Meanwhile, In Berlin

Representing the Putin-Trump plan for dismantling the Trans-Atlantic Alliance, we have

The people of Germany are turning against their leadership as migration is rocking the already tenuous Berlin coalition. Crime in Germany is way up. Big mistake made all over Europe in allowing millions of people in who have so strongly and violently changed their culture!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 18, 2018

Crime in Germany has been declining, an inconvenient, yet not uncomfortable, fact for a demagogue who used the racially charged "law and order" to lie his way to the top some nineteen months ago.

But Trump is right that there is impatience within the grand coalition Prime Minister Angela Merkel formed earlier this year. Yet, Monday morning in the USA brings the news

German Chancellor Angela Merkel tonight accepted an end-of-the-month deadline from Interior Minister Horst Seehofer on border control.

The compromise would help de-escalate a row that had threatened to blow up the 70-year-old alliance between the two conservative parties — Bavaria’s Christian Social Union and the Christian Democratic Union — destabilising her government.

Mrs Merkel said she would hold talks with other EU countries on migration issues and report back on July 1.

Mr Seehofer said tonight he wanted to proceed step-by-step in his plan to turn back some migrants at the country’s borders.

In the USA, we have a chief executive who has imposed tariffs on those European allies (and Canada), as well as withdrawn from the Iran nuclear agreement and the Paris climate accord and moved the nation's embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. These have all been moves strongly opposed by allies and democratic nations in general, whose objections have been met by a figurative middle finger from President Trump.

His new national security adviser, John Bolton, once said "If I were redoing the [UN] Security Council today, I’d have one permanent member because that’s the real reflection of the distribution of power in the world.” His views have not changed. The President's have: he'd add mainland China and Russia.

By contrast, Merkel has worked out an arrangement, however temporary, with her chief domestic foe, preparatory to meeting with  Italian Prime Minister Conte, later French President Macron, and with the European Union at the end of the month. “In the CDU, we are of the conviction that German and European interests have to be considered together,” Merkel has said (video below from early June).

We've been doing it differently here, with a chief executive who has imposed tariffs on those European allies (and Canada), as well as withdrawn from the Iran nuclear agreement and the Paris climate accord and moved the nation's embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. These have all been moves strongly opposed by allies and democratic nations in general, whose objections have been met by a figurative middle finger from Donald Trump.

The President's new National Security adviser, John Bolton, once said "If I were redoing the [UN] Security Council today, I’d have one permanent member because that’s the real reflection of the distribution of power in the world.” His views have not changed. The President's have: he'd add mainland China and Russia.

Nations working together to come up with solutions to mutual problems may seem a novel approach because Washington has not practiced it since, roughly, the January 2017 inauguration of the "I alone can solve it" authoritarian. The concept of cooperation is almost as awkward as the concept of shame for Donald Trump and his supporters

In tweeting Monday morning "We don’t want what is happening with immigration in Europe to happen with us!" President Trump continues an ultra-nationalistic and ultimately futile approach toward the surge in refugees in the USA and Europe. Fortunately, the German chancellor, seeking a coalition- or at least cooperation- among allies, is leading the continent in addressing the issue. President Trump does not understand: but this is what leadership looks like.

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Too Bad, So Sorry

Melania Trump spokesperson Stephen Grisham on Sunday morning issued a statement which read

Mrs. Trump hates to see children separated from their families and hopes both sides of the aisle can finally come together to achieve successful immigration reform. She believes we need to be a country that follows all laws, but also a country that governs with heart.

In unison: let us clap our hands for a First Lady who hates to see children separated from their families. By now, she has presumably turned off her television set and avoided videos on social media so that she's not forced to see what her husband has wrought. The New York Times' Peter Baker explains

The president has falsely blamed Democrats for the situation, saying that he was simply enforcing a law that they had written. But no law requires families to necessarily be separated at the border. Children have been taken away from their parents because of a Trump administration “zero tolerance” policy enacted this year to prosecute all unlawful immigrants as criminals.

Steve M. adds

Melania isn't challenging her husband -- this is part of the administration's bamboozlement process. Stephen Miller embraces the family separation policy, Kirsjen Nielsen says family separation isn't administration policy, the president blames it on Democrats -- it's all one big "sorry not sorry," with Miller speaking to the immigrant-haters, the president speaking to the Democrat-haters, and Nielsen and Melania attempting to confuse everyone else.

