This whole thing has been a train wreck waiting to happen, John McLaughlin, the former deputy director of the C.I.A., told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell on Thursday, a couple of hours after Donald Trump abruptly called off his much ballyhooed summit with Kim Jong Un, the North Korean dictator.

McLaughlin, who served under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, was right. The aborting of the summit wasn’t a freak accident. It was a result of a number of systemic failures that have plagued the Trump Presidency in all too many areas: wishful thinking, lack of preparation, exaggerated rhetoric, disregard for detail, and a cult of personality.

That personality is Trump’s, of course. On the night of March 8th, a few days after Kim had met with South Korean officials for the first time since initiating talks, in January, the President was the one who revealed, via Twitter, that a summit was being planned. “Kim Jong Un talked about denuclearization with the South Korean Representatives, not just a freeze,” Trump said. “Also, no missile testing by North Korea during this period of time. Great progress being made but sanctions will remain until an agreement is reached.”

Precisely what sort of agreement the North Koreans might be willing to reach, and what Kim meant by “denuclearization,” Trump didn’t dwell upon. To anybody who knows the history of the issue, these are key questions. Pyongyang has been saying it supports the “denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” for decades. As far back as 1992, the North and the South signed a mutual declaration committed to this aim. But the reality has been a steadfast refusal on the part of the North to give up its nuclear program.

Under practically any other President, the U.S. response to Kim’s entreaties would have been to make encouraging statements and dispatch some lower-level experts to speak with the North Koreans and gauge what, if anything, they were really offering. Only after a good deal of staff work had been done, and—at the very least—a framework for detailed negotiations had been agreed upon, would the U.S. have agreed to a Presidential summit.

But Trump isn’t any other President. “At this point we are not even talking about negotiations,” a senior U.S. official told the Wall Street Journal on the day Trump announced that a meeting was being scheduled. Evidently, the idea was that the two leaders would hash out the details of the agreement themselves. The Journal also quoted an Administration official saying the summit meeting “was justified because Mr. Kim was the only person able to make decisions in his ‘uniquely authoritarian’ regime and that Mr. Trump was known as a dealmaker.”

For decades, Trump has exaggerated his negotiating skills as he overpaid for many properties and pushed some of them, such as the Plaza Hotel, into bankruptcy court. But in Trump’s mind, everybody, even senior national-security officials, must go along with whatever he says: that is how a cult of personality works.

In April, Trump said the summit meeting would take place “as soon as possible,” and he referred to Kim, whom he had earlier called Little Rocket Man, as “very honorable.” Around the same time, Trump secretly dispatched Mike Pompeo, a very high-level official who was then still running the C.I.A., to Pyongyang to meet with Kim. Shortly after Pompeo returned, and the existence of his mission was leaked, Trump tweeted, “Meeting went very smoothly and a good relationship was formed. Details of Summit are being worked out now. Denuclearization will be a great thing for World, but also for North Korea!”

A couple of weeks ago, Pompeo, who by then had switched jobs to become Secretary of State, made a second visit to North Korea, and Trump announced, again via Twitter, that the summit would be held in Singapore. By then, some Republicans were calling for the President to get the Nobel Peace Prize, and the White House was ordering commemorative coins featuring Trump and Kim. But to those paying attention, there were clear signs of trouble ahead.

On April 30th, John Bolton, Trump’s ultra-hawkish new national-security adviser, said the Administration was looking at “the Libya model of 2003-2004” for how North Korea might denuclearize, suggesting the process would be one-sided and rapid. At a May 7th meeting with Xi Jinping, the President of China, Kim said that North Korea and the United States should both take “phased and synchronous measures“ that would “eventually achieve denuclearization and lasting peace on the peninsula.”

From that point on, things went further downhill, until Trump was forced to accept reality. On Monday morning, he personally dictated to aides the letter to Kim cancelling the summit. (The letter used the word “I” six times, and it, too, was tweeted out.) His dream of overcoming decades of fractious history and complex geopolitics during one sitdown with Kim was just that—a dream.

In his MSNBC interview, McLaughlin suggested that the cancellation of the summit might end up being a positive development. “Now everybody can step back, take a deep breath, and do this how it is normally done—with real preparation,” he said. Given the nature of the man who heads the Trump Administration, that seems like an optimistic reading.