Trump is insisting he hasn’t really been humiliated by North Korea — because he and the nation’s brutal dictator had a handshake.
While the rest of the world is watching the continued humiliation of Trump and his team by North Korea, Trump remains in complete denial about it.
"I have confidence that Kim Jong Un will honor the contract we signed &, even more importantly, our handshake," he tweeted Monday morning. "We agreed to the denuclearization of North Korea. China, on the other hand, may be exerting negative pressure on a deal because of our posture on Chinese Trade-Hope Not!"
Of course, there is no "contract." Trump has repeatedly insisted that he won a long list of concessions from the North Korean dictator during last month's summit, but it simply isn't true. The two leaders signed a vague document that didn't actually agree to anything. And North Korea has been openly undermining all of those claims since then.
Trump, for example, agreed to cease military exercises in the region — something former CIA Director Michael Hayden and many other military and intelligence experts said was an absurd concession for which Trump got nothing in return.
Meanwhile, Trump baselessly bragged that he had convinced North Korea to cease its nuclear program and even declared that the country was "no longer a nuclear threat."
But even Trump's administration has admitted that's not true. Shortly after the summit, the White House officially notified Congress that it was extending the national emergency status applied to North Korea because of "the existence and risk of proliferation of weapons-usable fissile material on the Korean Peninsula."
Meanwhile, reports have shown that North Korea has in fact ramped up its program.
But Trump simply cannot admit that he was wrong and that he got played by Kim Jong Un. So now he's deluding himself — in front of the whole world — by claiming that the young dictator will honor a non-existent "contract" and, more hilariously, a handshake.
As for any reports that North Korea has no intention whatsoever of honoring the promises Trump think he extracted? Well, obviously that must be the doing of China, according to Trump, though he isn't clear on how that works. China is angry about Trump's trade war and is thus retaliating by ... what, exactly? Spreading vicious rumors that North Korea is continuing its nuclear program?
None of it is clear. What is clear is that Trump has embarrassed himself by claiming he somehow resolved the United States' decades-long hostile relationship with North Korea. Obviously, he did nothing of the sort — and everyone else in the world knows it.
Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.