But there is something additional: heart.

It turns out that even Mrs. Trump's appeal to governing with heart is an echo of- and probably a shout-out to- the President.  In defending his decision to strike a Syrian air base, in an April, 2017 interview with the Associated Press Mr. Trump cited the "human responsibility" of the presidency. He added "here, everything, pretty much everything you do in government involves heart, whereas in business most things don’t involve heart. In fact, in business you’re actually better off without it.”

In September he claimed at a press availability in the White House that he has "a love for these people" and "a great heart" for Dreamers.

Prior to his State of the Union address the following January, the president remarked

When you're a businessperson, you don't have to worry about your heart, the heart.  You really do what's best for you — you know, for almost purely monetary reasons....

I'm telling you, the immigration is so easy to solve if it was purely a business matter, but it's not.  And I think that's something that I've learned maybe more than anything else.  You have to govern with all of the instincts of a businessperson, but you have to add much more heart and soul into your decisions than you would ever have even thought of before.

The President has argued that he governs with "heart," and now his wife "a country that governs with heart." We have seen what Mr. Trump means by that and have no reason to believe his wife means anything else. Melania Trump chose on her own to enter the political fray and issue a statement intended to take the heat off the President of the United States of America for a very unpopular policy.  We should not pretend she has done anything different.

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"Credibility"

Responding to a question about North Korea, in his interview with Trump TV on Friday President Trump stated "I went there, I gave him credibility. I think it’s great to give him credibility."

Two New York Times reporters reviewed a United Nations report issued in 2014 and in the run-up to the Kim-Trump summit, they wrote

People accused of political crimes are arrested and sentenced to prison camps without trials, while their families are often kept in the dark about their whereabouts. Up to 120,000 inmates were in the country’s four major political prisons in 2014 and were subjected to gruesome conditions, according to the United Nations report.

Prisoners are starved, forced to work, tortured and raped. Reproductive rights are denied through forced abortions and infanticide. Some are executed — sometimes in public. Hundreds of thousands of political prisoners have died in the camps over the past 50 years, the United Nations report found.

In addition to the political camps, North Korea also operates prisons for those accused of ordinary crimes. Some prisons are short-term labor camps. Others hold prisoners who face long-term torture, starvation and other suffering.

For its 2017 report, Human Rights Watch noted

Those accused of serious political offenses are usually sent to political prison camps, known as kwanliso, operated by North Korea’s National Security Agency. These camps are characterized by systematic abuses, including meager rations that imperil health and can lead to starvation, virtually no medical care, lack of proper housing and clothes, regular mistreatment including sexual assault and torture by guards, and public executions. Political prisoners face backbreaking forced labor, including in logging, mining, and agricultural.

UN officials estimate that between 80,000 and 120,000 people are imprisoned in political prison camps.

They're sometimes called "political prison camps," sometimes "labor camps."  But they actually are concentration camps. Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Dachau were among death camps run by the Nazis while they operated a string of concentration camps.

Kim Jong-un runs a group of concentration camps, and the President of the USA calls him a "strong head" who "speaks and his people sit up at attention.” "I went there, I gave him credibility. I think it’s great to give him credibility," Donald Trump said. And so he did.

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Lie Of The Day (June 15, 2018)

This is a whopper:

These, however, are lies:

“I think that the report yesterday, maybe more importantly than anything, it totally exonerates me. There was no collusion. There was no obstruction. And if you read the report, you’ll see that.”

"Manafort has nothing to do with our campaign. … I feel a little badly about it. They went back 12 years to get things that he did 12 years ago?

“You know, Paul Manafort worked for me for a very short period of time. He worked for Ronald Reagan. He worked for Bob Dole. He worked for John McCain, or his firm did. He worked for many other Republicans. He worked for me, what, for 49 days or something? A very short period of time.”

“I feel badly for General Flynn. He’s lost his house. He’s lost his life. And some people say he lied, and some people say he didn’t lie. I mean, really, it turned out maybe he didn’t lie. So how can you do that?”

“I hate the children being taken away. The Democrats have to change their law. That’s their law.”

