Trump’s Talk of Love Made Kim Think He Could Have It All

“Sometimes you have to walk,” said the president, to the relief of those who feared Mr. Trump would give away too much in pursuit of a deal with the North Korean dictator. So Mr. Trump said fuhgeddaboudit, cancelled his lunch with Kim Jong-un, and headed home.

Mr. Kim’s offer was to dismantle what they say is their most important nuclear facility, leaving all their other weapons facilities in place with the hermit country unchecked in continuing to develop fissionable material. Kim’s demand in return: that the U.S. lift sanctions in their entirety. It wasn’t an offer; it was an affront.

Traditionally, and practically, pacts between nations are hammered out by each country’s negotiators and the heads of the countries meet only to shake hands,
sign the finished document, and enjoy a fine dinner punctuated by flowery toasts.

But Mr. Trump believes himself to be a premier deal-maker and went to Hanoi with no deal in place, expecting to charm the North Korean leader, and the American people on his return, with successful vanity diplomacy.

But North Korea had seen signals that the U.S. position has softened, that we would no longer demand a complete inventory of their nuclear infrastructure. After meeting with Kim last June, Trump had said the de-nuclearization issue had been “largely solved” and that “there is no longer a nuclear threat” from North Korea. Since then, the president saying that, in their exchange of “beautiful letters”, the two “fell in love”, as he told a rally in Wheeling, West Virginia, may have led Kim to think the U.S. president would accept crumbs in order to claim success in arriving at a deal. Evidence that North Korea believed it had attained the upper hand shown through when the North’s foreign minister, Ri Yong-ho, condescendingly told America that their position will not change, that “This kind of opportunity may never come again”.

But it did come again. Something did, in any case. When Trump walked out, Mr. Ri had to back down. He claimed their offer was misunderstood and called for only certain sanctions to be eliminated in exchange for demolition of the nuclear compound, unspecified sanctions described as those that are harming the people of North Korea.

Nevertheless, President Trump embarrassed the U.S. by going all that way only to be stiffed. Compare the absence of joint preparedness with the elaborately choreographed Iranian nuclear deal of the Obama administration — an agreement that Trump calls the worst he has ever seen — which provided for a full and transparent accounting of Iran’s facilities, the shutdown and removal of equipment and enriched stocks, and inspection that enables the International Atomic Energy Agency to say that Iran continues to be in compliance. That was an agreement fully worked out in advance before any of the countries’ leaders put pen to paper.

The president leaves himself open for schadenfreude when his mission falls short for his having tried to create a myth about his efforts with North Korea, even to the extent of self-congratulation for avoiding a war that he claims — with utter falsity — that President Obama would have started:

“When I came into office, I met right there in the Oval Office with President Obama. And I said, ‘What’s the biggest problem’ and he said, ‘By far, North Korea’. And, I don’t want to speak for him, but I believe he would have gone to war with North Korea. I think he was ready to go to war, in fact he told me he was so close to starting a big war with North Korea”.

This about President Obama, who couldn’t bring himself to fire a missile into Syria when Assad crossed his “red line”. Trump has told this lie more than once. At a cabinet meeting a month ago he said, “That was going to be a war that could have been a World War III, to be honest with you”. And to reporters few days later,

Anybody else but me, you’d be in war right now. And I can tell you, the previous administration would have been in war right now…You would, right now, be in a nice, big, fat war in Asia with North Korea if I wasn’t elected president.”

This from the man who himself had engaged in reckless brinkmanship, threatening a murderous dictator of a paranoid country about whose temperament we knew little that he would be “met with fire and fury like the world has never seen”, with Kim Jong-un counter-threatening — all the while testing delivery platforms, one after another of increasing range ending with being capable of reaching into the U.S. — “I will surely and definitely tame the mentally deranged U.S. dotard with fire”.

The North’s diminished offers — talk of an agreement for total denuclearization having dematerialized — also make Trump’s antagonism toward his own intelligence agencies look wrongheaded. In mid January he said, complaining of a media that did not buy his faith in Kim Jong-un:

“The agreement says there will be total denuclearization. Nobody…wants to report that.”

