We begin today’s roundup with David Axe at The Daily Beast who provides his take on what America lost at the Trump-Kim meeting:
Despite Trump telling reporters that his meeting with Kim went “better than anybody could have expected,” only one man truly had any reason to celebrate.
Kim walked away from the brief summit at a Singapore hotel on June 12 with all the legitimacy that a meeting with the world’s most powerful person confers—and without giving up very much in return. In addition, Trump said the U.S. would end war games with South Korea.
Jonah Shepp:
The 24-hour, by-the-minute news cycle never fares quite so poorly as it does in an event that is significant to the historical record but that produces very little actual news. The summit meeting between President Donald Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un in Singapore Tuesday morning was an excellent example of this shortcoming. [...] Trump will spin this meeting as a tremendous success; indeed, he was already doing so before it was halfway through — using the phrase “tremendous success,” verbatim. The president’s sycophants are already comparing the Singapore summit to Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to China and hyperventilating about Trump ending the Cold War. [...]
The summit is a historic event, to be sure, but whether or not Trump realizes it, the mere holding of the summit is a much bigger victory for Kim than it is for him. Here we have a North Korean leader (one who has already ordered hundreds of gruesome, politically motivated executions in his six years in power and presides over a gulag in which tens of thousands of prisoners are forced into labor, starved, tortured, raped, and subjected to all manner of other horrors) being greeted as an equal by an American president. This has been a longstanding objective for Kim, as it was for his father and his grandfather before him.
Ishaan Tharoor at The Washington Post writes about Trump’s affinity for dictators:
A pillar of Trump's "America First" agenda has been a retreat from conversations about human rights abuses, the rule of law and democracy around the world. Instead, he and his lieutenants grandstand over their narrow view of the national interest, the importance of sovereignty and the supposed global conspiracies and foreign threats undermining the United States.
That grandstanding was on full display during the debacle at the Group of Seven summit in Canada last weekend, where Trump dealt critical damage to a bloc of once-like-minded Western democracies. After two days of insults directed at Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau by Trump and his proxies — based largely on both a misunderstanding of Trudeau's own commentsand a likely deliberate misinterpretation of U.S.-Canada trade statistics — Canadians collectively fumed at the "bully" to their south.
Paul Krugman, meanwhile, calls out Trump’s enablers:
It’s important to understand that the fight Trump is picking with our allies isn’t about any real conflict of interest — because they are not, in fact, doing the things he accuses them of doing. No, Canada and Europe aren’t imposing “massive tariffs” on U.S. goods: A vast majority of U.S. exports enter Canada tariff-free, and the average European tariff is only 3 percent. These are simple facts, not disputable issues.
So Trump is justifying his attempt to destroy the Western alliance by accusing our allies of misdeeds that exist only in his imagination. [...] that’s Trump, a man whose presidency has been marked by around seven false statements per day in office. What about his officials?
Well, they have been acting like the courtiers in the old story about the emperor’s new clothes. (The emperor’s new hairpiece?) If the boss says something whose falsity is obvious to anyone with eyes to see, they’ll claim to believe his version.
The New York Times:
When Vladimir Putin ordered his hackers to surreptitiously help Donald Trump in the presidential race, he could hardly have anticipated that once in office, Mr. Trump would so outrageously, destructively and thoroughly alienate America’s closest neighbors and allies as he did at the Group of 7 meeting in Canada. The lame explanation from Mr. Trump’s courtiers, that he needed to look tough for his meeting with Kim Jong-un, made matters worse by implying that he felt he needed to publicly kick friends aside to impress a murderous dictator.
Trump refused to discuss human rights at his meeting, but in case anyone needs a refresher on the regime he just legitimized, here it is:
Mr. Kim rules with extreme brutality, making his nation among the worst human rights violators in the world.
In North Korea, these crimes “entail extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation,” concluded a 2014 United Nations report that examined North Korea.
On a final note, here’s Dana Milbank’s analysis of Trump’s foreign policy positions:
Inexplicably, [the G7] foreigners are not putting America First. That’s why Trump needs to quit the group and make his own G-8 — the Great Eight — with more sympathetic world leaders:
Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, who enjoys “a great relationship” with Trump as he deploys extralegal killing squads.
North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, who is “very open” and “very honorable” in running the most repressive regime on Earth.
Egyptian dictator Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, who established himself as a “fantastic guy” with his bloody crackdown on dissidents.
The Saudi regime, which has been “tremendous” as it purges business leaders and critics.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is “getting very high marks” as he jails opponents.
China’s premier, Xi Jinping, who did something “great” in making himself president for life.
And, of course, Russian President Vladimir Putin, “getting an A” for his leadership and receiving a congratulatory call from Trump after his “election.”