Zero summit

The coins preemptively commemorating President Trump’s summit with “Supreme Leader” Kim Jong Un could yet be purchased from the White House Gift Shop (at a discount). Trump’s Nobel Peace Prize nomination for the tete-a-tete, thanks to a dozen of Congress’ most obsequious members, had been submitted. All that was missing, at least as of Thursday morning, was the summit itself.

The hypothetically historic meeting evanesced as abruptly and bizarrely as it materialized. That’s regrettable. For all that he is wrong about, Trump was right about the benefits of talking even to our most dangerous, distrusted enemies. Unfortunately, he also reserved the right to go wrong in his fumbling efforts to make denuclearization talks a reality rather than just another realitytelevision farce.

Even as Trump heaped inappropriate praise on the “very honorable” hereditary despot he once insulted with Elton John lyrics, his lieutenants gratuitously threatened Kim, sabotaging the summit before it could begin. Trump’s aggressively minded and mustachioed third national security adviser, John Bolton, proposed a “Libya model” of disarmament, evoking memories of another murderous dictator, Moammar Khadafy, unceremoniously dispatched by his subjects. While Trump walked back the provocation, Vice President Mike Pence went out of his way to reprise it, prompting the “tremendous anger and open hostility” the president cited in calling off the summit.

Perhaps the president’s boosters were thinking of Alfred Nobel in his capacity as the inventor of dynamite and other explosives. In the same month that Trump blew up the painstaking Iran nuclear accord reached under his predecessor, his awkward attempt at a comparable achievement appears to have imploded.