A few days later in a congressional hearing Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said:

“We currently assess that North Korea will seek to retain WMD [weapons of mass destruction] capabilities and is unlikely to completely give up its nuclear weapons.”

Mr. Trump faces an altered reality from a year ago. The two Korea’s have developed lofty dreams of reunification, with South Korea seemingly not seeing the risk of the North’s malevolent designs. Getting virtually nothing in return, the U.S. suspended the joint military exercises with the South last June and South Korea now disfavors resumption out of concern it will put an end to the detente with Kim Jong-un’s regime. A military strike out of exasperation would be disastrous for the South, with estimates of untold thousands killed — including our own troops — by the North’s artillery alone. Which says that the U.S. is left with almost no options and the dictator probably knows it.

Maybe Tariffs Aren’t All That Bad

We have become so immersed in free market doctrine since the debut of Reagan conservatism that “tariff” has become a dirty word. Between the simple-minded insistence by the right for unadulterated free trade unencumbered by regulation, and the go-along embrace of globalization by the left, we have succumbed to the belief that these mechanisms, left to their own devices, will result in an equitable sharing among peoples. Billions have been lifted out of poverty, yes, but jobs in the millions have been transferred across borders and serious imbalances in deficits and debt have arisen between nations.

Donald Trump, with an anger first aimed at Japan and then at China that dates from public declarations by him unchanged from three decades back, has waded in with a mission to engineer trade parity. Past presidents from Clinton onward have allowed China unrestricted access and exports to the United States, while allowing China to block a broad swath of service industries from entering their country and extracting trade secrets from those American companies allowed in. To his credit, Trump has challenged China head on. He has tossed aside the feckless World Trade Organization and chosen tariffs as his weapon of choice to bludgeon China.

There’s comedy in that because Mr. Trump doesn’t know how tariffs work, even after a year of imposing them. In November he said in a news conference, “Billions of dollars will soon be pouring into our treasury from taxes that China is paying for us”. He said the same on Twitter, adding that if we continue to import tariffed goods, we’ll “just make our Country richer than ever before”.

China doesn’t pay the tariffs. It is American companies that are penalized for importing, and they in turn will pass on the cost to American consumers, raising prices somewhat. But Trump continues to think China is paying tariffs to the U.S. He just said it again. Whether a deal or continued tariffs…

“I’m happy either way. I could live [sic] receiving billions and billions of dollars a month from China…Now they are paying billions a month for the privilege of coming into the U.S.”

Nevertheless, he succeeded in awakening us to tariffs, a concept that has been beyond consideration, conjuring only the specter of Smoot-Hawley and the Great Depression. But his methods could use some refinement.

There are always tariffs. We just aren’t made aware of them. What if they were re-engineered to serve some purpose other than an arbitrary toll on a given item, most likely going on and on with its original purpose forgotten. What of this instead: What if the United States, with other countries hopefully following suit much as they did after Roosevelt reorganized trade with the Reciprocal Trade Act in 1934, were to install a rating scheme wherein tariff levels were applied to countries individually — Trump’s preference over multilateral agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership — according to a demerit system.

The default rate would be 0% tariffs for everything imported from that country, but with possible increments added for each offensive policy it perpetrates. If it subsidizes its industries, that would earn a tariff increment of X%. If it blocks our access to its markets, that would deserve an added Y%. And so forth for violations of human rights, toleration of child labor, environmental transgressions — potentially a sizable list to choose from. The data is already available from the many organizations that currently rank countries. The level of tariffs for our hypothetical country would be the total of its negative assessments. That aggregate of percents, reviewed annually, would then be levied uniformly across all goods shipped to us.

Each country adopting the system would arrive at its own scorecards for countries with which it trades, including the United States, which would get docked for its human rights abuses in separating children from parents at the Mexican border, rates of incarceration, etc.

