Month: February 2019

Something else to keep you up at night

by digby

I don’t know if Trump would go this far, but it is worth thinking about. I do know for sure that he will contest the results if he doesn’t win and that his rabid followers will have a full blown hissy fit. They’re already talking about civil war…

President Donald Trump’s critics are increasingly focused on the question of which Democrat will challenge him for the presidency in 2020. It’s an important question, but another one might be even more important: Regardless of who runs in 2020, if Trump loses, will he leave the Oval Office peacefully?

Let’s start with why we need to ask this question: Trump is increasingly proving himself to be a President eager to overstep his authority. Just last week, Trump displayed his willingness to invoke unprecedented presidential power to declare a national emergency utterly without justification. This week has brought a startling report from the New York Times that, for the past two years, Trump has tried to undermine the investigations by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and other parts of the Justice Department in order to, in the words of the Times, “make the president’s many legal problems go away.” In light of these overreaching assertions of his own authority, it’s at least plausible that Trump might attempt to cling to power in ways previously unimaginable by an American president.
Thankfully, there are four steps that key actors across the American system of governance can take to get ahead of this possibility.

Remember, when Trump was merely a private citizen running for President in 2016, he became the first presidential candidate in recent memory to refuse to commit that he’d honor the results of the election if he lost. Now, he occupies the Oval Office. He’s the commander in chief of the most powerful military on Earth. If he even hints at contesting the election result in 2020, as he suggested he might in 2016, he’d be doing so not as an outsider but as a leader with the vast resources of the US government potentially at his disposal. 

Trump’s unrelenting assaults on the media and intelligence community, augmented by his baseless insistence on widespread voter fraud, have laid the groundwork for him to contest the election results in worrisome ways by undermining two institutions Americans would count on to validate those results.

Defeating Amy Klobuchar could give progressive Democrats a chance for real change
As the 2018 midterms approached, Trump appeared to preview exactly such behavior. He tweeted that he was “very concerned that Russia will be fighting very hard to have an impact on the upcoming Election” and “pushing very hard for the Democrats.” Without pointing to even a shred of analysis from the intelligence community, media reports or any other sources, Trump seemed to dangle the notion that, if the elections went too badly for the Republicans, he might allege foreign interference with the vote tally to cast doubt on the validity of the results.

In 2020, with his reelection on the line, the stakes for Trump himself are, of course, wildly bigger. 

All told, there’s real reason to worry here. So, what can be done now to avoid a potential constitutional crisis and ensure that the 2020 election results — whatever they might be — are respected and that any transfer of power occurs peacefully?

While many of us worry that President Trump has fallen woefully short in addressing foreign election interference through social media that can change American voters’ minds, there’s nonetheless an obvious imperative to respect the actual vote tally unless the intelligence community indicates that malicious actors have directly altered it (which would be unprecedented). Thankfully, there are four key sets of governmental actors across the United States that can commit now to certain steps that would help to isolate President Trump should he refuse to hand over power peacefully.

First is the justifiably much-maligned Electoral College. As we were reminded in 2016, elections are not determined by popular vote but by the votes of each state’s and the District of Columbia’s electors, who are generally chosen by the political parties at state conventions or through a vote of the party’s central committee. For the sake of the rule of law and peaceful transfer of power, both parties should require anyone seeking to be one of the college’s electors to pledge that they will not withhold, delay or alter their vote based on the claims or protestations of any candidate, including President Trump. 

Second is Congress. It’s the outgoing Congress that, in January 2021, will meet in joint session to receive the Electoral College’s handiwork and count the electoral votes. Thereafter, the President of the Senate will formally announce the election’s result. Unlike the electors, who haven’t been selected as of this writing, we already know who will be serving in Congress that day (with the exception of any resignations, deaths or other unusual occurrences). These senators and representatives should make a joint pledge not to delay or alter counting of the votes based on any candidate’s objections. Moreover, they should pledge to hold public hearings with intelligence community leaders should those officials or any candidate suggest that vote counts were influenced by foreign election interference or for any other reason. That unvarnished testimony by intelligence professionals could debunk any claims by Trump (or any other candidate) that the final vote count shouldn’t be honored.

