Trump has followed up failure at the Hanoi summit by doing more of the same things that produced that failure:

President Donald Trump has taken increased control of negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, sidelining his own top negotiator and dismissing the warnings of top intelligence and foreign policy advisors in the wake of last month’s failed summit in Vietnam, officials familiar with the developments tell TIME.

In recent days, Trump shut down an effort by Stephen Biegun, nominally the Administration’s lead negotiator with Pyongyang, to reestablish a back channel through the North’s United Nations mission in New York, according to four U.S. and South Korean officials.

At the same time, Trump continues to dismiss the conclusions of the CIA, State and Defense Departments and other agencies that North Korea will not abandon its nuclear weapons program, continuing to insist that he and Kim can negotiate a deal, according to two U.S.officials.

The summits with North Korea have been so unsuccessful in part because there was little or no progress made between lower-level officials that could serve as the foundation for an agreement. Jumping ahead to summit meetings before any of the preparatory work had been done was a recipe for a breakdown in talks, and that is exactly what has happened. Trump’s delusion that he can secure an agreement on his own means that he isn’t interested in letting those officials do their work, and shutting down Biegun’s communications with North Korea make him useless as an envoy. At the same time that he is undermining the administration’s negotiators, he remains fixated on an impossible goal of North Korean disarmament. The president has managed to combine hard-line inflexibility with extreme gullibility, and his unfounded confidence in his ability to bargain with other leaders sets him up for embarrassment again and again.

This is impossible. Trump is wrong to cut off diplomacy and think anything good can result. He's wrong to ignore intel. He's wrong to believe he can reach a credible deal with Kim on denuclearization. The stupidity here is gratuitous and dangerous https://t.co/JlrDJ5YjJi pic.twitter.com/KevclmsROG

— Van Jackson (@WonkVJ) March 20, 2019

To make matters worse, Trump’s belief in the rapport that he thinks he has with Kim seems to outweigh all other considerations:

“The President’s constant refrain is that Kim is his ‘friend’,” said one of the officials, who has tried to present Trump with the unanimous assessment by multiple agencies that Kim remains wedded to his nuclear program, both as a family mission and as a deterrent to any U.S.-led effort to overthrow his regime.

It is hard to believe that anyone could be dumb enough to think this, but it fits with everything we have seen over the last year. If Trump really considers Kim to be his friend and that he can therefore come to an understanding with him because of their personal bond, his judgment is even worse than we thought it was.