One of the only big disappointments for the Democratic Party in the 2018 midterm elections was the defeat of a promising candidate for Congress named Amy McGrath, a Naval Academy grad and former Marine Corps fighter pilot, in Mitch McConnell's home congressional district in central Kentucky. For sure, there were a number of demographic explanations for McGrath's loss, and it is possible that, in the giddy blue-wave-now run-up to November's balloting, McGrath's chances were more than a bit inflated.

But there was another issue that bedeviled her campaign against Republican Andy Barr. Barr married himself to the issue of Otto Warmbier, the American college student who died in 2017 after a year of being mistreated in a prison in North Korea. To be fair, Barr followed through on his campaign's relentless flogging of the Warmbier situation by introducing and getting passed a tough regime of sanctions that he called the Otto Warmbier North Korea Nuclear Sanctions Act.

Warmbier in captivity Xinhua News Agency Getty Images

This all came to mind Wednesday night as I was flying back from Washington through a snowstorm at two in the morning, and news dropped that the Hanoi summit between the president* and Kim Jong-un had broken down entirely. (In case you haven't noticed by now, the news cycle is more of a Moebius strip than anything else.) The president* then called a press conference in which he said the following about Warmbier's imprisonment and death. From the BBC:

I know the Warmbier family very well. I think they’re an incredible family. What happened is horrible. I really believe something horrible happened to him, and I really don’t think the top leadership knew about it. And when they had to send him home -- by the way, I got the prisoners back and the hostages back. The others came back extremely healthy but Otto came back in a condition that was terrible. And I did speak about it, but I don’t believe he would have allowed that to happen. It just wasn’t to his advantage to allow that to happen. Those prisons are rough, 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. He felt badly about it. He knew the case very well, but he knew it later. And you’ve got a lot of people, big country, a lot of people. And in those prisons and those camps you have a lot of people. And some really bad things happened to Otto, some really, really bad things. He tells me that he didn’t know about it, and I will take him at his word.

A high-value American detainee gets mistreated to the extent that he comes home and dies, and the guy who runs the most personality-driven authoritarian state since Hitler shot his dog in the bunker doesn't know about it? Either the president* is a sucker or he's lying again. Our lines are open.

Trump holds a press conference at the conclusion of the summit. Getty Images Getty Images

The complete collapse of the summit is infinitely better than having the president* hand over the Aleutians to Kim just to demonstrate his awesome dealmaking prowess, which is the way I thought this thing was heading. Two of the least-rational actors ever to head nuclear-armed nation-states couldn't agree that one of them should simply shut down the nuclear program that gives him his identity as surely as the president*'s name on garish buildings gives him his? What were the odds?

But it was sadly predictable that Otto Warmbier's period of political utility would come to this tawdry end, and that the Art of the Deal eventually would come down to the oeuvre of one of those pigs that paints with its nose.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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