FOREIGN POLICY/NORTH KOREA/NUCLEAR/SUMMIT/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “President Donald Trump embarked on his trip to Vietnam with a political cloud hanging over his head and keen to show progress on a thorny foreign policy issue that has befuddled many of his predecessors. Now, he is just back from a Hanoi summit with North Korea that collapsed and the cloud has grown darker. While Trump’s much-hyped meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un broke up in disagreement over sanctions linked to Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program, testimony from his former lawyer Michael Cohen, who accused him of breaking the law while in office, represented a potentially damaging development for the president at home. Trump faced challenges on other fronts: sensitive talks with China over a trade deal, a slow-rolling crisis in Venezuela, tensions between India and Pakistan and an attempt in Congress to kill his emergency declaration aimed at securing funding for a wall on the border with Mexico.”
–Steve Holland, Roberta Rampton, “Back home from Hanoi, Trump faces more political headwinds,” Reuters, March 1, 2019 10:07 pm