You Are the Sucker, Donald the Dove Edition
By 
As Paul observed below, Donald Trump has informed Kim Jong-un that no, he’s dumping him and he never liked him anyway and it’s not me, it’s you. This is an eminently unsurprising outcome. The real question is why so much of the media is so desperate to identify the moment when Donald Trump truly became president that they took this seriously in the first place:
But it raises the question: Why did so much of the media and the political system insist on taking President Trump’s Korean nuclear diplomacy so seriously in the first place?
The factors that led to the collapse of the summit were there from the beginning. The only thing that ever seemed remotely promising about it was Trump’s say-so, but Trump’s say-so is meaningless. Not only is he a person who makes factual misstatements and lies, but he’s a person who has gotten ahead in life through extensive use of bullshit, leaving in his wake a trail of broken promises.
From his unpaid bills to contractors to his scam university to his brief period ripping off the shareholders of his eponymous company, this is what Trump does: He exploits normal human nature to sucker people into trusting him, and then he exploits his own ever-growing fame and power to get away with breaking the rules.
As president, this pattern has only continued.
He never delivered his much-promised plan to release a “terrific” Obamacare alternative that would cover everyone. Instead, he backtracked on his promise to protect Medicaid from cuts. He never took on the National Rifle Association. He never delivered a solution for DREAMers, and, of course, Mexico isn’t going to pay for the wall.
He’s dropped the promise to negotiate lower prescription drug prices for Medicare. He dropped the promise to break up big banks. He dropped the promise of a $1 trillion infrastructure bill. He dropped the promise to develop a tax program that would leave the rich paying more. And, of course, his version of “draining the swamp“ has brought a level of corruption to official Washington that would have embarrassed the congressional barons of the Gilded Age.
This is not controversial. Everyone in the Washington and media elite knew this but set aside all the evidence to believe that Trump is someone else and might actually take negotiations seriously and usher in a major diplomatic breakthrough with North Korea. The ultimate collapse of the summit is a valuable opportunity to try to make sure we do a better job next time, and not only take note of Trump’s lies and nonsense when his statements are proven to be dishonest nonsense but to be preemptively skeptical of new claims he makes.
With the anti-anti Trump left, meanwhile, I’m not sure they were even pretending to believe Trump as opposed to just believing in Trump:
Glenn spent the last few months mocking anyone who criticized the summit as 'anti-diplomacy' & thirsting for war (because the Dems love & are basically neocons now) pic.twitter.com/kH3RmLNSfr
— Centrism Fan Acct 🔹 (@Wilson__Valdez) May 24, 2018
The logical somersaults have an impressive degree of difficulty, I must admit. “A tiny, extremely unrepresentative minority of conservatives thinks Trump is unfit for office. Therefore, by the principle of guilt…not even of association but single common shared belief, all opponents of Trump are therefore actually bloodthirsty conservatives who are mocking Trump’s summit not because he’s obviously being outmaneuvered but because they’re scared it will succeed. CHECKMATE LIBS!” [Flips over Hungry, Hungry Hippos board]