WASHINGTON — On Saturday, after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo finished talks with North Korean officials in Pyongyang, Kim Jong Un's foreign ministry accused the Trump administration of a “unilateral and gangster-like demand for denuclearization." It was an immediate and sharp contradiction to President Donald Trump’s rosy descriptions of his North Korea diplomacy.

The harsh statement also illustrates the risks of putting so much stock in a ceremonial summit, now that last month's meet-and-greet between Trump and Kim in Singapore is colliding with the hard-nosed reality of enormously complex nuclear negotiations.

This dissonance between fact and fancy was made clear earlier this week. After NBC News first reported that Pyongyang was in fact expanding elements of its weapons program, the president tweeted, “Many good conversations with North Korea — It is going well!” He added: “If not for me, we would now be at War with North Korea!”

On Thursday, as his secretary of state was flying to Pyongyang, the President again pointed to eight months without a missile or nuclear test by the North as proof of his success. But in fact, Pyongyang also suspended tests for a while under President Barack Obama, and promised to denuclearize. It did not keep that commitment.

All this puts even more pressure on Pompeo and his negotiating team. Hoping to get something “deliverable” during his two days of talks in Pyongyang, the secretary departed North Korea claiming to have made “progress” in talks he described as “productive.” That made the North Korean description of those talks as “deeply regrettable” only hours later even more stinging.

But in fact, the outcome of this first formal effort to test Kim Jong Un’s sincerity about denuclearizing was utterly predictable. Trump’s impulsive acceptance of the first summit between a North Korean leader and an American president was always going to be largely ceremonial. But the President’s exaggerated and frequently false claims of tangible success afterward raised the stakes impossibly high.