WASHINGTON, D.C. Feb. 28 (DPI) – It’s been more than two years that Americans have endured the bombast and bloviations of President Donald Trump, whose tweets and other public comments attack and deny and prevaricate at every turn. So, in the wake of his sudden failure to hammer out a deal with North Korean dictator Kim Jung-Un, there are expressions in some corners that Trump has actually acknowledged failure, a positive sign in itself.

Trump “is often pathological” in his behavior and comments, one reader wrote to The New York Times, so “I’m a little reassured that he admitted” that a de-nuclearization agreement could not be forged with North Korea, whose regime’s existence depends on the nuclear threat to blackmail the world.

Trump’s summit meeting with Kim, in Vietnam this week, coincided with a congressional hearing in which former counsel Michael Cohen said Trump is a “racist, a con man and a cheat.” The two news events sat side by side on news feeds everywhere, but were oddly disconnected.

As for the summit, most readers repeated the longstanding view that Trump is in over his head, and simply lacks the basic competence to prepare and formulate a solution for something as complex as the North Korea problem.   Comment boards on all the major news sites were clogged with posts this morning.

Top recommended comment on WashingtonPost.com this morning: “This is what happens when you march into a meeting with absolutely no real plan and no preparation. Laziest — and  worst — president ever.”

From NYTimes.com:

Our President defines himself as a professional and skilled deal-maker, but the outcome of his failed trip to Vietnam, to meet Kim Jong-un, shows that he’s woefully incapable of negotiating at high, international levels. A meeting like this one should have been carefully prepared by skilled negotiators on either sides, but obviously, Mr. Trump knew better, had no patience for letting associates do the ground work or investing any of his time in getting down to details. Instead, he thought he could wing it and it didn’t work. At a head of state level, this is called incompetence and shows that Donald Trump might have been good at Reality TV, but doesn’t have the mettle to be President of the United States.

We don’t know what Trump’s objectives were for this meeting: perhaps to get out of town, perhaps to appear presidential, perhaps a play for the Nobel, even possibly to advance US-NK relations and world peace. Under none of these can the meeting be considered a success.

Far reaching agreements, of this nature, cannot be made based on pure rhetoric. Trump and his cohorts were more focused on bluster, rather than hard work. What building blocks did he and his team put in place between the Singapore and the Hanoi meeting? A top down meeting with no building blocks is going to fail inevitably. There is no surprise here. This was simply a made for TV show. Period. It is quite another thing to dismantle agreements than to enter into them. It was easy to walk away from the Iran deal, the Paris agreement, the TPP agreement, and the 1987 INF Treaty. It is easy to savage Obama and his predecessors, but quite another thing to slog it out and build a coalition of like minded allies. As long as Trump and his sycophants keep believing that he alone can negotiate agreements, they will continue to fail. There is no substitute for hard work, something Trump is not used to. Does anyone want to guess how our trade negotiations with China will end?

From WSJ.com:

While “no president has come closer” to reaching a good deal with North Korea, Trump has come no closer than any other president either.  Except that he met with the NK dictator.  But no closer to a deal than any one else.
And he put so much stock in what he was doing.

A good result, since it was completely unrealistic to expect that a problem festering since the 1950s could be solved in two short summits. The good news is that the talks will continue, and the better news is that none of the sanctions were lifted.