“Barack Obama, I think you will admit this, he said the biggest problem that the United States has, and by far the most dangerous problem … is North Korea. Now, that was shortly before I entered office. I have solved that problem. Now, we’re getting it memorialized and all, but that problem is largely solved, and part of the reason is we signed, number one, a very good document. But you know what? More importantly than the document — more importantly than the document, I have a good relationship with Kim Jong Un.”

As the Washington Post’s Fact Checker helpfully tells us, this is “only a partial list.” Further, Salvatore Rizzo explains why each of these is inaccurate, and it is clear that in at least four cases, the falsehood was not simply a matter of judgement and Trump would have known the statement is inaccurate.

The report covers only a period prior to the election. Therefore, it could not have "exonerated" Donald Trump, nor will anyone who reads it imagine that it does so.

Admittedly, the President may have been (though probably not) unaware that Michael Flynn worked 144 days, not 49 days, for his campaign, though he likely realized it covered a substantial period of time. However, he surely knows that it has not “turned out” that “maybe he didn’t lie.” Trump himself has stated “I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI.

The President understands, further, that his Administration’s policy of separating children from parents charged with violation of immigration law as they present themselves as refugees to border authorities is a new one. He probably is aware also of the 4/18 memorandum, revealed Friday evening by MSNBC’s Ari Melber and, signed by Attorney General Jefferson B. Sessions, in which (Melber explains)

The Trump Administration shifts from a long-standing set of policies that prioritized enforcement against immigrants deemed more dangerous and offered more protection for folks who are not considering (sic) dangerous as well as for children and families. This new policy orders a “zero tolerance policy for” all offenses and states the “zero tolerance policy supersedes the other existing policies I mentioned”- meaning the more family-oriented policies of past administrations in both parties are now out.

President Trump knows, moreover, that his agreement to agree with Kim Jong Un has not “largely solved” the problem of North Korea. The most significant plank reads “the DPRK commits to work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” That does not mandate complete denuclearization (which is interpreted differently by Seoul than by Washington, anyway) not does it mandate even working toward it- rather a commitment to work toward it. 

Unfortunately, WaPo refers to the partial list as “false and misleading claims” rather than “lies.” Worse, it refers to the statements as “whoppers”- which tens of millions of Americans, some of them voters, find quite tasty.

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Sit At Attention

Trump & Co. is making it more obvious now.

Reporting on the then-upcoming Trump-Kim summit, Fox News host Abby Huntsman on Sunday noted "regardless of what happens in that meeting between the two dictators, what we are seeing now is history."

 Having accidentally told the truth on Trump TV, Huntsman later "apologized" for what she called a "mistake."

"Mistake" misses the real story, however. The tell is the response from frequent Trump surrogate Anthony Scaramucci, who (as Sam Seder observed, video below) replied "yea, because he's a disruptive risk taker, he's willing to break what would be the usual bonds of..."

Anyone can make a mistake. But when an experienced businessman now-turned pundit who appears frequently in defense of the President doesn't correct a startling remark, it throws into question whether there is anything to correct.

On Thursday, President Trump saluted General No Kwang-choi of North Korea, an unnecessary and improper gesture given the regime he represents. Sarah H. Sanders misleadingly defended Trump's move as "a common courtesy when a military official from another government salutes that you return that." No apology, no retreat.

In an interview with Trump TV prior to an impromptu exchange with the press on Friday morning, the President remarked of Kim Jong Un

Hey, he's the head of a country and I mean a strong head.   Don't let anyone think anything different.  He speaks and people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.

 "You don't understand sarcasm," he later told reporters.

Earlier this week, Trump said "Anybody that takes over a situation like he did at 26 years of age and is able to run it and run it tough. I don’t say he was nice or say anything about it. He ran it, few people at that age — you could take one out of 10,000 could not do it.”

Perhaps that, too, was meant as sarcasm, as perhaps with hispraise of Chinese strongman Xi Jinping as "now president for life, president for life. And he's great. and look, he was able to do that. I think it's great. Maybe we'll have to give that a shot someday." Or VladimirPutin, who "has been a leader far more than our president [Obama] has been."

 When Trump made his "joke" about the need for "people (to) sit up attention," he forgot to laugh or smile. So did the reporter he was speaking to.

