"We need only look at the depraved character of the North Korean regime to understand the nature of the nuclear threat it could pose to America and our allies,” Trump said in his speech.

During a visit to North Korea, Trump explained, Warmbier “was arrested and charged with crimes against the state. After a shameful trial, the dictatorship sentenced Otto to 15 years of hard labor, before returning him to America last June — horribly injured and on the verge of death. He passed away just days after his return.”

AD

AD

Trump recognized Warmbier's parents, who were in the audience.

"You are powerful witnesses to a menace that threatens our world, and your strength inspires us all,” Trump said. “Tonight, we pledge to honor Otto’s memory with American resolve.”

Warmbier was a constant in Trump’s rhetoric on North Korea. When Trump focused on North Korea during his speech to the United Nations in September, Warmbier’s fate was intertwined with the murder of Kim’s half brother at a Malaysian airport as an indicator of the “deadly abuse” of the Kim regime. The brutal treatment of Warmbier, a “young, wonderful man” in Trump’s telling, served as a metaphor for how North Korea and Kim wanted to treat the United States itself.

AD

This week, however, as Trump traveled to Vietnam to broker a sweeping, historic agreement with Kim — now his “friend,” per a tweet — Warmbier’s fate was presented in a different context.

AD

“What happened is horrible. I really believe something horrible happened to him, and I really don’t think the top leadership knew about it,” Trump said during a brief news conference. “Those prisons are rough,” he later added, “they’re rough places and bad things happened. But I really don’t believe that he was — I don’t believe he knew about it.”

Kim “felt badly about it,” Trump said. What's more: “He tells me that he didn’t know about it, and I will take him at his word.”

AD

The immediate and obvious analogy here is of Trump’s response to the murder of Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi at a Saudi Arabian consulate in Turkey in October. In that case, too, Trump decided that the guilt of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was uncertain despite the assessments of U.S. and Turkish intelligence officials.

AD

Perhaps it’s more reminiscent of Trump’s approach to Russian interference in the 2016 election. After encountering Russian President Vladimir Putin at an event in 2017, Trump said he’d asked Putin about that interference.

"Every time he sees me, he says, ‘I didn’t do that,’ " Trump later told reporters. “And I believe, I really believe, that when he tells me that, he means it.”

AD

Why such generous assessments of dubious claims by geopolitical opponents or those deeply implicated in bad activity? Because, it seems, Trump believes that his personal relationship with those leaders is the best route to getting what he wants in his interactions with them. He’s said as much. At a NATO summit last year, he framed the relationship between the United States and Russia explicitly as being about his personal relationship with Putin.

AD

"Somebody was saying, is he an enemy?” Trump said. “He’s not my enemy. Is he a friend? No, I don’t know him well enough.”

Trump’s new comments about Warmbier came in the context of his second summit with Kim, a summit where Trump clearly hoped for a dramatic diplomatic breakthrough. That motivation was likely amplified by events taking place in Washington: the interrogation of Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen by the House Oversight Committee.

AD

Cohen’s testimony was a broad condemnation of Trump in political and personal terms, a stark change from when he was, at one time, Trump’s closest defender. That shift in roles meant a shift in how Trump talked about his former ally. Trump has attacked Cohen as a rat and a liar.

At the news conference in Vietnam, Trump made that assertion again.

AD

“He lied a lot,” Trump said. “But it was very interesting, because he didn’t lie about one thing, he said no collusion with the Russian hoax. And I said I wonder why he didn’t lie about that, too, like he did about everything else.”

It’s hard to imagine a more perfect distillation of the Trump approach to reality. Everything bad Cohen said was a lie; everything useful was true. It’s precisely the approach he takes to the media broadly. Any negative reporting is fake news; any positive news — even from “fake news” outlets — is obviously accurate. Same with polling: Polls showing him doing well are from “respected” pollsters, and everything else is made up or biased.

AD

It seems like an exhausting world in which to live, one in which everything must constantly be torn down or shored up. One in which there are no permanent allies but only one permanent interest: Trump's.

AD

Cohen was useful until he wasn’t, and now he’s a liar except when he isn’t. Warmbier was useful as a demonstration of North Korea’s brutality until Trump didn’t want to highlight North Korea’s brutality. Warmbier is now an example not of the deadliness and threat of the Kim regime but instead of an apparently leaderless system in which bad things happen to good people — such as when Kim was unfairly blamed for Warmbier’s injuries.

This approach to, well, everything makes Trump fairly easy to deal with for the unscrupulous. Traditional allies expect Trump to act first as the leader of the United States but instead find hostility. But Putin, Mohammed and Kim simply build close relationships with Trump, and he steers the weight of the U.S. government away from them.