Such a scheme would result in orderly practices and far greater simplicity than the voluminous tariff schedules with different rates for thousands of items, the product of endless haggling of the sort we now see from the thousands of applications by U.S. firms to the Commerce Department for a waiver of Trump’s across the board tariffs on aluminum and steel. Plus, with reasons for tariffs spelled out and quantified, the penalty scheme could have the salutary effect of causing countries to change behavior in order to gain more favorable access to other markets.

Feb 22 2019 | Posted in Governance | Read More »

Trump Defies Intelligence Chiefs and Shuns Briefings Say Leaked Schedules

Once again we were made aware of the chilling disconnect between President Trump and his intelligence chiefs when, after their annual briefing to the Senate Intelligence Committee of the threats we face around the world, he tweeted the
Senate Intelligence Committee hearing: L. to R.: Christopher Wray, head of the F.B.I.; Gina Haspel, C.I.A. director; Dan Coats, Director of National Intelligence                

next morning that the chiefs were “passive and naïve” and suggested they “should go back to school”.

The disconnect was simultaneously borne out by a Time magazine article citing officials who witnessed “multiple, in-person” instances of the president exhibiting “willful ignorance” at his daily intelligence briefings, and by a leak to online news site Axios of the most recent three months of the president’s schedule showing that he sees no urgency in those briefings.

Time reported that intelligence officials are breaking their accustomed silence to warn the public that the president is endangering American security with what they say is an obstinate disregard of their assessments.

flex time

The leak by a White House source to Axios of Donald Trump’s schedule shows that the president spent fully 60% of of those three months in the undefined category of
A charted excerpt of the president’s schedule. Orange represents
“executive time”
“executive time”. The term was hit upon by former Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly to cover the president’s unaccounted-for time. Critics say that the released schedules prove that Trump spends most of his time tweeting, watching television, and calling friends. His supporters say that he simply prefers an unstructured schedule. Press Secretary Sarah Sanders e-mailed:

“President Trump has a different leadership style than his predecessors and the results speak for themselves. While he spends much of his average day in scheduled meetings, events, and calls, there is time to allow for a more creative environment that has helped make him the most productive President in modern history… It’s indisputable that our country has never been stronger than it is today under the leadership of President Trump.”

Fox News fell in behind the president. Martha MacCallum of “The Story” said of executive time, “He’s doing things. He’s reading the papers”. Howard Kurtz said, “Who cares how he runs his schedule as long as he gets things done”. Greg Gutfeld of “The Five” urged Trump to “Do more of it. Have more executive time, I say”. A guest on “Fox & Friends” gushed, “The guy is the hardest working person there is and what?, just because you don’t have a scheduled event?”

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich likened Trump to Winston Churchill’s unusual work habits in defense of the president’s leisurely and unscripted hours. Previous chiefs of staff were generous in allowing that a president has the right to set his own circadian rhythm while qualifying that the presidents they worked for bore no resemblance to Mr. Trump’s

time out

But by any measure, Mr. Trump cannot boast of an exhaustive schedule. He often complained of Barack Obama’s approach to the job (“I love working, I’m not a vacation guy, like Obama… He goes out and plays golf all the time”), but by the end of 2018, Mr.Trump had visited his properties on 218 of his 710 days in office and played golf 166 times. For Obama, two years into his first term, it was 58 rounds.

early bird

The president certainly rises early — often before 6:00 am as the timestamps on his tweets bear witness — but doesn’t arrive at the Oval Office until 11:00 am, when he typically receives the daily intelligence brief that has long been the start of a president’s day. But the schedules label the hours from 8:00 to 11:00 am as “executive time” as do they also label chunks of time in the afternoons (see illustration above).

For past presidents, the meeting for the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) was always the first order of business, starting usually at 8:00 am. Intelligence agency staff have been at work through the night culling reports from around the world and filtering them into the PDB — it’s a full briefing book — ready when the president wakes up.

Kelly Magsamen, former national security council and Pentagon official under President Obama, says that he “would have read that book before he even entered the Oval Office” and would have sat with his national security team and adviser to discuss the day’s findings.