And he knows "my people"- his subjects- knew what he meant.  Cowardly as he often is after such remarks, he failed to own up to what he was doing, labeling it "sarcasm" and a "joke." But he did not laugh or smile, nor did the reporter he was speaking to. 

He regards "my people" as his subjects.  The pounding upon our head is President Trump warning us what he has in mind in the unlikely event of a second term. That will be neither a joke nor sarcasm, and certainly no laughing matter.

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Not Kim, Not Trump, But.... Us?

On Wednesday morning, President Trump tweeted 

Just landed - a long trip, but everybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office. There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea. Meeting with Kim Jong Un was an interesting and very positive experience. North Korea has great potential for the future!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 13, 2018

President Trump may simply suffer from seriously impaired judgement. Political science professor Vipin Narang,a fellow at the Federation of American Scientists and senior editor at The Diplomat magazine believes that with the Trump-Kim summit, "China moves closer to being the dominant power in northeast Asia"  and "the lesson for states like Iran is simple: Acquire a thermonuclear ICBM that can threaten America and you too can have your Singapore declaration — a fast track to nuclear status."  He argues

North Korea has arrived as a nuclear power, and there is no going back. Once the reality-show theatrics of the Singapore summit meeting subside, we are left with the reality that North Korea was just recognized as a de facto nuclear weapons power.

President Trump went to the meeting with Kim Jong-un of North Korea to try to take the keys to Mr. Kim’s nuclear kingdom. Whatever the terms of the statement released at the end of the meeting, Mr. Kim has not committed to anything concrete. He is not surrendering North Korea’s nuclear weapons and has walked away the big winner.

North Korea declared its nuclear weapons force technologically complete at the end of 2017, with its third successful test of an intercontinental ballistic missile. Now, less than a year later, North Korea’s nuclear power is politically complete, thanks to the legitimacy that comes from a handshake with an American president. Mr. Kim did what neither his father nor grandfather could do before him: sit down and negotiate with a president of the United States. The Singapore summit meeting looks indistinguishable from a meeting between the leaders of two states with normal diplomatic relations. But this is far from where Washington and Pyongyang have ever stood. It was Mr. Kim’s development of nuclear weapons — and the credible means to deliver them to America — that made the meeting possible.

Didn’t he just agree to “work towards complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula”? He did. Just like his grandfather’s deputies did in 1993. That phrase — “denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” — is a term of art that the United States and North Korea can interpret to suit their interests.

The summit provided nothing specific, let alone verifiable. It also poses, as Narang describes, tremendous opportunity for expansion of Chinese influence in Asia and a serious threat to the security of South Korea.

Yet, when President Trump looked around the negotiating table, saw only Kim Jung-un and two interpreters and did not identify the mark, it might not have been him. William Saletan explains

When your adversary wants concessions, you’re supposed to raise the price by projecting reluctance. Instead, Trump has expressed eagerness to do what Kim wants. Trump says he wants to end joint U.S. military exercises with South Korea—a long-standing North Korean goal—since he wants to save money anyway. He hints at a rift in the alliance with Seoul, grousing that South Korea doesn’t pay the whole cost of the exercises. And he signals that he’d be happy to pull U.S. troops off the peninsula altogether: “I want to get our soldiers out.”

Trump isn’t trying to impress Kim. He’s trying to impress you. He starts by lowering the bar, claiming that any summit outcome is better than the nuclear holocaust people feared after Trump escalated the war of words with Pyongyang. “You could have lost, you know, 30, 40, 50 million people” in a nuclear war, Trump pointed out in the press conference. Then, to pad the tally of gains from the summit, Trump double-counts things North Korea had done beforehand: releasing hostages and suspending missile launches. Trump demands extra credit for not giving North Korea $150 billion, which he falsely claims Obama gave up in the nuclear deal with Iran. (Spoiler: It was Iran’s money.)

In the Singapore agreement, Trump hasn’t insisted that Kim accept clear methods of verification. Instead, Trump asks you to accept Kim’s vague assurances. “I do trust him,” Trump told Stephanopoulos. When asked how denuclearization will be verified, Trump offers mumbo-jumbo: “It’s going to be achieved by having a lot of people there, and as we develop a certain trust.” Trump says you’ll have to wait 15 years for proof that the deal was honored, since “scientifically,” it takes that long to denuclearize.

