NORTH KOREA/NUCLEAR/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “When the North Koreans were shooting off missile tests and detonating new, more powerful atomic bombs last year, President Trump responded with threats of ‘fire and fury’ and ordered the military to come up with new, if highly risky, pre-emptive strike options. But since the one-day summit meeting last month in Singapore, Mr. Trump has done an about-face, while the North’s nuclear program has continued. ‘Many good conversations with North Korea-it is going well!’ he wrote Tuesday [7-3-18] morning on Twitter. Even the recent revelations of seemingly modest North Korean progress on missile technology and the production of nuclear fuel — including continued work on a new nuclear reactor that can produce plutonium — have not dimmed Mr. Trump’s enthusiasm. He argues that they mean little compared to the new tone of conversations, and that even though North Korea has not disassembled a single weapon, his mission should be judged a success. It is that jarring reversal of tone that has led Mr. Trump’s critics to argue that he was taken in by Kim Jong-un, the North’s 34-year-old leader.”
-David E. Sanger, “How Trump Went From ‘Fire and Fury’ to Dismissing North Korean Nuclear Advances,” The New York Times online, July 4, 2018