Optical Illusions

In 2018, President Trump met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in Singapore. There was a theatrical handshake—broadcast wall-to-wall on US TV, including on ABC, which cut into The Bachelorette to air it—before the duo disappeared for talks. There followed what CJR’s Pete Vernon referred to at the time as a few hours of “dead air”—to pass the time, CNN’s Chris Cuomo chatted with the former NBA star Dennis Rodman (somehow “one of the few people with firsthand knowledge of both leaders,” Vernon noted), while on Fox, Sean Hannity compared Trump’s trip to President Reagan urging Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall”—before Trump and Kim emerged to word of an agreement (albeit vague) to rid the Korean Peninsula of nuclear weapons, and Trump sat down with Hannity to take a victory lap. A year or so later, Trump and Kim shook hands again, this time inside North Korea, after Trump took a few steps into the country—a moment “made for TV,” as many journalists told us, even if the footage was shaky and took place at nearly three in the morning, Eastern time. During a press availability, Trump was asked whether any substantive progress had actually been made on denuclearization, and Trump dismissed the question as “fake news.” A different Fox host, Tucker Carlson, was invited along on the trip, after interviewing Trump at a G20 summit in Japan. During that interview, Carlson praised the cleanliness of Japanese cities, and contrasted it with “filth” in their US counterparts. Trump concurred, but suggested that he had already moved to clean up Washington, DC. “When we have leaders of the world coming in to see the president of the United States, and they’re riding down a highway, they can’t be looking at that,” he said. “I really believe that it hurts our country.”

The world doesn’t stand still—since Trump’s first term, Cuomo has left CNN under a cloud; ditto Carlson, at Fox—but some things never change, like Trump proposing an attention-grabbing summit with an adversarial world leader, and journalists telling us that the whole exercise is made for TV. Recently, Trump announced that he would be meeting Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, in Alaska, to discuss an end to the war in Ukraine (or, at least, to discuss further discussions about ending the war in Ukraine). Ahead of time, before a hand had even been gripped, numerous members of the media wearily concluded that the existence of the summit was a win for Putin. The Russian leader “is a global pariah facing an international warrant for his arrest, but the United States is welcoming him to American soil for the first time since 2015,” The Atlantic’s David A. Graham noted. “Without stopping his aggression against Ukraine, and despite blowing through a series of deadlines, he gets a photo op with Trump.” Russian state media—which the Kremlin tightly controls—suggested a similar conclusion, albeit without the weariness. “The whole world is waiting for the meeting,” the state-owned news agency TASS enthused.