Trump’s National Security Advisor went on This Week earlier today to repeat more of the same nonsense about North Korea that administration officials have been saying for the last year and a half:

President Trump took a different attack — tack, with personal diplomacy. And, so far, we have had some success. Kim Jong-un promised to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula. We want to hold him to that commitment. And we hope he follows through with the commitment that he made in Singapore [bold mine-DL].

The Trump administration has been trying to deceive the public for eighteen months that the president’s handling of North Korea has been successful. To keep that deception going administration officials have made statements about commitments from North Korea that everyone paying attention knows to be false. Kim did not promise to denuclearize anything. He definitely didn’t agree to the unilateral disarmament that the Trump administration has been expecting. The vague reference in the Singapore statement said only that both governments would work towards the denuclearization of the peninsula, but it contained no promises, pledges, or commitments on this point. It was at best a statement of their intentions to continue talking with only the blurriest idea of what they were both seeking. This is the empty statement that O’Brien is touting as a “success.” Boasting about a non-existent achievement wouldn’t be such a problem if it didn’t involve lying about the North Korean position. Demanding that North Korea honor a commitment that they never made may make for a good soundbite on a Sunday show, but it is likely to antagonize and provoke the North Korean government.

One of the reasons that the Trump administration has been able to get away with this misinformation campaign is the unwillingness of so many journalists to challenge administration officials when they say blatantly untrue things about this issue. O’Brien makes demonstrably false claims as if they were a given, and the interviewer, Jonathan Karl, lets them pass without comment or correction. The average viewer watching this program will probably have no idea that the president’s top national security adviser has just brazenly lied to the public, and the journalists whose job it is to challenge the official administration line are doing nothing about it. There is news value in posing questions to top administration officials, but there is nothing gained from letting those officials use these programs as a megaphone for what amounts to nothing more than dishonest propaganda.

Instead of calling out O’Brien for his own false claims, Karl pivots to citing John Bolton of all people in a pointless bid to get O’Brien to disagree with his predecessor on camera. It isn’t clear why anyone should care what Bolton has to say about North Korea when he bears more responsibility than most for pushing North Korea to leave the Non-Proliferation Treaty and test its first nuclear device during the Bush era. Bringing up Bolton’s criticism of the administration’s North Korea policy is a bizarre move when it was Bolton who did everything he could to make sure that U.S. policy remained as maximalist and unacceptable to North Korea as possible. U.S.-North Korean engagement fell apart in large part because of Bolton’s baleful influence and advice, so his opinion on what should be done now ought to be irrelevant. “Is John Bolton right?” is not a question anyone should be asking about any foreign policy issue, because the answer is always no. The fact that O’Brien makes a point of praising Bolton in his answer underscores how silly the entire exercise is, and it reminds us how little has changed in Trump’s foreign policy since Bolton was replaced.

O’Brien finishes by making a statement that sums up the bankruptcy of the administration’s North Korea policy:

And, again, he has two paths in front of him, he’s got a glorious path for the people of North Korea where they could become like South Korea and be a very prosperous, very wealthy country, or there’s another path that takes them down the road of sanctions and isolation and being a pariah state. And we’ll see which one they choose.

If this is the “choice” North Korea is being offered, we already know that they will choose the latter because that is what they have been choosing for decades. Kim has no interest in his country becoming “like South Korea,” because in such a country he and his family would not remain in power for very long. Trump and his officials keep talking up the possibility of economic prosperity for North Korea if they disarm, but they believe that disarmament threatens their survival. The U.S. is asking for North Korea to take a massive leap of faith and give up the one thing that guarantees their security. Even if North Korea cared about the prosperity being promised, they would not risk the collapse and destruction of their system. If economic prosperity were their priority, they would not have gone to such lengths to develop and build a nuclear arsenal in the teeth of U.S. opposition. O’Brien’s statement shows how little the administration understands North Korea even now, and it bodes very ill for the next year now that North Korean patience has run out.