The White House is a smoothly running machine

It appears to be the embattled President against the world these days. There is, however, at least one notable exception: the increasingly warm public words he reserves for the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un. Over the weekend, Trump praised Kim for sending him an encouraging letter, publicly suggesting that he was open to denuclearization by the end of Trump’s first Presidential term, and dispensing with the customary displays of nuclear missiles at a huge parade in Pyongyang celebrating the country’s seventieth anniversary. On Monday, the White House announced that, in response to the “very warm, very positive” note from Kim, Trump was now ordering his staff to plan for a second Trump-Kim summit meeting. “Thank you to Chairman Kim,” Trump wrote in a tweet. “We will both prove everyone wrong!”

But Trump’s faith in the North Korean dictator is not shared by his top advisers.

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Bruce Klingner, who for years served as the C.I.A. branch chief for Korea and is now a regional expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation, called the President’s current strategy “the beatification of Kim Jong Un.” He and other former officials described the hallmarks of Trump-era foreign policy: conflicting signals, a lack of clear information and process, and distrust of allies. [...] [A] former official said he had personally spoken to most of Trump’s key advisers on North Korea in recent days and that “none of them is where the President is.”

The infighting is not lost on Kim, who now appears to be openly trying to divide Trump from his team, and his government’s statements have increasingly started to accuse Trump advisers, such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, whom Trump has designated as his lead negotiator, of trying to “thwart” Trump’s wishes. “Kim watches us as much as we watch him and, unfortunately for us, this Presidency is wide open,” Jung Pak, the C.I.A.’s former lead Kim analyst, who left the agency for the Brookings Institution last summer amid Trump’s “fire and fury” rhetoric, told me. “North Korea has gleaned a lot about this Presidency and the policy dysfunction.”

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The disarray and chaos described in Woodward’s book are not in the past; they remain the current reality of the Trump Administration. On Monday, for example, Trump had the White House announce both the news of his planned second summit with the North Korean leader and the likely cancellation of a planned Presidential visit to Ireland. Both announcements were a surprise to many who would normally be consulted. “When I met people in the State Department, they were still not aware of what was going on,” one diplomat told me, two days later. In the case of the Ireland visit, officials were initially taken aback by the news of Trump’s plans for the trip, an add-on to a visit to France planned for November that they suspected was an excuse for Trump to visit his golf course in the country. They were surprised once again on Monday by Trump’s apparent decision to cancel it. Both decisions came without any of the standard consultations. On Tuesday, a day after the White House announcement, several top White House officials told the Irish government that they still did not know what had happened. In the protocol-laden world of Presidential trips during past Administrations, such a move would have been unthinkable.

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On the same day that the White House announced Trump’s plans for a second summit with Kim, NBC published a story quoting an internal U.S. government intelligence assessment that North Korea, rather than showing signs of dismantling its nuclear program since Singapore, remains on track to produce as many nuclear weapons this year as before the summit. (The current estimate, NBC said, is “five to eight” nuclear weapons; the estimate before the summit was six.) Pompeo, the report quoted two sources as confirming, “went into talks with North Korea deeply skeptical that the effort would work, and the process has since only solidified his belief that it won’t.”

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Pompeo and his State Department aides are in the nearly impossible position of trying to negotiate on behalf of a President who thinks nothing of publicly undercutting them.

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“Pompeo is trying to negotiate things the President already says he’s gotten,” Victor Cha, a former senior National Security Council official who handled North Korea for President George W. Bush, and who was initially tapped as Trump’s Ambassador to South Korea but had his name withdrawn before he was ever formally nominated, said.

  New Yorker

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