The Daily Fuckup

President Donald Trump spent most of the previous week acting as if the North Korea summit was finished before it ever began. Then, on June 1, he brought it back from the dead. After meeting at the White House with a senior North Korean envoy and receiving a letter from Kim Jong Un, Trump announced that the planned June 12 summit in Singapore would still go forward after all. The reversal came less than a week after he had canceled the meeting, saying Pyongyang had shown “tremendous anger and open hostility.” In a foreign-policy process already defined by abrupt turns, the sudden return of the summit turned the administration’s diplomacy into another episode of public improvisation.

The whiplash was extraordinary even by the standards of this White House. For weeks, officials had talked up the Singapore meeting as a historic opening, suggesting the two leaders might finally begin a serious effort to reduce nuclear tensions on the Korean Peninsula. Then the atmosphere darkened as the two sides traded sharp statements and doubts piled up about whether the talks would happen at all. Trump’s cancellation on May 24 appeared to slam the door shut, leaving allies, negotiators, and even some of the president’s own aides scrambling to understand whether the summit had truly been abandoned or merely put on hold. In the days that followed, however, U.S. officials were once again in summit-planning talks, including discussions with North Korean representatives at Panmunjom, and Trump’s tone shifted from dismissal back toward cautious optimism. The result was not a clean diplomatic strategy so much as a volatile cycle of promise, rupture, and restoration. Even if the eventual meeting produced something useful, the path to it made the whole process look fragile and improvised.

That matters because the North Korea summit was never just about a date on the calendar. It was supposed to be a test of whether Trump’s direct-engagement style could unlock progress where previous administrations had failed, and whether Kim Jong Un would accept a different kind of relationship with Washington. There is a reasonable case for trying diplomacy even after months of threatening rhetoric, especially if the alternative is continued escalation and the risk of miscalculation. But the administration’s handling of the process repeatedly undercut the idea that it had a clear plan. By elevating expectations and then suddenly canceling the summit, Trump created a crisis of his own making. By reviving the meeting so quickly and with relatively little explanation, he left the impression that the White House was reacting to events rather than controlling them. The president seemed eager to claim that pressure had worked, but the optics suggested volatility more than leverage, and those are not the same thing. If the administration wanted the summit to look like a disciplined diplomatic opening, it went out of its way to make it look like a roller coaster.

The confusion also reverberated far beyond Washington. South Korean officials were left trying to keep pace with a process that seemed to change almost by the day, while allies elsewhere had to rethink what it meant when the United States could declare a summit off one week and back on the next. That uncertainty mattered because diplomacy with North Korea depends heavily on signaling, coordination, and trust among the countries most directly affected. Critics of Trump’s foreign-policy style have long argued that his improvisational instincts create needless uncertainty, and the North Korea episode gave that argument a vivid case study. Even people who supported the basic idea of talking to Kim had reason to worry about the administration’s execution, which often looked amateurish and reactive. At minimum, the June 1 reversal showed that diplomacy under Trump could hinge on theatrics as much as substance. At worst, it suggested that the president was using a nuclear standoff as a stage for crisis management, with everyone else forced to respond in real time while trying to guess what came next.

That leaves the White House in a familiar and uncomfortable position. If the summit goes forward and produces some kind of breakthrough, Trump will almost certainly present the last week’s chaos as proof that his pressure tactics worked and that his willingness to walk away forced Kim back to the table. If the meeting fails, he will face obvious questions about why he canceled it in the first place and why he brought it back without making clear what had changed. Either way, the administration has made it difficult to separate diplomacy from spectacle. Trump wants the credit that comes with a historic opening, but he keeps reaching for it through abrupt reversals that unsettle allies and confuse the public. The June 1 announcement may have reopened the door to talks, but it did not erase the sense that the route to Singapore had become a self-inflicted mess. For a president who likes to cast himself as a master negotiator, that is a risky way to set the table.