Third, 39 of America’s 50 state governors will not be up for reelection in 2020. They represent continuity in critical positions of leadership, and some command respect across party lines. Those 39 should band together now to make clear that they will serve, at least informally, as bastions of our democracy should a peaceful transfer of power look threatened by any candidate’s response to the election. Especially because most, if not all, are sure to support one candidate or the other, they hold great power to urge respect for the election’s results, regardless of who wins. Think here of the example set by former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas after the December 2017 special election for a Senate seat in Alabama. When Republican candidate Roy Moore initially appeared intent on baselessly contesting the election results, Huckabee, a Republican stalwart, issued a sharply worded rebuke to Moore. Moore soon acknowledged defeat.

Fourth, our civilian and uniformed Defense Department leaders have a role to play. The health of our democracy rests, in part, on not involving the military in transfers of power. And that should continue. But imagine the most extreme scenario, with Congress certifying Trump’s defeat but Trump refusing to leave office. In those circumstances, the military would no longer owe its loyalty to Donald Trump as of noon on January 20, 2021. And it’s worth asking the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as they testify before Congress in coming months, to affirm that they understand that and would act consistently with it.

These are dire thoughts. But we live in uncertain and worrying times. Perhaps, in 2016, Donald Trump never really intended to contest a loss at the ballot box. Still, having seen him in action as President, it’s surely best, as we hurtle toward 2020, to be prepared in case President Trump makes good on his threats from 2016 — now with far more power at his disposal.

This is extreme. But it says something that people are actually thinking about this. It’s isn’t really that farfetched.

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The best piece you will read about the Green New Deal

by digby

… is this one by David Roberts at Vox

Earlier this month, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) introduced a Green New Deal resolution laying out an ambitious set of goals and principles aimed at transforming and decarbonizing the US economy.

The release prompted a great deal of smart, insightful writing, but also a lot of knee-jerk and predictable cant. Conservatives called it socialist. Moderates called it extreme. Pundits called it unrealistic. Wonks scolded it over this or that omission. Political gossip columnists obsessed over missteps in the rollout.

What ties the latter reactions together, from my perspective, is that they seem oblivious to the historical moment, like thespians acting out an old, familiar play even as the theater goes up in flames around them.

To put it bluntly: this is not normal. We are not in an era of normal politics. There is no precedent for the climate crisis, its dangers or its opportunities. Above all, it calls for courage and fresh thinking.

Rather than jumping into individual responses, I want to take a step back and try to situate the Green New Deal in our current historical context, at least as I see it. Then it will be clearer why I think so many critics have missed the mark.

The context, part one: this is a fucking emergency

The earth’s climate has already warmed 1 degree Celsius from preindustrial levels and it is exacerbating a cascade of heat waves, wildfires, hurricanes, storms, water shortages, migrations, and conflicts. Climate change is not a threat; it’s here. The climate has changed.

And it is changing more rapidly than at any time in millions of years. The human race is leaving behind the climatic conditions in which all of advanced civilization developed, going back to the beginning of agriculture. We have no certainty about what will happen next, mainly because we have no certainty about what we will do, but we know the changes are bad and going to get much worse, even with concerted global action.

Without concerted global action — and with a few bad breaks on climate sensitivity, population, and fossil fuel projections — the worst-case scenarios include civilization-threatening consequences that will be utterly disastrous for most of the planet’s species.

At the moment, nobody is doing a better job of describing the tragic unfolding reality of climate change than author David Wallace-Wells, especially in his new book The Uninhabitable Earth, but also in this New York Times piece. Here’s just a paragraph of coming attractions:

As temperatures rise, this could mean many of the biggest cities in the Middle East and South Asia would become lethally hot in summer, perhaps as soon as 2050. There would be ice-free summers in the Arctic and the unstoppable disintegration of the West Antarctic’s ice sheet, which some scientists believe has already begun, threatening the world’s coastal cities with inundation. Coral reefs would mostly disappear. And there would be tens of millions of climate refugees, perhaps many more, fleeing droughts, flooding and extreme heat, and the possibility of multiple climate-driven natural disasters striking simultaneously.

