Summit Breakdown: President Trump’s second summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un broke down and Trump abruptly left the country. 

  “Sometimes you have to walk,” Trump said at a news conference in Hanoi, Vietnam. He said Kim had insisted that all of the United Nations economic sanctions imposed on the North be lifted in exchange for dismantling its most important nuclear facility but not its weapons. 

  “I’d much rather do it right than do it fast,” Trump said. He left suggesting there may be hope for further talks. “There’s a warmth that we have and I hope that stays. I think it will.”

A Cancer on the Presidency: In a day of stunning and damaging testimony about a sitting President, Donald Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen said, “He is a racist. He is a conman. He is a cheat.”

  Cohen, who has been convicted of previously lying to Congress, told the House Oversight Committee, “Sitting here today, it seems unbelievable that I was so mesmerized by Donald Trump that I was willing to do things for him that I knew were absolutely wrong.”

  He said, “My loyalty to Mr. Trump has cost me everything.”

  Cohen said Trump repaid him for the payoff to porn actress Stormy Daniels while he was President months before he denied knowing anything about it. “The President of the United States thus wrote a personal check for the payment of hush money as part of a criminal scheme to violate campaign finance laws.” Cohen provided a copy of a check.

  He said Trump knew that his friend and adviser Roger Stone was in contact with WikiLeaks and knew in advance of the dump of Democratic Party  emails. He said Trump ordered him to find a straw bidder for a portrait of himself, then repaid the bidder $60,000 out of his charitable foundation and kept the painting himself. 

  Cohen admitted that he had previously lied to Congress about real estate negotiations with Russia continuing through the 2016 campaign. He said Trump’s own lawyers vetted his false testimony before he delivered it.

  He also said he was present when he believes that Donald Trump Jr. told candidate Trump about the setup for the infamous meeting with a Russian lawyer dealing dirt on Hillary Clinton.

  Trump said from Vietnam, “A fake hearing like that in the middle of this important summit is really a terrible thing.”

  Republican panelists on the committee, who are now the minority, spent their allotted time trashing Cohen’s credibility as a convicted liar,  but spent virtually no time challenging the truth of what he was saying. They didn’t actually defend the President. Rep. Jim Jordan of  Ohio, a big Trump loyalist, suggested that Cohen was merely bitter because he was not offered a position in the White House.

  Cohen described Trump as an “enigma.” He said of the President that, “He has both good and bad, as do we all. But the bad far outweighs the good, and since taking office, he has become the worst version of himself. He is capable of behaving kindly, but he is not kind. He is capable of committing acts of generosity, but he is not generous. He is capable of being loyal, but he is fundamentally disloyal.”

  Cohen said Trump ran for office not to win, but to enhance his real estate brand and make money. He said, “He had no desire or intention to lead this nation – only to market himself and to build his wealth and power. Mr. Trump would often say this campaign was going to be the ‘greatest infomercial in political history.’”

  Cohen described how he was drawn into Trump’s culture of lies, braggadocio, and loyalty. He said, “In the mix, lying for Mr. Trump was normalized, and no one around him questioned it. In fairness, no one around him today questions it, either.”

Permawar:In what is threatening to become a full-blown military conflict, Pakistan and India have shot down warplanes from each other’s air forces. Following an Indian bombing raid, Pakistan shot down two aircraft and India shot down one from Pakistan. The Pakistanis claim they’ve taken an Indian fighter pilot captive.

  India and Pakistan have fought three wars already over control of Kashmir. Now they have nukes.

 Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan said, “With the weapons you have and the weapons we have, can we really afford a miscalculation?”

The News Roundup:L. McCrae Dowless Jr., the Republican operative accused of tampering with votes in North Carolina’s 19^thcongressional district election has been indicted on several felony charges. — The House voted to require all gun buyers to pass a background check, even at gun shows, but the bill is unlikely to pass the Senate. 

A Hero in His Own Time:President Trump is in Vietnam, which he avoided visiting when he was draft age. The Onionhas a report on that:

“HANOI, VIETNAM—Tearing up as he described the courage he would have had no choice but to summon had he not been born into a life of luxury, President Trump reportedly took time Tuesday before the North Korea summit in Hanoi to travel south and lay a wreath at the spot where he would have died in the Vietnam War if he weren’t rich. ‘Today we recognize those who, like myself, would have been forced to make the ultimate sacrifice had they not come from wealthy families who could call in a favor from a doctor friend and get exempted from the draft,’ said Trump.”

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