While the rest of the world was transfixed by the historic summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, CNN focused on … Canada.
The network on Tuesday was still obsessing over the Group of 7 (G-7) summit, in which Trump refused to sign on to a joint communiqué and reacted to criticism from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau by firing rhetorical shots of his own.
CNN replayed comments from Trump at the summit in Singapore, responding to a question, wagging his finger.
“He learned,” Trump said. “That’s going to cost a lot of money for the people of Canada.”
CNN host Poppy Harlow asked, “Is it really that politically advantageous for the president to keep taking shots at Canada?”
New York Times reporter Julie Hirschfeld Davis, a CNN contributor, said Trump “heard the Canadian prime minister say something about him that, essentially, hurt his feelings, or he felt wasn’t respectful enough of him, and he kind of — he threw a tantrum. And he had his advisers take the United States out of the communiqué.”
Time magazine reporter Molly Ball contrasted that with Trump’s supportive words for Kim.
“You could not get a sort of more illustrative, sort of, split screen of the Trump foreign policy than that diptick, right, of him beating up on the leader of Canada,” she said. “I don’t think anyone would have predicted that our main international conflict right now would be with Canada. And then, on the other hand, as you said, buttering up the brutal dictator of North Korea.”
Davis noted that Kim got something he wanted — a cancellation of joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises — without giving up anything in return. But she offered qualified praise for the president for engaging in diplomacy in the first place.
“Certainly, the fact that he was willing to go to the table, I mean, this is a ground-breaking moment,” she said. “And that’s something he should get credit for.”
But Ball decried an erosion of America’s moral standing under the current president.
Related: MSNBC Finds a Way to Slam Trump for North Korea Meeting
“Trump has already abundantly shown that that’s not something he really cares about,” he said.
Ball added that the United States used to promote democratic ideals and human rights.
“That is something that this administration has already basically said, ‘We’re not in that business anymore,'” she said.
PoliZette senior writer Brendan Kirby can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter.
(photo credit, homepage image: Justin Trudeau, CC BY 2.0, by Steve Jurvetson)
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