massive ego and tiny, withered soul.
I sense Bolton’s remarks may have had a role in NK’s …
Wow, in the letter he states that the U.S. has a nuclear arsenal so “massive and powerful that I pray to God they will never have to be used.”
More saber rattling along the lines of “My Button is Bigger than Yours” talk. This is terrifying.
The proximate cause does seem to have been Pence’s asinine and provocative speech. It would have taken more statesmanship than Kim possesses to have just ignored it.
But Jon Sopel on the BBC News has just said that the N Koreans weren’t playing ball anyway – e.g. their officials failed to show up to meetings to agree the arrangements for Singapore; and they didn’t allow nuclear experts to witness the “destruction” of their test facilities.
So maybe both sides decided independently that what they might gain from a meeting didn’t justify what they might have to concede.
Bolton I believe also mentioned the “Libya option” or something like that.
Yes, he did. Pence also said something nasty. Trump backing out because of Kim Jong Un’s angry rhetoric is just another of Trump’s fabricated excuses.
Some TV news commentator said that Trump ran as the ultimate deal-maker but he’s really only good at breaking deals. Sounds right.
His signature is like fingernails on a chalkboard. His persona is the same.
A recent science/engineering newsletter (forgot which) stated that there was evidence of a significant collapse after the last NK test. Maybe Kim was just blowing up what was already destroyed.
Trump already got what he wanted – dealt a blow to China by embargoing ZTE(for violating sanctions), got a few interned solderiers home(a genuinely good thing with good publicity) kind words from abroad & the US, and a few unique photos of Koreans talking to Koreans. Oh and a distraction to whatever trainwreck was happening domestically
Kim had to clean up the test site anyway – it had already collapsed. Having gotten points for that in negotiations was a nice bonus.
Honestly the current situation of “talking but not really” seems like a safe place to stop for both sides, especially after Trump showed how he upholds agreements when there is the price of oil to be raised and fracking to be made profitable again(there is a minimum oil price for fracking to be profitable). Oh and did I mention the Russian budget runs on oil?