Tired of winning?

For years, [scholar at New America who specializes in talking with rogue regimes Suzanne] DiMaggio and Joel Wit, a longtime U.S. diplomat turned scholar at Johns Hopkins University who founded the influential North Korea-watching website 38North, have been quietly meeting with North Koreans to talk about the country’s nuclear program. In the past, they hardly acknowledged the conversations, part of a “Track 2” dialogue that has kept a line open to the isolated dictatorship even when the two governments officially were not on speaking terms.

But that was before Trump.

[...]

“I don’t normally talk about my ‘Track 2’ work in such a public way,” DiMaggio tweeted. “But these are far from normal times.”

[...]

In their meetings with the North Koreans since Trump was elected, DiMaggio and Wit watched their growing alarm and confusion as an initial outreach after the election testing U.S. reaction to new nuclear talks descended into a Trumpian fury of name-calling, mutual recriminations and military escalation.

[...]

The North Koreans have asked her not only if Trump is nuts, DiMaggio said, but what and how to think about everything from his public undercutting of his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible campaign collusion with Russia.

“They really want to know what is his end game,” said DiMaggio, a scholar at New America who specializes in talking with rogue regimes and has spent the past two years in these secret discussions with the North Koreans. She believes they were ready after Trump’s surprise election to discuss a new round of official talks with the U.S. to defuse the standoff over their nuclear weapons—but that Trump’s escalating rhetoric and Twitter rants such as his weekend taunting of North Korea’s “short and fat” Kim Jong Un may have foreclosed that option. “They follow the news very closely; they watch CNN 24/7; they read his tweets and other things.”

[...]

Wit agreed that, while it got little attention at the time, the Obama administration had misread Kim when he succeeded his father in 2010, and had failed to pursue new nuclear talks before then that might have kept the North Koreans further away from achieving a nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile that can reach the continental U.S., a breakthrough they are now on the brink of making. Obama’s approach, Wit said, now looks like a “big mistake.”

[...]

“Based on my conversations with them immediately after the inauguration, when I traveled to Pyongyang to meet them, they were very clear that this could be a new beginning,” [DiMaggio] said. “They certainly didn’t have any illusions that things would be easy, but I think they were willing at least to consider the idea of talks with the United States without preconditions at that time.”

  Politico

Looks like The Most Notable Loser blew another one.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.