Mack McLarty, who served as chief of staff for Bill Clinton, speaks of that president’s voracious curiosity, saying he often tried to get Clinton to read less of the briefing papers. In the morning session, McLarty could see from where he was sitting that Clinton had already read the PDB before the session began, witness notes he had written in the margins.

George W. Bush was punctual to a fault, up around 5:00 am, arriving at the Oval Office at 8:15, and working 10 1/2 hour days, divided into tightly adhered-to 10-minute segments.

Jeh Johnson, Secretary of Homeland Security under Obama, said “The most important part of a president’s day is the daily intelligence briefing” and without that briefing, “you are flying blind if you are responsible for any part of national security”. Moreover, “you have the briefers go back over it with you to make sure you got it”. He allowed that “they’re not perfect” and occasionally an analyst is “a little over his skis, he’s kind of reaching for an assumption” and needs to be challenged on how a conclusion was reached, but the briefings are “the tools for navigating national security and if you don’t use them, that’s a big, big problem”.

Unmentioned by them is why the 8:00 am jump start matters — that the rest of the world has been awake for a good dozen hours. Thanks to geography, the United States is already well behind what may have happened elsewhere.

contrarian

Trump has been hostile to the intelligent agencies’ work from the outset. In a “Face the Nation” interview on CBS just after the Senate intelligence hearings, he disagreed with the assessment that Iran is in compliance with non nuclear weapon development:

“President Bush had intel people that said Saddam Hussein in Iraq had nuclear weapons — had all sorts of weapons of mass destruction. Guess what? Those intel people didn’t know what the hell they were doing, and they got us tied up in a war that we should have never been in.”

That’s been a standard justification for Trump discrediting the work of the thousands at the intelligence agencies. No matter that it was 17 years and almost a generation ago. For him, nothing could have changed.

On taking office he bridled at the notion of daily briefs. He told Fox News’ Chris Wallace:

“I don’t have to be told — you know, I’m like, a smart person — I don’t have to be told the same thing and the same words every single day for the next eight years”.

NBC News’ Ken Dilanian says Trump “doesn’t take many in-person briefings” and “he doesn’t read his daily intel brief” either. He relies on his “gut”, as he’s said more than once, which somehow knows more than the intelligence gathered everywhere in the world every day that $81 billion a year buys. The calendar published by Axios shows only 17 intelligence briefings specifically described in the 85 day span. When he does accept a briefing, he often becomes angry when briefers present data that contradict his beliefs, says the Time report. He was asked on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” during the campaign, “Who are you consulting with consistently so that you are ready on day one?” He answered:

“I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain… I know what I’m doing and I listen to a lot of people…But my primary consultant is myself and I have a good instinct for this stuff”.

Bringing that up to date, days ago he said, “So when my intelligence people tell me how wonderful Iran is” — by which he meant CIA Director Gina Haspel saying Iran is in compliance — “if you don’t mind, I’m going to just go by my own counsel.”

To try to keep the president engaged, officials and analysts who prepare the briefs, use visual aids such as charts, distill points to two or three sentences for a president who does not read, and “repeat his name and title as frequently as possible” says Time‘s article. One story told of the president wandering off in the middle of a briefing to watch the huge television screen he had installed in an adjacent room when he moved into the White House.

alternate reality

The president’s version of the world has caused observers to conclude that he clings to his own view of reality, what White House communications director for a dozen days, Anthony Scaramucci, called Mr. Trump’s “reality distortion field” which “curves facts toward himself”. Former CIA head Michael Hayden said, “This is the first president that the intelligence community has had to deal with whose instinctive departure point is not the truth. He goes from his belief first”. In that more comfortable outlook he believes he has established warm relationships with leaders of adversarial countries — Russia’s Vladimir Putin, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and China’s Xi Jinping among them. Intelligence officers have been warned to steer clear of reports that disagree with Trump’s publicly stated views. That’s what brought about the “willful ignorance” comment. He does not want to hear the contradictory information brought to him daily by the multiple U.S. intelligence agencies despite their having their ears to the ground around the world. What could make the capabilities of those agencies clearer, compared to Trump’s gut, than their intercept of a 2017 conversation inside Saudi Arabia of Crown Prince bin Salman saying he would use “a bullet” on Jamal Khashoggi?

