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It sure looks as if President Trump was hoodwinked in Singapore.

Trump made a huge concession — the suspension of military exercises with South Korea. That’s on top of the broader concession of the summit meeting itself, security guarantees he gave North Korea and the legitimacy that the summit provides his counterpart, Kim Jong-un.

Within North Korea, the “very special bond” that Trump claimed to have formed with Kim will be portrayed this way: Kim forced the American president, through his nuclear and missile tests, to accept North Korea as a nuclear equal, to provide security guarantees to North Korea, and to cancel war games with South Korea that the North has protested for decades.

In exchange for these concessions, Trump seems to have won astonishingly little. In a joint statement, Kim merely “reaffirmed” the same commitment to denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula that North Korea has repeatedly made since 1992.

“They were willing to de-nuke,” Trump crowed at his news conference after his meetings with Kim. Trump seemed to believe he had achieved some remarkable agreement, but the concessions were all his own.

The most remarkable aspect of the joint statement was what it didn’t contain. There was nothing about North Korea freezing plutonium and uranium programs, nothing about destroying intercontinental ballistic missiles, nothing about allowing inspectors to return to nuclear sites, nothing about North Korea making a full declaration of its nuclear program, nothing about a timetable, nothing about verification, not even any clear pledge to permanently halt testing of nuclear weapons or long-range missiles.

Kim seems to have completely out-negotiated Trump, and it’s scary that Trump doesn’t seem to realize this. For now Trump has much less to show than past negotiators who hammered out deals with North Korea like the 1994 Agreed Framework, which completely froze the country’s plutonium program with a rigorous monitoring system.

Trump made a big deal in his news conference about recovering the remains of American soldiers from the Korean War, but this is nothing new. Back in 1989, on my first trip to North Korea, officials there made similar pledges about returning remains, and indeed North Korea has returned some remains over the years. It’s not clear how many more remain.

Trump claimed an “excellent relationship” with Kim, and it certainly is better for the two leaders to be exchanging compliments rather than missiles. In a sense, Trump has eased the tensions that he himself created when he threatened last fall to “totally destroy” North Korea. I’m just not sure a leader should get credit for defusing a crisis that he himself created.

There’s still plenty we don’t know and lots of uncertainty about the future. But for now, the bottom line is that there’s no indication that North Korea is prepared to give up its nuclear weapons, and Trump didn’t achieve anything remotely as good as the Iran nuclear deal, which led Iran to eliminate 98 percent of its enriched uranium.

There was also something frankly weird about an American president savaging Canada’s prime minister one day and then embracing the leader of the most totalitarian country in the world.

“He’s a very talented man,” Trump said of Kim. “I also learned that he loves his country very much.”

In an interview with Voice of America, Trump said “I like him” and added: “He’s smart, loves his people, he loves his country.”

Trump praised Kim in the news conference and, astonishingly, even adopted North Korean positions as his own, saying that the United States military exercises in the region are “provocative.” That’s a standard North Korean propaganda line. Likewise, Trump acknowledged that human rights in North Korea constituted a “rough situation,” but quickly added that “it’s rough in a lot of places, by the way.” (Note that a 2014 United Nations report stated that North Korean human rights violations do “not have any parallel in the contemporary world.”)

Incredibly, Trump told Voice of America that he had this message for the North Korean people: “I think you have somebody that has a great feeling for them. He wants to do right by them and we got along really well.”

It’s breathtaking to see an American president emerge as a spokesman for the dictator of North Korea.

”

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NICHOLAS KRISTOF, writing in the New York Times, “Trump Was Outfoxed In Singapore.”

Kristof is correct and no one at all is surprised.

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Wisdom comes from the unlikeliest places. And on Saturday, Ben Bowling, the valedictorian of Bell County High School in Pineville, Ky., made an inspirational appeal that left his graduating classmates and their parents dumbstruck.

“This is the part of my speech where I share some inspirational quotes I found on Google,” he told the packed auditorium. “‘Don’t just get involved. Fight for your seat at the table. Better yet, fight for a seat at the head of the table’ — Donald J. Trump.”

The crowd burst into applause. President Trump is quite popular in Pineville and the surrounding area, which is the heart of coal country and overwhelmingly supported the president in the 2016 election after he promised to bring coal jobs back to America.

Mr. Bowling, though, wasn’t finished.

“Just kidding,” he said. “That was Barack Obama.”

The cheering abruptly stopped. The crowd went mostly silent. There was a lone boo.

Mr. Bowling was quoting a May 2012 commencement speech President Obama gave to the graduating class of Barnard College in New York City. He offered this message to graduates of the women’s college then: “Women shape not only their own destiny but the destiny of this nation and of this world.”

“He’s very politically aware,” Richard Gambrel, the principal of Bell County High School, said of Mr. Bowling.

Mr. Bowling, 18, and his parents, who live in Middlesboro, Ky., declined to be interviewed.

The valedictorian, though, told The Louisville Courier Journal on Saturday that he quoted Mr. Obama because the president offered a good message. He was aware how the crowd would react, even if he shared it in a lighthearted and funny way.

