G7 reporting

Yes, your president is a buffoon and and asshole.  Why do you ask?

Donald Trump on Saturday said his summit with Kim Jong-un in Singapore would be a “one-time shot”. Speaking to reporters at the G7 summit in La Malbaie, Canada, the US president projected confidence over the prospects for a deal on denuclearization, stating: “I think within the first minute, I’ll know.

  The Guardian

Depends on the handshake.

“Just my touch, my feel, that’s what I do,” he said. “How long will it take to figure out if they’re serious? You know, the way they say you know if you’re going to like somebody in the first five seconds, you ever hear that one? I think very quickly I’ll know whether or not something good is going to happen.”

And here's how we all know: if Kim is subordinate enough, Trump will like him. If Trump likes him, he'll claim something good is happening. Otherwise, no dice.

“You don’t know, it’s not been done before at this level,” Trump said of attempts to establish peace with a reclusive, authoritarian and nuclear-armed regime. He added: “This is a leader that’s really an unknown personality, people don’t know much about him."

And by "people" he means himself.

“It’s a one-time shot and I think it’s going to work out very well,” Trump said, though he also indicated that the summit may only be a starting point, saying it “may not work out. There’s a good chance it won’t work out. There’s probably an even better chance that it will take a period of time, it’ll be a process.”

Asked about suggestions that even granting a meeting to Kim meant conceding valuable ground, he said: “Only the fake news says that. We just got three hostages back, we paid nothing … we have gotten … we haven’t done anything. The haters, they say, ‘Oh, you’re giving him a meeting’ – gimme a break, OK?”

I'll give you a break if you'll talk like an adult.

In an unscheduled press conference hours before the G7 summit was due to end, Donald Trump accused the rest of the world of treating the US like a piggy bank to be robbed, appeared to snub Theresa May and called for tariff-free trade with the G7 countries.

In a bravado performance, he also described Russia’s annexation of Crimea as “something that happened a while ago”, warned in the bluntest of terms against economic retaliation for the US’s introduction of tariffs, and described the way the EU treated the US as brutal.

[...]

“It’s not a question of ‘I hope it will change’”, he said. “It’s going to change, 100%. Tariffs are going to come way down because people cannot continue to do that. We’re like the piggy bank that everybody’s robbing. And that ends.

[...]

And we have very, very strong measures that take care of that ... the numbers are so astronomically against them ... we win that war a thousand times out of a thousand.”

[...]

“I’d say the level of relationship is a 10. We have a great relationship. Angela [Merkel], and Emmanuel [Macron] and Justin [Trudeau] ... I would say the relationship is a 10.”

  Guardian

Not PM May? She's a suck-up, so she gets ignored.

In what was widely seen as another ostentatious display of contempt for the process of international cooperation, Trump began the day by failing to show up for the start of the Saturday morning working session on gender equality.

[...]

The official pool photography session, when the world’s media are allowed in to take the day’s first pictures, was taking place and security personnel had to open a path for the president through a crowd of journalists.

As Hudon continued to talk about the need for gender equality to be included in every policy decision, Trump walked slowly to his seat while the whole room watched.

The president departed a summit of the G7 major industrialised democracies in Quebec the same way he arrived, firing off threats of a trade war. His fellow leaders were warned not to respond to the steel and aluminum tariffs he has imposed on them.

“If they retaliate, they’re making a mistake,” Trump told reporters before leaving several hours early, ducking sessions on climate change and the oceans.

In a tense session on trade on Friday, European and Canadian leaders had sought to defuse the gathering conflict, rolling out statistics on how many US jobs depended on their countries’ trade and investment and arguing that the US had more barriers to trade than its partners.

The discussion had no effect on Trump, who stuck to the claims he made throughout his election campaign: that the US was being ripped off.

“The European Union is brutal to the United States,” he railed.

Canada too, the president said, “can’t believe it got away” with its trade deal with the US.

“We’re like the piggy bank that everybody’s robbing,” Trump said. “And that ends. The gig is up.”

  The Guardian

Come on. You know he said "jig".

The disparaging tone towards leaders seen by all former administrations as America’s closest allies was in marked contrast to the hopeful language he used in anticipation of Tuesday’s planned summit with Kim Jong-un.

[...]

“How long will it take to figure out if they’re serious? … Maybe in the first minute. You know, the way they say you know if you’re going to like somebody in the first five seconds, you ever hear that one? I think very quickly I’ll know whether or not something good is going to happen,” Trump said. “And if I think it won’t happen, I’m not going to waste my time. I don’t want to waste his time.”

Asked how he would read Kim so swiftly, Trump said: “My touch, my feel, that’s what I do.”

Like I said. It depends on the handshake. (I hope he realizes that Kim has a low center of gravity.)

The juxtaposition of the two high-profile international events has highlighted one of the peculiarities of Trump’s relations with foreign governments: he has found it easier to cultivate personal chemistry with autocrats than with democratically elected leaders.

“He’d much prefer to be in Singapore than in Quebec,” said Thomas Wright, director of the Center on the US and Europe at the Brookings Institution. “He gets more annoyed with allies than enemies, and really doesn’t get on with the others at the G7. He is anti-free trade and allies, and pro-strongmen and authoritarian regimes.”

The longer Trump has been in office, Wright said, the more confident he has grown in his own gut instincts, formed by long experience of the property market, which he viewed as a zero-sum struggle to come out a winner, not a sucker.

“He is fixated on trade deficits in particular industries like cars and manufacturing,” Wright said. “But the whole global economic model is based on the US consuming goods. This is why it is impossible to negotiate with him. He is fixated on something that doesn’t make any sense.”

The picture worth a thousand words.

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

UPDATE:



Prick.