President Donald Trump is so adept at making things up, he sometimes manages to fool even himself. He tweeted last week that Japan and South Korea had been pressuring him to rejoin the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade accord, from which Trump withdrew last year with much fanfare.
Then he raised the possibility last week of rejoining. But wait, then he reversed his reversal and decided to reject participation.
Amid all this flip-flopping and tweeting without apparently consulting his advisers, the president neglected to note one important detail: South Korea is not one of the partnership’s 11 signatories. Why would Seoul pressure Trump to join an accord that South Korea has yet to embrace?
We can only imagine the kinds of coaching Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe received from his advisers heading into last week’s meetings with the president at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Something like this: If he said it on Twitter, it’s only U.S. policy until his next viewing of “Fox &Friends.” If he says it to you in person, it’s only U.S. policy until you walk out of the room. If he says it in front of reporters, it’s only U.S. policy until he accuses them of reporting fake news.
In other words, if Trump says it, don’t necessarily believe it.
After Syria, backed by Russia, launched a chemical weapons attack on civilians on April 7, America’s U.N. ambassador, Nikki Haley, announced on television that new sanctions would be imposed on Russian businesses that helped Syria develop chemical weapons.
Trump went berserk, yelling at his TV screen, “Who wrote that for her?” Apparently because Trump didn’t get to say it first, he decided to publicly embarrass Haley by reversing his own sanctions decision — a decision that already had been circulated within the administration and to Republican Party officials as talking points.
When then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced in October a potential diplomatic breakthrough in negotiations with nuclear-armed North Korea, Trump took offense. He publicly humiliated Tillerson by tweeting, “I told Rex Tillerson … that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man… Save your energy Rex, we’ll do what has to be done!”
Trump now is preparing for a meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to discuss exactly what Tillerson talked about. Tillerson’s designated replacement, CIA Director Mike Pompeo, already has sat down with Kim to work out details.
Trump’s flip-flops have become so commonplace that more Americans are inclined to believe a porn star than the president of the United States. Only a third of Americans polled in March regarded the president as honest.
Facts and trust matter. If the president has lost credibility among the Americans who elected him, imagine the damage he has inflicted to the national reputation abroad.
— St. Louis Post-Dispatch