All of that is expected when the global average temperature rises 2 degrees Celsius.EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

New EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler recently dismissed the latest IPCC report as being based on a “worst-case scenario,” which is darkly ironic, since the report is all about the dangers that lie between 1.5 and 2 degrees of warming.

But 2 degrees is not the worst-case scenario. It is among the best-case scenarios. The UN thinks we’re headed for somewhere around 4 degrees by 2100. Believing that we can limit temperature rise to 2 degrees — a level of warming scientists view as catastrophic — now counts as wild-haired optimism, requiring heroic assumptions about technology development and political transformation.

The best-case scenario is very, very bad. And it gets much worse from there. From Wallace-Wells’ book:

Two degrees would be terrible, but it’s better than three, at which point Southern Europe would be in permanent drought, African droughts would last five years on average, and the areas burned annually by wildfires in the United States could quadruple, or worse, from last year’s million-plus acres. And three degrees is much better than four, at which point six natural disasters could strike a single community simultaneously; the number of climate refugees, already in the millions, could grow tenfold, or 20-fold, or more; and, globally, damages from warming could reach $600 trillion — about double all the wealth that exists in the world today.

The worst-case scenario, which, contra Wheeler, is virtually never discussed in polite political circles in the US, is, as Wallace-Wells quotes famed naturalist David Attenborough saying, “the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world.”

That is alarming and, if you must, “alarmist,” but as Wallace-Wells says, “being alarmed is not a sign of being hysterical; when it comes to climate change, being alarmed is what the facts demand.”

The status quo — continuing along the same trajectory, doing the same things — leads to disaster on a scale that is genuinely difficult to comprehend, involving the fate of our species and thousands of others over centuries to come. (Remember, just because our models tend to stop at 2100 doesn’t mean warming will stop then. It will just get worse.)

Click over and read the whole thing. He points out that the other emergency is our dysfunctional political system — and I would argue, the rest of the world’s political systems as well. Houston, we have a problem and there’s no time to waste.

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The dumbest president in world history

by digby

To think we were told that this moron was a brilliant businessman:

An exasperated Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. trade representative, tried to gently educate his boss, Donald Trump, on the meaning of a “memorandum of understanding” in the Oval Office on Friday, leading to a presidential lecture in front of television cameras and a top Chinese official.

The exchange between the president and his top trade negotiator unfolded Friday when the president was asked during a meeting with a Chinese trade delegation about how long so-called memorandums of understanding would last in an eventual accord with Beijing. Negotiators have been drafting MOUs on areas such as agriculture, non-tariff barriers, services, technology transfer, currency and intellectual property as the two nations work toward a deal.

Trump told gathered reporters that the memorandums would “be very short term. I don’t like MOUs because they don’t mean anything. To me, they don’t mean anything.”

Lighthizer then jumped in to defend the strategy, with Trump looking on. “An MOU is a binding agreement between two people,” he said. “It’s detailed. It covers everything in great detail. It’s a legal term. It’s a contract.”

But the president, unswayed, fired back at Lighthizer. “By the way I disagree,” Trump said.

The top Chinese negotiator, Vice Premier Liu He, laughed out loud.

“The real question is, Bob,” Trump said, “how long will it take to put that into a final binding contract?”

The exchange marked the latest instance in which Trump tried to reshape the branding of a major trade agreement during high-stakes negotiations. Last year, he persuaded leaders from Canada and Mexico to change the name of the North America Free Trade Agreement, known as Nafta, to the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA. Trump said the prior agreement carried the baggage of closed factories, while his new acronym evoked the U.S. Marine Corps.

