Get a load of this:
There you have it, folks. All this time, Trump thought (and apparently still thinks) that the Singapore joint statement was a “contract,” one in which NK agreed to denuclearize.
Of course, it was not. No such language exists in the statement, no such “contract” exists, and there was never any agreement to denuclearize. Now that it’s obvious NK is not doing so, Trump is complaining that they had a deal that was never made. Not some informal handshake deal, but something he believes they signed.
To me, this is not some simple opportunity for mockery. The mere fact that Trump misunderstood the statement raises a bunch of very serious questions about our executive branch. Questions like:
- Did Trump get confused about this on his own, by misunderstanding the statement, or is he being purposefully insulated by staff who told him for whatever reason that he totes denuked the North Korean peninsula? Is the president of the US being kept in a fantasy bubble, or is he making his own?
- Why would the President of the US be allowed to sign a statement of such diplomatic import without being made to understand its meaning? We justifiably focus our criticism on this one guy, but isn’t there a bigger and broader problem if the apparatus around the president lets him sign stuff in a general state of confusion?
- Am I overthinking this? Could it be instead that he understood the statement at the time, or stated that he understood at the time, but got his memories confused since then? Perhaps when he’s now insisting that they had a signed contract, it’s simply a Trumpian tendency to just say whatever, regardless of truth value?
In any case, I hope our news media will have the sense to point out that Trump is talking about a thing that doesn’t exist---that China can’t be “exerting negative pressure on the deal” because there wasn’t a deal---and that he appears to be confused about, and unable to accurately remember, even basic details about a very significant event that happened less than a month ago.