“Most people wouldn’t like it if I used it,” he told The Courier Journal. “So I thought I’d use Donald Trump’s name. It is southeastern Kentucky after all.”

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– The New York Times, “Kentucky Crowds Cheers Valedictorian’s Trump Quote, Then Learns Obama Said It”

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Gavin Newsom, the Democratic lieutenant governor and former mayor of San Francisco, took a major step Tuesday in his bid to become California’s next governor, capturing one of two spots on the November ballot as the state moved closer to the end of the era of Gov. Jerry Brown.

John Cox, a Republican businessman backed by President Trump, captured the other spot, setting up what is — at best — a very long-shot bid for Mr. Cox in a decidedly Democratic state where Mr. Trump lost by nearly four million votes.

Mr. Cox’s showing represented a major tactical victory for national Republicans as they seek to protect seven Republican-held congressional seats in California that Democrats are targeting as they try to recapture the House. Republican leaders, including Kevin McCarthy, the House majority leader who comes from central California, had feared that having no Republicans running for a high-profile statewide office would diminish turnout among party voters in the fall.

Importantly, Democrats seemed poised to avoid the disaster they feared in House races: Being shut out of the November balloting under the state’s so-called “top-two’’ primary system, in which only the top two finishers advance to the general election. But many of the districts had crowded primaries and in some of them votes were still being counted early Wednesday morning.

The most-watched races here were seven congressional districts that Hillary Clinton carried in 2016 and that are now held by Republicans. Democrats are aiming to capture those seats in November, a linchpin of their strategy to take back control of the House.

The November race between Mr. Newsom and Mr. Cox promises to be, in part, a fight over Mr. Trump, and one in which the liberal Democrats who embraced Mr. Newsom have a clear advantage. The election is taking place at a critical time as California is enmeshed in a protracted fight with the Trump administration on range of battlefields, including environmental protections, immigration and offshore oil drilling. And on Tuesday night, both candidates invoked Mr. Trump in dueling remarks to supporters.

“It looks like voters will have a real choice this November — between a governor who is going to stand up to Donald Trump and a foot soldier in his war on California,” Mr. Newsom told hundreds of supporters at a San Francisco nightclub, as he pledged to push for guaranteed health care for all and “a Marshall Plan for affordable housing.”

”

– The New York Times, “Gavin Newsom and John Cox to Compete in California for Governor”

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Net income for the first quarter rose to $60.1 million at Dick’s Sporting Goods, up from the same quarter the year before, when it were $58.2 million. Sales were also up, increasing 4.6% to $1.91 billion.

The financial results are being closely watched in the gun community because of Dick’s strong stance in the gun debate. After the Parkland, Fla., shooting, the retailer announced it would remove assault weapons from its Field & Stream stores and stop selling guns and ammunition to people under 21.

The results indicate that, at least so far, the threatened boycotts by the gun community and actions by gun manufacturers to isolate Dick’s didn’t have an effect on the retailer’s financial picture.

In the first quarter, the company opened eight new Dick’s Sporting Goods stores. As of May 5, 2018, according to the release, the company operated 724 Dick’s Sporting Goods stores in 47 states, 94 Golf Galaxy stores in 32 states, and 35 Field & Stream stores in 16 states. Adjusted for the calendar shift due to the 53rd week in 2017, consolidated same store sales decreased 2.5% on a 13-week to 13-week comparable basis, the company reported.

”

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Forbes, “In A Repudiation of the NRA, Sales Were Up at Dick’s Sporting Goods.”

Oops.

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In 1969, after having already been held hostage for four years, a graduate of the United States Naval Academy faced a lonely choice in a North Vietnamese prison camp: how to prevent his captors from using him in a propaganda piece. James Stockdale chose to smash his own face in with a stool rather than give “aid and comfort” to the enemy.

In the early years of Stockdale’s seven-year imprisonment, the current president of the United States was enjoying the comforts of Wharton Business School, having received four draft deferments to attend college (he received another after graduation for supposedly having bone spurs in his heels). He would later go on to make fun of POWs of that era, claiming John McCain was not a war hero because he was captured.

In 1972, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy named John Ripley low-crawled and pulled himself along the underside of the Dong Ha bridge for over three hours, making multiple trips with explosives. His actions, all done under fire from the North Vietnamese Army, earned him the Navy Cross for valor. In 1972, Donald Trump, who took over his father’s apartment rental business, was a year away from being sued by the Justice Department for refusing to rent apartments in one of his buildings to black people.

On Sept. 11, 2001, thousands of graduates of the U.S. Naval Academy steeled themselves for a mission to bring violence to our enemies. After the World Trade Center Towers fell, Donald Trump bragged on TV that a building he owned was now the tallest in downtown Manhattan.

On Feb. 1, 2003, a graduate of the United States Naval Academy named William McCool was at the helm of the space shuttle Columbia when it broke up during reentry. The current president was then gearing up to become the host of a reality TV show called “The Apprentice.”

