THREAD on the Bolton and Woodward books regarding Trump and North Korea. The big, completely predictable, takeaways:

1. Trump had no idea what he was doing.

Both confirm pretty much what anyone could see from the start – that Trump was winging it. Of Trump’s many governing /1

flaws, it is his shambolic maladministration of government that aggravates me the most. Dealing with NK on nukes is a big deal. A lot people are really concerned that NK may proliferate them, manage them poorly and have an accidental, or use them if there were a war. This is /2

serious stuff, yet Trump showed up grossly unprepared, didn’t read or listen to his briefers, didn’t understand the issues, knew nothing about Korea, nukes, or missiles, and would have signed just about anything were it not for all the journalists and analysts holding his feet /3

to the fire not to give away the farm for some flim-flam agreement NK would cheat on anyway. The whole thing was a farce from the start.

2. Trump didn’t care at all that Kim Jong Un is a sociopath and actually kind of admired him. Ugh

Again, if you paid attention,you already /4

could see this. Trump’s sycophancy before dictators is one of his worst, most un-American foreign policy traits. But in the books, you really get to see Trump fawning over Kim, a tin-pot dictator no one would care about if he didn’t have nukes. It’s gross and absurd. Yes, we /5

have to deal with unsavory leaders in world politics, but you don’t have to toady to them like Trump does with Kim, Xi, and Putin. Trump seems to think that Kim calling Obama an ‘a**hole’ makes Trump look better. It does not; it’s actually a complement of sorts to Obama, bc it /6

bc it means Obama knew what kind totalitarian KJU is.

3. It was all about the images.

The hawkish critique of this from the start was that it all was just photo-op diplomacy. Doves tried to defend it as the summit diplomacy long needed to break the Korean stalemate,and there /7

is indeed something to that argument. (I have a paper coming out later this year on this.) But what the doves could never quite admit – especially here in SK – was that Trump didn’t actually care. Trump was not Carter at Camp David shepherding a breakthrough possible only at /8

the leader-level. He was, instead and predictably, the TV-obsessed con-man he’s been his whole career. He just wanted the pictures and symbolism. Walking over the DMZ line was enough in his mind to win a Nobel Prize, garnering even more attention and acclaim. That he didn’t /9

broker an actual deal like Carter – that he didn’t resolve anything and that nothing has changed on the ground here in Korea - never actually occurs to him as a problem in either book. Instead, he demands that Woodward call his pictures and walk inside N Korea ‘cool,’ like /10

some high schooler on a field trip. It’s ridiculous.

4. The South Korean left both got taken for a ride and is complicit in Trump’s theatrics.

The player which comes off worst in all this – other Trump - is the dovish left in South Korea. So obsessed with getting a POTUS to /11

meet a North Korean leader is President Moon Jae In’s coalition that it aligned itself with wannabe authoritarian con-man Trump, a figure similar to the right-wing dictators the SK left fought against in the past. This is an appalling cession of moral high-ground. SK liberals /12

should have known better than to throw in their lot with Trump. Yet they manipulated him from the start,with the SK president and foreign minister talking about what a great man he was and how he deserved the Nobel Prize. It was an open secret in South Korea that all this was /13

a flattering lie. Moon’s people could see as well as anyone how grossly incompetent Trump was, how he didn’t know anything about the issues, as well as Trump’s deep personal animus toward South Korea. Yet they went along with him anyway, got nothing real out of Pyongyang, and /14

now face a hawkish future because no will believe, outside of the most ideological doves, that NK wants to deal after 3 years of Trump and Moon falling all over themselves to make concessions. Doves wanted a serious POTUS like Obama or Carter to negotiate with Kim; instead /15

they got a con-man incompetent who squandered summitry for his own ego; now they have to live with the backlash consequences. /16