1.
What I’ve noticed about the president in his first two years in office is that he seems to relish leaving the White House. Next to riding in a golf cart, his favorite form of exercise may be walking to Marine One, the chopper waiting on the South Lawn, to transfer him to his magic carpet, Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base, whisking him off to some far-off mystical place, like Florida or Bedminster, New Jersey, where he can escape from the White House Fake News gang, trying to trap him in another lie or two.
There is nothing the best president we have seems to like better as an excuse for getting away from the office than summit meetings. He thinks he’s very good at summits.
Sitting down with obstreperous perennial world problem-makers like Chairman Kim of North Korea or President Putin of the Russian Federation, he can get things done, unlike previous presidents. Because he is the greatest negotiator, as he has explained. “Great dealmaker.”
We saw how effective Trump summit diplomacy was in Singapore with Kim Jung Uh-uh where he was awarded the Alfred E. Neuman Prize for ending the North Korean nuke threat.27
A few details still needed to be ironed out, judging by the North Koreans continuing missile tests and rebuilding of nuclear development sites said to have been dismantled after Singapore.
Predictably, the president is now saying he is open for another summit meeting with Kim of North Korea, what leading Koreanologist Richard Lingeman calls “a Hair Summit, between the two hirsute chiefs of state in their best hair shirts.” It’s part of his game plan for crafting a deal that will save the world from a nuclear Armageddon.
The wrinkle in the strategy is that every other day the president is dithering about the next summit, which means it will be on every other day and he will change his mind on the off days. The other side never knows what our policy will be about saving the world. Brilliant!
His greatest success in the summit meeting game so far, according to the president, was Helsinki 2018.
2.
The Helsinki Summit of July 2018 will live in the annals of great summits attended by American presidents: Potsdam, Teheran, Casablanca, and Yalta. FDR was accused of selling out to Russia at Yalta, as Comrade Trump, excuse me, President Trump, is now being accused of having sold out to Putin in Helsinki.
Helsinki was the one in which the president in front of the TV cameras said he believed the Russian denials of meddling in our 2016 presidential election, whatever our seventeen supersleuth intelligence agencies concluded. Why? Because Putin sounded so sincere.
He had said that many times before (917 times, according to an unofficial count, as of June 12, 2018). Ergo, it must be true.
Somehow, at the Helsinki summit’s concluding press conference, it sounded as if the president was reading a script from the Politburo’s Ministry of Propaganda.
The USA was responsible for the bad relations between the two countries, he explained. It was all Obama and Hillary’s fault.
Our seventeen intelligence agencies were conducting a witch hunt about this Russian interference in the 2016 election thing. It’s all a hoax.
Trashing his own country, and embracing the enemy, was a great moment in history for the Blame America First movement.
3.
The big mystery of the two hours and ten minutes meeting in July was why, at the president’s request, the Helsinki summit was conducted in secret with no note-takers or the usual advisers.
It reminded me of the Cone of Silence in Get Smart when Agent 86 (Don Adams) took meetings that way with The Chief.
What was settled in the Cone of Silence? Whether Vladimir the Poisoner wanted the Lincoln Bedroom or the Red Room in the White House? Who knows?
Even the locked-out director of national intelligence expressed astonishment at this second summit idea. The look on Dan Coats’s face was “priceless,” as they say in the Mastercard commercials. It was the first he knew of an impending visit, he told Andrea Mitchell of NBC News.
4.
With no better explanation of the secrecy, a pundit is free to suspect there was something to hide.
National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster was fired, my sources say, because the respected war hero used big words that the boss didn’t understand. Our vocabulary-handicapped chief executive didn’t know what the general was saying most of the time.
The next designated brain in the White House who called the foreign policy shots was John Bolton, whose answer to any policy question, no matter how complex, was: “Let’s bomb the hell out of ’em.”
Standard operating procedure before a summit meeting is reviewing intelligence, especially important in dealing with a cutthroat thug commissar like Putin.
This president, as he says, does not need to read any intelligence briefings. He goes by his gut.
As a result, he seems to have gone into the 130 minutes behind closed doors with a certain lack of preparation. None of this prevented him from acting like a shill in Putin’s shell game.
What really happened behind closed doors to make our president sound like a Chatty Donnie doll? Wind him up, and he says, “Nyet collusion.”
My sources say Putin played his Trump card. Behind closed doors, he was able to play on his SmarterThanYours iPhone the complete unexpurgated golden showers videos. That’s why the summit meeting took so long.