Derek Scissors, a China expert at the American Enterprise Institute, said that Lighthizer is in a bind because he wants China to treat a deal with the U.S. as binding even though it’s not.

“The Trump administration originally chose MOUs because no truly binding agreement can be made on the exchange rate or large future purchases of corn, much less technology coercion China denies has ever happened,” he said. “If the administration switches to calling it a binding trade agreement, members of Congress will want to vote on it. If they don’t get to, this looks exactly like Obama not wanting Congress to vote on the Iran nuclear deal.”

But in Friday’s debate over memorandums of understanding on Friday, Lighthizer eventually deferred to his boss.

“From now on we’re not using the word memorandum of understanding anymore. We’re going to use the term trade agreement,” Lighthizer told reporters. “We’ll have the same document. It’s going to be called a trade agreement.”

He then turned to Liu to ask if the Chinese would accommodate the new terminology, winning a nod from the Chinese leader.

“Good, I like that term much better,” Trump said, before again complaining that memorandums of understanding were not that meaningful.

“We’ll never use that word again!” Lighthizer responded.

As Trump turned to take another question from reporters, Lighthizer whispered to Liu about not calling the agreements an MOU.

If this idiot hadn’t inherited all that money from his father, he’d be selling knock-off watches at flea markets.

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Finding our spines
by Tom Sullivan

After a long Friday evening of waiting for Robert Mueller to drop his anticipated sentencing memo on Paul Manafort, even the estimable Marcy Wheeler threw in the towel.

GNight folks. I have a meeting in the AM.

We know Paulie is a very bad dude. Don't need a memo for that.— emptywheel (@emptywheel) February 23, 2019

We have spent 21 months anticipating release of the Mueller Investigation’s findings, still due to drop. Some of that waiting is strategic. Needing a Democratic majority in the U.S. House to wield investigative powers, for example. Or to maximize the chances of ending this administration at one term, waiting to act until we see the whites of his eye sockets.

Dahlia Lithwick highlights the failure inherent in our “waiting for Mueller” before taking action to stop the sitting president. Indeed, we have seen a string of former administration officials content to enable this administration while working for the White House suddenly grow spines once it is time to write tell-all books and hit the talk-show circuit.

“The prevailing ethos seems to be that so long as there is somebody else out there who is capable of Doing Something, the rest of us are free to desist,” Lithwick writes. “And for the most part, the person deemed to be Doing Something is Robert Mueller.”

Diagram: Andrew Witherspoon/Axios.

It is not as if Mueller is going to tell us (in general terms anyway) something we do not already know about Donald Trump and his 40 Thieves. This is an administration awash in scandal and led by a crime family. In addition to the guilty pleas and indictments Mueller has already secured, Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr. are at risk of indictment. The Trump Organization itself is under investigation by the state of New York and federal prosecutors from the Southern District of New York.

Sure, we anticipate reading all the gory details that still remain hidden. But, Lithwick cautions, what has enabled the Trump administration to remain operating at “levels of corruption, conflict of interest, and untruth” without parallel, and at peril to the republic, is our sense that so long as Mueller is doing his part, we do not have to do ours:

This very human hope that Mueller will package up the case for legal action is perhaps most troubling because Mueller’s report won’t be an action plan; it will be a set of facts that then need to be acted upon. But as the series of lawsuits filed to question the constitutionality of the president’s patently pretextual declaration of a national emergency at the border make clear, each of the two remaining branches of government with constitutional obligations to act as checks on an out-of-control president may themselves continue to follow the script they’ve relied on throughout this presidency—and instead opt to avail themselves of their constitutional prerogative to do absolutely nothing. A Republican-controlled Senate may remain supine. A Supreme Court may issue abstract rulings about executive power.

We want Mueller to be both the guy who knows everything and the guy who does everything. It obviates anyone else from needing to know what we already know and do what needs doing. But going into the next few fateful days, my sense is that we might want to stop investing too much hope in great men, and superheroes, and saviors. Instead, we should remember that it is our job to insist that we, and our public officials, must be the Muellers we hope to see in the world.

