President Trump is worse than a dupe: He’s a weakling.
I wrote for the Washington Examiner almost exactly a year ago that Trump should resign, specifically because “We cannot trust President Trump to act with wisdom, objectivity, and reasonable perspective when dealing with our most potentially dangerous adversary, Russia.” Despite Tuesday’s attempted walk-back, Monday’s disgraceful Helsinki summit performance by Trump shows I was right – but I was missing part of the picture.
The reality is that, as weirdly submissive and stoop-shouldered as Trump is vis-a-vis Russian President Vladimir Putin, he is almost equally as pitiful a negotiator when dealing with many authoritarians or totalitarians around the globe. As Kirsten Powers noted concisely in a June column, “Trump has made his affection for authoritarians — from the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte to Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan to China’s Xi Jinping — well known.”
To that list one could add Syria’s Bashar Assad, at least until Assad again used chemical weapons against his own people in April. Indeed, just days before that attack, Trump was playing into Assad’s hands by calling for removal of American troops from Syria – and Trump had either praised or made excuses for Assad for years before that.
But it is in his two most recent high-profile meetings with dictators – the one with Putin, and the Singapore session in June with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un – that’s Trump’s vassalage has been clearest and most dangerous to U.S. interests.
Consider the judgment of the American Enterprise Institute’s Nicholas Eberstadt. Before the Singapore meeting, he had been a supporter of Trump’s handling of North Korea: “Trump looked well positioned to wrest genuine international concessions from a North Korean dictator — something that had arguably never been done before. He was certainly better positioned than any previous president to roll back North Korea’s nuclear clock.”
Instead, though, Eberstadt wrote that once Trump met Kim, Trump got his clock cleaned:
Among the “wins” for Kim identified by Eberstadt: a public-relations sense of the “legitimacy” of the regime; failure to be held account for proliferation of weapons of mass murder; adoption of North Korean code language for the North’s dominance over South Korea; “no accounting” for the North’s current nuke inventory “or cyber-crime activities, or counterfeiting, or drug sales”; almost no attention to human rights; a Trump pledge to suspend joint military training with South Korea; and, most important, actually weaker verifiability and deliverability of the North’s vague pledges to denuclearize.
Not only that, but Trump extravagantly praised the hideous Kim in numerous ways, including the remarkably obtuse claim that Kim “loves his people.” And as was noted at The Weekly Standard, our allies in South Korea agreed: “Chosun Ilbo, South Korea’s paper of record, published a bleak editorial: ‘Kim Jong-un Got Everything He Wanted from Summit with Trump.’”
Then came Monday’s atrocity of a summit with Putin. Enough has been written and said about its disgracefulness, including by Trump’s staunchest supporters, that one need not belabor those points, except to agree that the proper takeaway from Helsinki (and Singapore) was that provided by conservative radio hero Charles Sykes at The Weekly Standard: “What we have learned again is that at the heart of every truculent and strutting bully is a craven sycophant eager to cower before a bigger bully…. [Trump’s] performance [was] so servile that we struggle to place it in context, because there are no parallels in the history of the American presidency.”
This sort of weakness before authoritarians, combined with Trump’s particularly bizarre obsequiousness specifically to Putin, leaves the U.S. endangered. My closing sentences from a year ago remain appropriate:
“Now nobody in the public and no foreign heads of state can trust the Trump team’s assessment of Russia’s moves on the international chessboard. This is untenable. For the sake of public confidence in America’s honorable conduct of foreign affairs, President Trump should forfeit his office.”
Quin Hillyer (@QuinHillyer) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a former associate editorial page editor for the Washington Examiner, and is the author of “The Accidental Prophet” trilogy of recently published satirical, literary novels.
