Just before departing Canada, Trump threatened a trade war with any country, including allies. “We’re like the piggy bank that everybody is robbing, and that ends,” he said. Trump’s complaint in Quebec drove to the core of his campaign pitch to the “forgotten men and women” of America: that he would forcefully put U.S. interests first, by renegotiating trade deals to restrict foreign imports and increase U.S. exports. But according to many economists, blocking foreign imports would have been counterproductive and actually harmful to the U.S. economy.
Trump headed directly to Singapore, the island nation in the Pacific, where history awaited him. He was set to meet Kim Jong Un for the first-ever face-to-face talks between an American president and a North Korean leader. On the way, one of Trump’s top advisers revealed that the tantrum the president threw in Quebec might have been about more than just trade disagreements. “POTUS is not gonna let a Canadian prime minister push him around,” Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, said June 10 on CNN. “He is not going to permit any show of weakness on the trip to negotiate with North Korea, nor should he.”
“So this was about North Korea?” anchor Jake Tapper asked.
“Of course it was in large part,” Kudlow responded.
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The president envisioned the historic disarmament summit as the ultimate Donald J. Trump production. He thought meeting with Kim might even earn him the Nobel Peace Prize. Trump had long ago started imagining the pageantry. Earlier in the year, when he and Kim were first cooking up plans to meet, the White House Communications Agency had manufactured red, white, and blue challenge coins embossed with Trump’s silver visage facing off against Kim. Just before leaving for Singapore on June 9, Trump announced that he would be able to determine whether a denuclearization deal was attainable “within the first minute” of meeting Kim. How? “My touch, my feel—that’s what I do,” he boasted to reporters.
One longtime Trump adviser summed up the president’s mind-set about the North Korea talks: “He looks at it like he looks at everything, which is, this is another guy who is the mouse that roared, who’s tied his tail to China, to whom Donald Trump could be the messiah. Why? Because in Donald J. Trump’s mind, he thinks that he, the president, has the ability to figure out a way to give [Kim] what he wants and to get what he wants. It’s just another deal to him.”
The president, this adviser added, had thought to himself, “Am I intellectually as smart as Jimmy Carter? No, but I don’t need to be. Do I have the vast reservoir of political cachet that the Bushes have? No, but I don’t need that. What do I have? I can go one-on-one playing tennis. I don’t need to play chess. I don’t need long-range, strategic diplomacy.”
On June 10, when Trump arrived in Singapore, approximately thirty-six hours ahead of his meeting with Kim, it was so humid that visitors’ shirts stuck to their backs the minute they stepped outdoors. About five hours earlier, Kim had landed aboard a Boeing 747 borrowed from the Chinese government. Trump was restless. He never liked life outside the bubble of his daily life—his bed, his televisions, his steaks and burgers. The antsy president told his aides to move up the start of the summit, scheduled for June 12, to June 11. He wanted to see Kim right away. “We’re here now,” Trump told them. “Why can’t we just do it?”
After weeks of careful diplomatic negotiations by the U.S. and North Korean governments to choreograph the summit, Trump caused a flurry of commotion. His aides, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, John Kelly, and Bolton, pleaded against changing the schedule. They told him he needed the extra day to prepare for his talks with Kim. Plus, on June 11, Trump was slated to meet with the prime minister of Singapore, a perfunctory visit that if canceled would insult the host government. Then press secretary Sarah Sanders made the argument that proved persuasive: if he moved the summit up to June 11, a Monday, then it would air live on Sunday night in the United States, because Singapore is twelve hours ahead of Washington. “Sir, you’re doing a historic meeting and you don’t want it on prime time?” Sanders asked Trump. Of course, he did.
When Trump first met Kim at the lush Capella hotel on the resort island of Sentosa, he shook the dictator’s hand for thirteen seconds, patted him on the back, and led him down a rich red carpet. Kim was a pariah, arguably the world’s greatest abuser of human rights, and committed to nuclear armament. But Trump threw Kim a party, showering him with respect and declaring himself honored to be in his presence. The summit was carefully staged to put both leaders on equal footing, which normalized the authoritarian Kim. The spectacle was so jarring that even Kim acknowledged the oddity. He was overheard telling Trump, through an interpreter, “Many people will think of this as a form of fantasy . . . a science fiction movie.”
Trump’s nearly nine-hour day with Kim epitomized the president’s reality-show diplomacy. The summit was short on substance but heavy on superlatives. Trump called Kim “very talented,” “very smart,” and a “very good negotiator.” He said the North Korean people were “very gifted” and their country’s future “very, very bright.” And he claimed personal credit for staving off a North Korean nuclear attack on Seoul, the South Korean capital, which is just thirty-five miles from the border and home to about ten million people. “This is really an honor for me to be doing this, because I think, you know, potentially, you could have lost, you know, 30, 40, 50 million people,” Trump said.
Trump began his grand-finale news conference in Singapore by playing a film he had commissioned, first a version in Korean and then one in English. It was startlingly reminiscent of Pyongyang’s propaganda videos. The movie portrayed North Korea as some kind of paradise, with gleaming high-rises, time-lapsed sunrises, high-speed trains, majestic horses running through water, and children merrily skipping through a city square. It included a montage of images of Kim and Trump waving their hands and flashing thumbs up, as if running mates in a campaign.
Journalists were flabbergasted. Trump explained that he had it made to show Kim what his country’s future would look like if it abandoned its nuclear weapons and normalized relations with the West. The shores of North Korea could be an exclusive resort destination! Trump said he played the video personally for Kim on an iPad—and, yes, the North Korean dictator liked it.
“They have great beaches,” Trump told reporters. “You see that whenever they’re exploding their cannons into the ocean, right? I said: ‘Boy, look at that place. Wouldn’t that make a great condo?’ And I explained it. I said, ‘Instead of doing that, you could have the best hotels in the world right there.’ Think of it from a real estate perspective.”
The summit put a pause on bellicose rhetoric and threats of war but produced nothing concrete—certainly not a commitment from Kim to give up his nuclear arsenal. In the days following his Singapore trip, Trump spoke with apparent envy of Kim’s rule. He admired how the North Korean people “sit up at attention” when their dictator spoke and marveled at how tough Kim’s guards appeared. After watching clips from North Korean state television, Trump noted the female news anchor’s sycophancy and joked that she was even more lavish in her praise of the dear leader than Fox News hosts were of Trump.