Portable Toilets

Singapore Fallout:  Trump has arrived home to Washington.  While he was traveling two interviews he gave about his Singapore meeting with his now good friend Kim Jong Un aired on competing networks.  To no one’s surprise one of those interviews was with Fox’s Sean Hannity, his shadow chief of staff.  Trump told Hannity that he really bonded with the North Korean leader because “He’s got a very good personality, he’s funny, and he’s very, very smart.”  He then went on to describe Kim as a “great negotiator,” and “a very strategic kind of a guy,” which may explain how Kim managed to extract a major concession from him so soon, the one where Trump shocked the Pentagon, members of Congress, and the South Korean and Japanese governments by promising to suspend future joint military exercises.  Though Trump remains confident that the summit was a wild success in a rare moment of reflection he did admit to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that the path ahead remains foggy. “”Maybe in a year you’ll be interviewing and I’ll say I made a mistake. It’s possible. We’re dealing at a high level, a lot of things can change a lot of things are possible.”  That said, Trump remains confident that denuclearization will “start very quickly” as in “now.” To that end Trump expects Secretary of State Pompeo to begin discussions with his North Korean counterpart immediately, a notable objective but one made more difficult by the fact that North Korea hasn’t yet named a point person for future discussions, a delay strategy that they’ve employed before after making similar promises to earlier administrations.  As to the suspension of those provocative “war games,” a Pentagon spokesperson reports that despite Trump’s promise, a promise he retweeted on his flight home, the exercises are still on, at least for now.  For his part, VP Pence who almost never says anything that isn’t straight from the Trump playbook tried to reassure alarmed Senate Republicans that some “training exchanges and readiness training with South Korea will continue.”  Of course immediately after he made those reassurances, his spokespeople walked them back,  denying that Pence had said anything that contradicted Trump by explaining that “the Vice President did NOT say that military exercises will continue with South Korea." In response Cory Gardner, one of those alarmed Republican Senators, replied over Twitter: "@VP was very clear: regular readiness training and training exchanges will continue." The bottom line is that while Trump firmly believes that his summit was a success, that Kim is a really wonderful guy and that he, Trump, will go down in history for achieving denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula by tweet beating the North Korean strongman into submission, many members of Congress from both parties are concerned that he’s given away far too much and will get little more than broken promises in return.  Success or not, the summit experience did provide for some oddly entertaining moments.  To convince Kim Jong Un that turning his nukes into plowshares really is his best and only option, Trump showed him a video of what North Korea could look like if and when Kim allows the Trump family real estate conglomerate to turn his country into a Trump wonderland filled with Trump towers and Trump beach resorts.  Trump also showed the film clip to the press, a number of whom missed its message, thinking instead that they were viewing a North Korea propaganda film.  As to the Little Rocket Man, to prevent anyone from grabbing his DNA, he brought along his own portable toilet.  He also had a latex gloved aide swab down the pen he used to sign the summit agreement letter, paranoid but rational if you consider that he’s been known to kill a family member or two with one or more discrete nerve agents, the kind of stuff that could easily be applied to a pen.   

More Politics:  Trump’s hold over the Republican party was on display yesterday.   Mark Sanford, the Congressman from South Carolina who had once been the state’s governor until he had tried to cover up an Argentine fling by claiming that he was walking the Appalachian trail, lost his primary bid against a Trump supported opponent.  Sanford had been one of the few Republican members of Congress willing to criticize Trump and his fiscal policies and it’s likely that a last minute tweet slam from Trump led to his Congressional demise.  In Virginia, Republicans nominated Corey Stewart, an anti-immigrant, Confederate flag supporter to run against former Democratic VP candidate, current Virginia Senator Tim Kaine who is up for reelection in November.  Virginia Republicans are now concerned that Stewart’s presence on the ballot will turn off moderate Republicans so much that it will make it difficult for some Republican members of the Virginia Congressional delegation to hold their seats in the fall election.  To that end, a number of polling experts have now recharacterized four Virginia seats from leaning Republican to leaning Democrat.  Republican Congresswoman Barbara Comstock, who was already facing an uphill battle in a district easily won by Hilary Clinton in 2016, is looking more and more like toast. In northeast Wisconsin a reliably Republican state senate seat was won by a Democrat, another indication that the outlook for Democrats in states that had been key to Trump’s presidential victory might be improving.  That said, yesterday Special Counsel Mueller warned that Russian intelligence services still have active “interference operations” into US elections.  He made that statement as part of his effort to protect the “voluminous” amount of evidence sought by lawyers for Concord Management and Consulting LLC, one of three companies and 13 Russian nationals charged in a February indictment alleging election meddling via social media. In other Mueller news, the judge presiding over the Washington DC case against one time Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort gave his lawyers a rare win.  She ordered Mueller’s team to turn over the names of individuals and groups that are alleged to have acted as unregistered foreign agents at Manafort's behest.  Manafort may have to savor that small victory from a jail cell.  On Friday the same Judge will decide whether or not to revoke his bail in response to his attempts at witness tampering.  Though they haven’t been indicted for anything yet, Ivanka and Jared have managed to come out of the year in Washington richer than ever.  The two raked in many tens of millions of dollars last year and, at least in Ivanka’s case, some of those riches come from Trump related properties and businesses. That said the Trump-Kushners are still not safe from the Russian meddling investigation.  To that end Buzzfeed reports that Senate Democrats want to question first daughter Ivanka about her role in facilitating conversations between Michael Cohen, who is telling friends that he expects to be arrested shortly, and a Russian Olympic weightlifter about setting up a meeting with Vladimir Putin related to Trump Tower Moscow, a project that she worked on and that lasted far longer than anyone in Trump’s orbit likes to acknowledge.   The Senators also want to learn more about all of those trademarks that she was awarded in May around the time that her father tried to resuscitate ZTE, the Chinese telecom company that he is still trying to save.  As to that save, Senate Republicans led by one of Trump’s most ardent supporters Tom Cotton, are close to attaching legislation to a key defense bill that will kill Trump’s attempt to save all those Chinese jobs by having sanctions against the company lifted.  Apparently, saving a Chinese company that sells products to North Korea and Iran and manufactures phones that represent a security risk to purchasing Americans is a step too far even for Cotton.