Illustration by João Fazenda

Shortly after Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un arrived in Hanoi last week, they met for what the White House characterized as a “social dinner,” an effortful display of fellowship between the leaders of the United States and North Korea. Trump asked, of no one in particular, “Everybody having a good time?” Kim gave a guarded smile. Trump then singled out a photographer and said, “Make us look very good tonight, please.” On the value of appearances, Trump and Kim see eye to eye. Even more than most world leaders, they revel in the arts of political theatre. Both know the importance of an adoring crowd and a generous camera angle. Both know how to rage and bait, how to make your opponent doubt your sanity, and, when it serves your interest, how to flip your fury into fawning attention. Both know the effect of a grand gesture, and, ultimately, that is what brought them together.

Less than eighteen months had passed since Trump taunted “Little Rocket Man” with “fire and fury,” and Kim threatened to retaliate against the “deranged U.S. dotard.” Each man had since concluded that the other might be craving a deal, and, in June, on a stage in Singapore, they made history, becoming the first leaders of the two countries to shake hands. Afterward, Trump tweeted, “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.” Of Kim, he told a crowd, “We fell in love.”

“I play to people’s fantasies,” Trump said, in “The Art of the Deal,” and when he and Kim reunited in Hanoi he kept up his patter about their “fantastic success.” Even before they sat down to negotiate, the White House had scheduled a signing ceremony for a “joint agreement,” fuelling talk of a breakthrough that might involve a declaration of peace and an economic infusion for North Korea in exchange for a reduction in its nuclear ambitions. But it soon became clear that the joint agreement was a hollow promise. There was no deal. The two sides could camouflage their disagreements for only so long. Kim wanted relief from the international sanctions that have severely hampered North Korea’s ability to import goods and to generate cash. Trump could not say yes. If he gutted the sanctions, he would be denounced not only by critics at home but also by the nations that have joined the United States in the sanctions regime. Trump abruptly announced that he was leaving early. “Sometimes you have to walk,” he said.

This was not simply a failure of negotiation—Trump had ignored reality at every turn. In January, when his own intelligence chiefs testified on Capitol Hill that North Korea had no intention of giving up its weapons, Trump tweeted, “Progress being made—big difference!” But, by last week, the two sides had not even agreed on a definition of the key word under discussion: “denuclearization.” (Pyongyang contends that denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula requires the removal of U.S. forces from South Korea, a step that neither Washington nor Seoul is willing to accept.) Trump’s distortion of reality produced an especially shameful moment when he was asked if he had spoken with Kim about the case of Otto Warmbier, the American college student who died after seventeen months in North Korean custody. “He tells me that he didn’t know about it,” Trump said. “And I will take him at his word.”

Trump is right to seek an end to seventy years of hostility, but his strategy—shallow, proud, and historically illiterate—has imperilled that prospect. What happens now? One of the few people with both a deep knowledge of Kim’s world and the freedom to speak about it is Thae Yong Ho, a diplomat who fled North Korea in 2016 and is the country’s most senior defector in two decades. With no path to relieving sanctions, Kim “could do anything,” Thae told the Times recently. “In order to survive, he may sell his nuclear technology.” Defectors have the unique ability to dismantle lies that they once helped to perpetuate. As a diplomat, Thae hailed North Korea as the “people’s paradise”; he now endorses the view of the U.S. intelligence chiefs that, for all Trump’s flattery, Kim will not give up his weapons. “The North Korean people do not now believe in North Korea’s system and ideology,” Thae said. “So he needs nuclear weapons to justify all of North Korea’s current problems.”

Defectors are especially unnerving to a leader who relies on mythmaking. In this, Kim and Trump share a predicament. Before sunrise on Wednesday, Trump tweeted, “Michael Cohen was one of many lawyers who represented me (unfortunately). . . . He is lying in order to reduce his prison time.” It will take more than tweets, though, to stem the damage done by the most dramatic excoriation of a sitting President in four decades. Testifying that day before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, Cohen said, of the President, “He is a racist. He is a con man. He is a cheat.”

For the next six astonishing hours, the man who once said that he would “take a bullet” for Trump described a decade of manipulating reality: rigging online polls, burying Trump’s grades and test scores, threatening people on his behalf “probably” five hundred times. Some of Cohen’s allegations—that Trump deceived a bank and the Internal Revenue Service; that he oversaw a hush payment to an adult-film star—if true, may worsen the President’s legal problems. Cohen knew that many people would discount the words of someone on his way to prison for, among other offenses, having lied to Congress, so he ended his testimony with a message aimed directly at his fellow-citizens. “My loyalty to Mr. Trump has cost me everything—my family’s happiness, friendships, my law license, my company, my livelihood, my honor, my reputation, and, soon, my freedom,” he said. “I pray the country doesn’t make the same mistakes I have made.”

Cohen’s revelations, like Trump’s failed diplomacy, exposed the limits of the President’s power to muscle reality into submission. Days before the summit, Thae predicted that, above all, Kim would indulge Trump’s fantasy of a friendship, because doing so advances North Korea’s aim to eventually “drive U.S. forces from South Korea.” Indeed, after the collapse of the talks, Kim’s aides gently disputed Trump’s account of them, saying that they had sought only partial sanctions relief, but, for the moment, they played down their differences. Others could not. In a statement released after Trump landed in Washington, Fred and Cindy Warmbier, Otto’s parents, said, “Kim and his evil regime are responsible for unimaginable cruelty and inhumanity. No excuses or lavish praise can change that.” And no political theatre can mask it forever. ♦