So he accepts Kim Jong-un’s claim that North Korea has destroyed their major underground nuclear testing complex at Punggye-ri. In an attempt to make the president more aware of how questionable that claim is, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency built a model of the facility, replete with a scaled rendering of the Statue of Liberty to show relative size, and with a “roof” that replicates the terrain covering it, so as to register with the president the enormity of the site when the roof was lifted away. But nothing has dissuaded Trump from believing the North Korean dictator.

With a summit meeting with Mr. Kim scheduled for the end of February and a possible trade deal with China to head of the March escalation of tariffs, we should be worried that Mr. Trump’s emphasis on being embraced by these autocrat rulers will cause him to sell out America.

What the Intelligence Chiefs Said. What Trump Thinks

In the Senate Intelligence Committee hearings at the end of January, the Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, had this to say:

“The composition of the current threats we face is a toxic mix of strategic competitors, regional powers, weak or failed states and non-state actors using a variety of tools in overt and subtle ways to achieve their goals.

President Trump often has a more benign view. Below are some of his statements, each followed by what one or another of the intelligence chiefs had to say in the hearing.

Toe to toe

July 18, 2018: Reporter: “Is Russia still targeting the U.S. Mr. President?”
Donald Trump answered: “Thank you very much. No.”

January 29, 2019: Coats: “We expect Russia to continue to wage its information war against democracies.”

January 12, 2019: Trump: On Fox News with Jeanine Pirro: “The whole Russia thing, it’s a hoax. It’s a terrible hoax.”

July 2018: Trump at Helsinki: “I have President Putin . He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be”.

January 29, 2019: Christopher Wray, FBI Chief: “Not only have the Russians continued to do it in 2018 We’ve seen indications that they are continuing to adapt their model and that other countries are taking a very interested eye in that approach.”

January 15, 2018: Trump : “The agreement says there will be total denuclearization. Nobody says, wants to report that.”

January 29, 2019: Coats: “We currently assess that North Korea will seek to retain WMD capabilities and is unlikely to completely give up its nuclear weapons.”

January 19, 2019: Trump on the White House Lawn: “We have made a lot of progress as far as denuclearization is concerned. Things are going very well with North Korea. We’ve made a lot of progress that has not been reported by the media.”

January 29, 2019: Coats about North Korea: “It is unlikely to completely give up its nuclear weapons and production capabilities.”

January 17, 2019: Trump: “I ended the horrible weak Iran nuclear deal”.

January 29, 2019: Sen. Angus King: “Is Iran currently abiding by the terms of the JCPOA in terms of their nuclear activities?”

CIA Director Gina Haskell: “They’re making some preparations that would increase their ability to take a step back if they make that decision, so at the moment, technically, they’re in compliance.”

December 19, 2018: Trump on White House lawn: “We have won against ISIS. We’ve beaten them and we’ve beaten them badly”.

January 29, 2019: Coats: “While ISIS is nearing territorial defeat in Iraq and Syria, the group has returned to its guerrilla warfare roots”.

January 11, 2019: Trump at cabinet meeting: “…working out very well. Knocking the hell out of ISIS”.

January 29, 2019: Coats: “ISIS is intent on resurging and still commands thousands of fighters in Iraq and Syria”.

There was no mention by anyone of the southern border, which trump has portrayed as the singlemost threat facing the country.

The president met with his intelligence agency heads a day after the hearings. He said he challenged them for saying “Iran is a wonderful place”, which they did not say. “It’s not a wonderful place”, Trump claims he said, “it’s a bad place, and they’re doing bad things”. According to Trump the agencies came around to his view, saying that in the hearings they had been mischaracterized. It could only be a Trump invention that they said that. The hearings were televised making moot the possibility of mischaracterization. Anyone watching the hearings knows exactly what was said.