Reihan Salam:

Well, I think it's helpful to take some perspective.

Consider President Trump's meeting with Kim Jong-un of North Korea. Kim Jong-un is an absolutely brutal, awful dictator. Donald Trump had very warm words for him.

Some weeks later, Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, then met with the North Korean regime. And then the North Korean regime responded by saying, they're making gangster-like demands, they're taking this much more hard-line position.

Donald Trump, when it comes to offering warm words for authoritarian leaders, does a lot, goes a long way in ways that other Republicans feel makes them very uncomfortable. But he is a minority of one in his own administration when it comes to those warm words. And when it comes to actual substance, you see a much tougher line.

If you look at Pompeo, if you look at Jim Mattis, if you look at John Bolton, these are all people who have taken a consistently hawkish line.

And the president himself, he reversed himself. Again, that's quite unusual, for him to have reversed himself so quickly, because Republicans were foursquare behind this idea that, no, in fact, they also — Republicans in Congress passed legislation, bipartisan legislation, keep in mind, that says that they can impose sanctions that the president of the United States can't reverse.

That is legislation that Donald Trump signed in 2017. So that's important background to keep in mind.