What's the difference?

What’s a poor President to do? Let’s take the man at face value, for once, when he says he wants to meet with our country’s sworn enemies in an attempt to forge a lasting peace that will keep us all safer—and what does the press have to say about it?

The President, they say, flabbergasted, “likes talking to dictators!”

“He would meet with some of these madmen without preconditions!” they say, apoplectic.

He is “bowing and scraping before dictators.”

“All he wants is to get them back to the table—not ‘if you give up nuclear weapons, then we’ll talk.’” The fool!

The big question they want answered: “Why would he think that these are people he can negotiate with?”

Once the meeting actually happened, though, the press changed their tune: The meeting, they now said, was “A remarkable turnaround in relations between two historic adversaries.”

“The commander-in-chief’s leadership is leading to a major foreign-policy breakethrough,” they said, with confidence.

The President, the pundits now tut-tutted, “proved the experts wrong again and scored a stunning diplomatic triumph.”

“It’s breathtaking, it’s audacious, it’s bold—it will be historic,” another crowed. “He is so charming—I think this can only work out well.”

What happened to make the press suddenly change their tune lock, stock, and barrel?

The answer is simple: A change in Presidents.

All of the above quotes are from Fox News pundits. The only difference is that the first group are about President Obama, when he dared say that he’d meet with our enemies without preconditions. The second group are about Trump, after he met with the murderous dictator Kim Jong Un of North Korea—without preconditions.

The other difference? Obama—without actually meeting with Iran—got Iran to sign a comprehensive, ironclad agreement with tons of concessions to American interests. (Trump, the self-proclaimed world’s greatest dealmaker, withdrew from that agreement earlier this year.) What did President Dealmaker get from North Korea?

Nothing. Wait—that’s not fair. Less than nothing. Kim Jong Un scored a victory before even shaking hands with Trump: The mere fact of the leader of the most powerful country on Earth agreeing to fly to the other side of the world to meet on equal footing with a tin-pot dictator who starves his own people, assassinates his own family members, and presides over a destitute populace (North Koreans bring home, on average, the equivalent of just over $1,000 per year).

Oh—and Trump also agreed to keep the tricky matter of human rights out of any negotiations. Another enormous victory for the North Korean regime, which doesn’t allow free speech, incarcerates its political opponents without trial, and routinely submits prisoners to brutal abuse, torture, executions and human experimentation. Putting human rights on the negotiating table to be bargained with might seem cynical—but it’s the only way you get idiot strongmen like Kim Jong Il t make even the semblance of an attempt at joining the rest of the civilized world.

The Great Negotiator’s one great negotiation during this meeting? Trump agreed that the United States would stop our joint military exercises—he called them “war games,” which is what people generally call the military exercises of their enemies—with South Korea. And what did he—we—get from North Korea in return?

Absolutely nothing. Zero. Zilch. Nada.

How do we know that Trump made this concession? Why, from Chinese-run state media, of course: Kim Jong Un—or something close to him—apparently leaked the news from the top-secret negotiations as they happened, in real time, to North Korea’s main benefactor: China. When Trump got around to telling our own media about this improbable, idiotic concession of his, his right-hand man Mike Pence immediately began running around to the Republican heavyweights on Capitol Hill, promising them that his big boss man actually didn’t mean anything he said about this.

One final note: Where did Trump come up with this brilliant idea of unilaterally offering to cancel longstanding American military exercises with an important and strategic ally in exchange for, well. . . nothing? As the conservative Wall Street Journal reports, this idea was first presented to Trump last year—by none other than Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Funny coincidence—isn’t it?