Some may be disappointed or dismissive of Trump’s diplomacy because no deal was reached in Vietnam with NK’s Kim. I have learned over the years that “real Presidents” don’t show up at summits without something having already been cooked by their team. But I think this is different.

Kim is a dictator who reportedly is mercurial and deadly. No one on his team wants to risk their neck floating trial balloons. A common tactic in negotiations with subordinate personnel is to reach tentative agreements and then see if you can “sell it to the boss.” This gives subordinates some leverage in peer negotiations (they don’t reject things, they just can’t “sell” things), but also permits discussion of options that might not be immediately presentable to the boss. That is not a tactic that will work in Kim’s world since none of his subordinates will do the slightest thing that they have the littlest niggle about even as a trial balloon lest they are treated to a high-caliber death.

While I was disappointed there was no breakthrough deal made with North Korea Wednesday night, I quickly realized that this may have been the best political outcome for Trump.

Unless the agreement was iron-clad and unrealistically conciliatory from North Korea, there would have been mixed reviews, based on party lines, of course. Depending on how nitpicky the anti-Trumpers wanted to be, the takeaway wouldn’t have moved the political scales much.

On Wednesday, there were two major bouts of testimony involving the future fate of a major leader of a G7 country. The one I am going to talk to you about is the one involving the corruption and incompetence of the Liberal Leader of Canada. Over the course of the last month, the Liberal government has gone into freefall due to the breaking accusation that the then-Attorney General of Canada was bullied and directly influenced by partisan political considerations in order to bail out a well-connected and well-known company after it illegally bribed the government of Libya for contracts.

To translate into American: Imagine if the President had sent his Chief of Staff to tell the AG to drop charges against Halliburton after Halliburton was caught bribing Libya.

Where to begin… On January 14, there was a mini-shuffle within cabinet due to the departure of a senior minister’s retirement from parliament. At that time the AG Jody Wilson-Reybould was removed from her position and given a lesser portfolio of Veterans Affairs. At that time this piece appeared in the Globe and Mail criticizing the demotion.