Mumbo-jumbo.  That technical language suggests that Trump knows what is going on, that whatever he and his new buddy mean by "denuclearization" cannot be verified under terms of the paper-thin agreement.  Instead

As usual, Trump is lying. And he’s happy to enlist Kim in the con. At the press conference, David Sanger of the New York Times asked Trump whether Kim’s promises were based on an adequate logistical understanding of “dismantling both the uranium and the plutonium processes” of his nuclear program. “He understands it so well,” Trump replied. “He understands it better than the people that are doing the work for him.”

Perhaps smart people working for Kim were murdered, leaving him with a weak staff.  Maybe working a good deal for the USA- or even doing a favor for Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping- isn't what Donald Trump is after. If his motivation is primarily financial, an effort to open up new market(s) for the Trump enterprises, the President's strategy is entirely rational. Saletan recognizes

Trump has spent a lifetime using other people’s celebrity to promote himself and his products. To him, Kim is just another celebrity. That’s why he spoke at the press conference about North Korea as a real estate paradise with beautiful beaches. It’s also why Trump credited Kim with saving, through North Korean participation, this year’s Winter Olympics in South Korea. “They weren’t exactly selling tickets,” said Trump. But once “Chairman Kim said, ‘Let’s participate in the Olympics,’ it sold like wildfire and was a great success.”

The summit, too, was an entertainment success. For that, Trump is happy to praise Kim and collaborate in the pretense of landmark concessions. Thanks for watching.

Trump and Kim, Saletan theorizes, are "working together to pass of their toothless pact as a milestone. It's a con, and you're the mark."

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Lie Of The Day (June 13, 2018)

Five minutes apart early Wednesday morning, President Trump issued two tweets pertaining to North Korea. The second included two claims:

Before taking office people were assuming that we were going to War with North Korea. President Obama said that North Korea was our biggest and most dangerous problem. No longer - sleep well tonight!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 13, 2018

President Obama actually warned the president-elect that North Korea would be the new president's "most urgent problem," not his "biggest and most dangerous problem." Still, Trump's claim was close enough to reality, thus can be classified with horseshoes and hand grenades.

But Mr. Trump contended also "before taking office people were assuming that we were going to War with North Korea." I don't know what "people" Donald Trump had talked to- or why the w in "War" would be capitalized- but folks on planet Earth were assuming nothing of the sort.

If Trump had claimed individuals believed- rather than assumed-  we would go to war with North Korea, he might deserve the benefit of the doubt. After all, he might have spoken with 100 persons and found 12 who believed war was likely.

However, he typed assumed, though a widespread view that war was ahead came about only after several months of the new administration (video below, Barack Obama in 2016, not panicked).  In August, 2017 The Washington Post reported

Obama highlighted North Korea in his meeting with Trump two days after the election. Aides who traveled with Obama to an Asia-Pacific economic forum in Peru in late November recalled him saying that Trump seemed to “sit up and take notice.”

The Obama team expected Trump to undertake the sort of deep-dive review and interagency decision-making process that it had employed, Rhodes said. Obama was frequently criticized by Republicans as being too deliberative, or, as Trump called him on the campaign trail, weak and indecisive. But Rhodes said the goal was to produce unity and clarity across the administration, rather than the kind of whipsaw tone and message that has marked the North Korea issue under Trump.

Initially, Trump appeared to think he could outsource the problem to China, a strategy deemed simplistic and naive by foreign policy experts who say Beijing has limited influence with the North and strategic interests that diverge from the United States’.

There would be little concern in the outgoing administration about war if the "goal was to produce unity and clarity across the administration." There was little concern in the incoming administration about war if "Trump appeared to think he could outsource the problem to China." Later, as the rhetoric ramped up between Trump and Kim Jong-un, fear of imminent war arose.

But it did not do so Donald J. Trump took office.  Trusting the contempt he has for the American people, he knows many of his cultists will follow him blindly and many other voters will forget life as it was 18 months ago. Nonetheless, whether good strategy or bad, "before taking office people were assuming that we were going to War with North Korea" is a lie.

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