“If he has another summit with Kim Jong Un that doesn’t really lead to something more serious than what we’ve seen so far, having had the debacle of the negotiation with the Congress, it starts to chip away at his mantra that ‘I alone can fix it’ and ‘I’m the greatest deal-maker of all time,’” said Eric Edelman, a former top Pentagon official under President George W. Bush.
“Democrats are likely to say he pisses off our friends, cozies up to our enemies and can’t negotiate out of a paper bag, much less ‘The Art of the Deal,’” Edelman said. If Trump secures real concessions from Kim, he added, the president “can make a plausible case that his methods are unorthodox — but he’s gotten results.”…
One Republican close to the White House argued that any implications for the president’s standing are mainly on the upside. Most Americans don’t pay attention to the details of nuclear diplomacy and are more likely to focus on a stunning success than a continued stalemate.
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