To paraphrase Marcy, we know Donny is a very bad dude. Don’t need a report for that. We just need spines for doing something about it.

Friday Night Soother

by digby

Dedicated Gorilla keepers at Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens have spent the last four months preparing baby Gandai for the time she can rejoin her mother, Kumbuka, and the rest of their Western Lowland Gorilla troop.

Kumbuka gave birth to little Gandai on September 28. Although Kumbuka’s initial maternal behavior toward the baby was perfect and normal, keepers noticed the new mother was cradling and carrying her youngster improperly—similarly to the way that she behaved when she lost two previous offspring at another zoo.

It is theorized that Kumbuka’s hearing disability may prevent her from detecting when her youngsters are in distress. The extremely difficult decision was made to remove Kumbuka’s baby for short-term assisted rearing by Gorilla care staff.

Before the infant can be reintroduced, she needs to achieve specific milestones including walking, taking a bottle through mesh, the ability to hold on when being carried, and various developmental criteria. Keepers are proud to say Gandai has been making great strides in reaching these goals.

Gandai’s keepers have taken turns providing around-the-clock care since the decision was made to remove her from the troop. While assistance-rearing the young Gorilla, keepers have not just cared for Gandai like a mother would, but they have also focused on getting her to a point where she can return to her real mother. Keepers report that it has been both a demanding and rewarding journey.

Oh look he’s punishing his friends too

by digby

You have to wonder how much more of this winning they can take:

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem said Friday that President Donald Trump’s trade wars have “devastated” her state, and though she agreed that countries like China were not following fair trade practices, she urged the Trump administration to quickly wrap up its trade talks there.

“South Dakota has been devastated by the trade wars that are going on,” Noem said at POLITICO’s State Solutions Conference, noting that agriculture is “by far” the largest industry in the state. The Republican governor warned that the trade woes of farmers can trickle down to the rest of the state, impacting “every main street business, everybody that has another entity out there that relies on a successful ag industry.”

President Donald Trump has engaged in a tit-for-tat war with U.S. trade partners like China and the European Union, which have levied retaliatory tariffs on major U.S. commodities like soybeans and wheat. The White House has been in talks with China for months over the issue, and faces a self-imposed deadline of next Friday to reach an agreement before tariff rates increase drastically.

Noem allowed that countries like China had engaged in unfair trade practices and said she realized the Trump administration “is trying to rectify that,” but said the clash had gone on too long.

“I have consistently been an advocate for wrapping up these trade discussions and making sure we’re getting access to better markets,” she said Friday, adding that “I think the administration wants to do this, we have been treated unfairly in the past, and they recognize that and want to have better trade agreements.”

The former congresswoman said that she has spoken to the White House in recent days and plans to engage them on the issue again while she’s in town for the Republican Governors Association winter meeting this week.

“The problem is that this has gone on now for a long period of time,” she said. “And farmers are used to risk, they’re used to prices going up and down and having that, but this sustained low commodity prices, frankly, is driving a lot of family businesses out of business. That is why we need to have some serious consideration for wrapping this up quickly.”

Yeah, that’ll happen.

According to Morning Consult polling, he has a 51-45 approval rating in South Dakota at this time. God knows why. But that’s down from 54-31 percent in 2017.

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“It’s going to be total war. And as I say to my friends, I do two things – I vote and I buy guns”

by digby

The Daily Beast reports:

Nearly three years after hacked materials upended the 2016 presidential campaign, every Democratic candidate running for the White House has pledged not to knowingly use such material should they end up being published during the current election cycle. 

Only one 2020 campaign declined to make such a commitment: President Donald Trump’s.

Surprise! He will be following the Russian playbook down the line. Again:

One presidential candidate is following the Democratic primary fight far closer than you might imagine. His name is Donald J. Trump.

Inside the White House, the President is watching announcement rallies, tuning into televised town hall sessions with voters and listening carefully to commentary on the Democratic presidential race. His opinions fluctuate on who he will, or would like to, run against. But one sentiment is unwavering — he has no plans to sit idly by and watch.

