Trump Totally Humiliated This Smug WaPo Reporter in Front of Everyone During NK Summit
During President Donald Trump’s summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Hanoi, Vietnam, the media tried its hardest to make Trump look like a stooge.
If you wanted to pick someone to act as a symbol of this attitude, you could certainly do worse than The Washington Post’s David Nakamura.
Nakamura, one of the WaPo’s White House reporters, apparently thought that Trump was going to get humiliated by Kim Jong Un during the summit, insinuating that he would kowtow to the diplomatic corps from Pyongyang.
Instead it was Nakamura who got humiliated.
It all stemmed from a comment Nakamura tweeted regarding a video put out by Trump’s official account. Nakamura implied there was weakness on the president’s part.
Great meeting and dinner with Kim Jong Un in Hanoi, Vietnam tonight. Looking forward to continuing our discussions tomorrow! #HanoiSummit pic.twitter.com/J3x6lUGzjS
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 27, 2019
Here was Nakamura’s take:
This does not look like the product of someone in the midst of trying to drive a hard bargain on an existential threat to U.S. national security and willing to walk away if the deal isn’t good enough. https://t.co/QVRFnpuUd1
— David Nakamura (@DavidNakamura) February 27, 2019
“This does not look like the product of someone in the midst of trying to drive a hard bargain on an existential threat to U.S. national security and willing to walk away if the deal isn’t good enough,” Nakamura said.
And so, what did Trump do — more or less right after Nakamura told the world he didn’t think Trump was ready to walk away if the deal wasn’t good enough?
He walked away when the deal wasn’t good enough.
“President Trump and Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader, abruptly ended their second summit meeting on Thursday after talks collapsed with the two leaders failing to agree on any steps toward nuclear disarmament or measures to ease tensions on the Korean Peninsula,” The New York Times reported.
“Sometimes you have to walk,” Trump said at a post-summit news conference.
The sticking point, according to The Times, was that Kim wanted all of the U.N. sanctions lifted off of his country “in exchange for dismantling its most important nuclear facility but not other elements of its weapons program.”
“It was about the sanctions,” the president said.
“Basically they wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety, but we couldn’t do that.”
Oh, well, I’m sure that Nakamura promptly apologized for getting the situation so wrong.
Or perhaps not. Here are some Nakamura tweets that followed the summit’s abrupt ending (the ending he essentially predicted could not happen).
At post-summit presser Trump leads off by suggesting his administration helped get peace … between Pakistan and India.
— David Nakamura (@DavidNakamura) February 28, 2019
I asked Trump if he confronted Kim Jong Un about Otto Warmbier’s death. He said Kim knew about the case but denied knowing about how Otto was put in coma and he takes Kim at his word.
— David Nakamura (@DavidNakamura) February 28, 2019
As for Trump, he apparently didn’t walk away in a huff, if you believe his statements.
“This wasn’t a walkaway like you get up and walk out,” he said. “No, this was very friendly. We shook hands.”
In other words, this is what Stephen Covey might have called “win-win or no deal,” although one imagines it was a bit more complex than that.
This is what Reagan did with Gorbachev at Rekyavik, Iceland, in 1986. Critics at the time called the summit a failure, but it was only three years later that the Berlin Wall opened. Five years later, the Soviet Union dissolved.
The sanctions Trump is keeping in place make it impossible for for Kim Jong Un to initiate any sort of economic growth. He’s gotten a taste of what could happen if he denuclearizes. He just had to look at Hanoi.
Nevertheless, Nakamura first stated Trump wasn’t going to walk away without a deal if it wasn’t good enough because he put out a video to promote the summit.
Then he mocked Trump’s post-summit news conference, then implied Trump wasn’t being hard enough on the North Korean leader.
Heading home after quite a day. pic.twitter.com/3etNx5Eks0
— David Nakamura (@DavidNakamura) February 28, 2019
“Heading home after quite a day,” Nakamura tweeted as he was on board Air Force One.
Yes, yes it was. Quite humiliating, too. Even if he didn’t admit it.
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