The President intends to play an active role in the Democratic primary and has instructed his aides to look for ways he can, according to more than a dozen Republicans involved in his campaign. His team is working to sow divisions among rivals and looking for opportunities to “cause chaos from the left and right,” in the words of one adviser.

He doesn’t have a clue how to govern but he does know how to insult people. So he’s going where his talents lie.

but it is striking that he’s fully planning to follow the 2016 Russia interference strategy, probably with their help once again.

And keep in mind that Russia has a back-up plan in case he loses. They will help him with his inevitable charge that the election was stolen and help him incite his base to violence.

I would bet money that that is on the agenda. They’re already gearing up:

JOE DIGENOVA (GUEST): We are in a civil war in this country. There’s two standards of justice, one for Democrats one for Republicans. The press is all Democrat, all liberal, all progressive, all left – they hate Republicans, they hate Trump. So the suggestion that there’s ever going to be civil discourse in this country for the foreseeable future in this country is over. It’s not going to be. It’s going to be total war. And as I say to my friends, I do two things – I vote and I buy guns.

That’s one of the high profile DC lawyers Trump interviewed to represent him.

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I gotcher socialist hellhole for you, right here

Bring it Trumpie.

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The Trump family brand is toxic

by digby

No one wants to be associated with his name:

On Election Day 2016, six residential buildings called “Trump Place” stood in a row on Manhattan’s Upper West Side — a legacy of Donald Trump’s efforts to develop that site, and a sign of the Trump name’s enduring value in New York.

Soon, Trump’s name will be gone from all of them.

On Friday, the last building holding on to the name “Trump Place” announced that it would take down the president’s name, according to an email obtained by The Washington Post.

That email, sent out by the condo board at 220 Riverside Boulevard, said that it had held a vote of building owners, and that owners representing 83 percent of the building had cast votes.

“Of the 83 percent [that] voted, 74.7 percent voted to remove the signage, and 25.3 percent voted not to remove the signage,” the email said.

“Over the next several weeks, we will select a company to carry out the required work” of removing the signs, the board said.

This decision will not cost the Trump Organization any money. The condo board said that the president’s company still holds a contract to manage the building, and the contract was not affected by the removal of the sign.

The Trump Organization “continues to do an outstanding job in ensuring the financial and operational well being of the condominium,” the board’s email said.

Just one day earlier, the condo board at the second-to-last Trump Place building — at 120 Riverside — had announced its own decision to remove the president’s name from the building facade.

These decisions signal how Trump’s politics has become a weight on his brand in some of the foreign countries and liberal U.S. cities, particularly Manhattan, the city that gave him his start. At both of these buildings, residents were willing to spendmoney to remove any trace of Trump’s name from their facades.

The one upside to all this horror for the country and the world is that Trump has ruined his so-called “high end” brand. And their great idea to move into Trump country to make money from the Trumpies hasn’t panned out either. Of course, the boys were in charge so …

In the early months of the Trump administration, with the president no longer running his family business, his eldest sons embarked on a plan to roll out two new hotel lines in dozens of American cities. It reflected the ambitions of “the next generation of the company,” President Trump’s son Eric said at the time.

Now, in a striking reversal, the Trump Organization is no longer pursuing the signature initiative, according to company officials.

Plans for the two hotel chains, Scion and American Idea, are to be shelved indefinitely, most likely for the remainder of the presidency. As a practical matter, that means calling off just one agreement, in Mississippi, though two years ago the Trump Organization said it had as many as 30 potential deals in the pipeline.

They lie. But you knew that.

I’d revealedey are having some problems finding partners. After all, it’s been refealed they are total con-artists who stiff everyone they work with. And then there are the legal problems:

The retrenchment comes as the company faces growing scrutiny from federal prosecutors and congressional investigators, and as a former employee, Michael D. Cohen, heads to prison for multiple crimes. With Democrats now in control of the House of Representatives, any new hotel deals could have provided investigative fodder for critics of the president.

“We live in a climate where everything will be used against us, whether by the fake news or by Democrats who are only interested in presidential harassment and wasting everyone’s time, barraging us with nonsense letters,” Eric Trump said in a statement. “We already have the greatest properties in the world and if we have to slow down our growth for the time being, we are happy to do it.”

Just like his daddy. Whine, whine, whine.

Trump destroyed his “brand” in order to stroke his own ego and run for president. If he’d have kept quiet he might have been able to keep parlaying his tabloid celebrity into a real inheritance for his heirs. But that’s over. This is going to come crashing down on all of them regardless of how the presidency ends. His brand is toxic.

I suppose they’ll be able to sell some MAGA hats at flea markets …

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Kim has got his number

by digby

Kim Jong Un understands that the best way to dupe the President of the United States is to get him alone:

Ever since he met Kim Jong Un in Singapore last year, President Donald Trump has shown a tendency the North Korean leader is sure to try and exploit: making unexpected concessions in one-on-one meetings.

There was the December phone call with Turkey’s president, when Trump surprised his own aides — and prompted Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’s resignation — by suddenly agreeing to pull troops out of Syria. And last year’s joint press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin, when Trump all but dismissed his own intelligence community’s findings on Russian hacking of the 2016 election.

Heading into next week’s summit with Kim in Hanoi, the president’s top advisers will seek to ensure no last-minute giveaways happen this time around. But for North Korea, the president’s habit of making concessions on the fly presents an opportunity that’s likely to lead negotiators from Pyongyang to disregard the president’s staff to focus on what he might offer.

“They do look to get President Trump in a room and see what they might get out of him,” said Christopher Hill, the North Korea negotiator under President George W. Bush. “If Singapore is any indication, the president seeks to want to negotiate everything himself.”

When the two leaders met last June in Singapore, Trump accepted a vaguely worded statement about “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” In exchange, he had already given Kim a priceless public relations victory just by agreeing to talks. Trump also extended a suspension of major joint military exercises with South Korea, even adopting North Korea’s terminology on those drills — calling them “war games” and “provocative.”

Kim and his team seem to be betting on a repeat. A senior Trump administration official, who asked not to be identified discussing internal deliberations, said North Korean officials have so far given little away in their meetings with the top U.S. envoy for the talks, Stephen Biegun. The official said the fear is that Kim will make an offer to Trump that sounds good at the moment, inspiring the president to sacrifice something in return that goes too far.

Those fears have largely focused on the fate of about 30,000 U.S troops stationed in South Korea. Kim could seek to exploit Trump’s own professed distaste for overseas deployments to extract a commitment to withdraw some or all of them as part of a deal to secure a peace agreement.

The U.S. and South Korea recently concluded weeks of bruising negotiations that got President Moon Jae-in’s government to increase its payments for hosting American troops, but Trump and his team have indicated they want Seoul to do more.

“I could see Kim saying, ‘South Korea is reluctant to pay for the troops so why don’t you withdraw them?”’ said David Maxwell, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former special forces colonel in South Korea. “It’s most important we disabuse him of that notion that he can make a deal without the working-level foundation.”

Observers such as Maxwell point to a range of evidence to suggest this is North Korea’s strategy. They cite a refusal to meet with Biegun for months after he was named the lead U.S. negotiator in August 2018.

Biegun got his first formal meetings in January, and complex talks on an agreement from the summit got underway only recently, just a few weeks before Trump and Kim meet. And while the window to achieve anything of substance is short, that didn’t stop the president from agreeing to a second summit where pressure will be high to move beyond the vague agreements from Singapore.

To be sure, ever since his early real estate days, the president has believed he’s the best negotiator in any room, and the intimacy of a one-on-one chat is often where he thinks he can get the best deal. Trump has said he and Kim “fell in love” last year and that North Korea has enormous economic potential under Kim.

He thinks everything in the world is a cable news show a cheap licensing contract or a real estate deal.  It’s all he knows.

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