In late June of 2005, two USNA graduates named Erik Kristensen and Mike McGreevy insisted on being in the lead aircraft riding into a hot landing zone in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley to come to the aid of their wounded, outnumbered and about to be overrun team of SEALs. The helicopter was shot down, and they and more than a dozen others lost their lives. A few months later in that same year, the current president of the United States was captured in a recording bragging about assaulting women: “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything … Grab ‘em by the [crotch]. You can do anything.”

These are just a few of many examples of graduates of the U.S. Naval Academy making big choices laden with courage and self-sacrifice that come from a history of countless small choices: to be truthful, to stay committed to a code of honor and duty, and to choose a harder right over the easier wrong — even if the choice is contrary to their own short-term personal interests. These are the choices that make one fit to lead.

These are just a few of many examples of graduates of the U.S. Naval Academy making big choices laden with courage and self-sacrifice that come from a history of countless small choices: to be truthful, to stay committed to a code of honor and duty, and to choose a harder right over the easier wrong — even if the choice is contrary to their own short-term personal interests. These are the choices that make one fit to lead.

”

– United States Naval Academy graduates DANIEL BARKHUFF and WILLIAM BURKE, writing in the Baltimore Sun, “Trump Has Little Advice to Offer Naval Academy Graduates”

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Harvey Weinstein turned himself in to New York City detectives and was arrested on Friday on charges that he raped one woman and forced another to perform oral sex, a watershed in a monthslong sex crimes investigation and in the #MeToo movement.

Around 7:30 a.m., Mr. Weinstein walked into a police station house in Lower Manhattan, flanked by several sex crimes detectives. Toting three large books under his right arm, he looked up without saying a word as a crush of reporters and onlookers yelled, “Harvey!”

With camera shutters clicking and reporters shouting questions, the scene was a mirror image of the red carpets where Mr. Weinstein presided for decades as a movie mogul and king of Hollywood.

But after decades of harnessing his wealth and his influence in the movie industry to buy or coerce silence from women, and after withstanding an investigation into groping allegations three years ago, Mr. Weinstein’s reign ended behind bars in a police holding cell on Friday morning.

He was fingerprinted and formally booked. Then about an hour later, he was led from the First Police Precinct in TriBeCa and taken to court on Centre Street to face rape charges, his arms pinned behind him in several sets of handcuffs to accommodate his girth, the police said.

The books he carried into the station house — among them “Elia Kazan: A Biography,” by Richard Schickel, and “Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution,” by Todd S. Purdum — were gone and he was buckled into his seat in a waiting S.U.V.

Around 9:25 a.m., Mr. Weinstein was escorted into a courtroom in Manhattan Criminal Court by two police investigators, one holding each of his elbows. They were Sergeant Keri Thompson and Detective Nicholas DiGuadio from the department’s Special Victims Division, both of whom have long been involved in finding Mr. Weinstein’s accusers and corroborating their stories.

They walked him through the well of the court in front of a roomful of scribbling reporters and then sat him in the corner, where he spoke quietly with his lawyer, Benjamin Brafman.

He was expected be arraigned on charges of first-degree rape and third-degree rape in one case, and first-degree criminal sex act in another, law enforcement officials said.

The charges follow a wave of accusations against him that led women around the world, some of them famous and many of them not, to come forward with accounts of being sexually harassed and assaulted by powerful men. Those stories spawned the global #MeToo movement, and since then, the ground has shifted beneath men who for years benefited from a code of silence around their predatory behavior.

The criminal sex act charge stems from an encounter with Lucia Evans, who told The New Yorker and then investigators from the Manhattan district attorney’s office that Mr. Weinstein forced her to perform oral sex on him during what she expected would be a casting meeting at the Miramax office in TriBeCa.

The victim in the rape case has not been publicly identified. Mr. Weinstein has been accused of sexually harassing and assaulting movie stars and employees of his former namesake company over the course of decades.

”

– The New York Times, “Harvey Weinstein Arrested and Handcuffed on Rape Charges in New York”

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As officials in Milwaukee released a video showing officers using a stun gun on an N.B.A. player over a parking violation, the chief of the Milwaukee police on Wednesday declared his officers’ handling of the matter inappropriate and said that they had been disciplined for their conduct.

In the 30-minute police body camera video, which the authorities had declined to release to the public since the arrest in January, a police officer can be seen confronting the player, Sterling Brown, as he emerges from a store. Mr. Brown’s car is parked in a handicapped zone, and the situation swiftly escalates into a confrontation with multiple officers and squad cars.

At one point, the officers push Mr. Brown to the ground and one officer calls out “Taser, Taser, Taser,” after which a stun gun is used on Mr. Brown.

During the video, Mr. Brown does not appear to raise his voice or physically resist officers.

“I own this right here,” an officer says at one point. “You don’t own me,” Mr. Brown responds.

In a news conference late Wednesday, the chief, Alfonso Morales, said he was “sorry this incident escalated to this level.” He said that an investigation of the events by the department revealed that “members acted inappropriately and those members were recently disciplined.” He offered no details, however, and did not provide names of the officers involved.

At City Hall, Milwaukee’s mayor, Tom Barrett, said that “as a human being, I am offended by what I saw.” He said: “Mr. Brown deserves an apology, and I am very sorry the Milwaukee police treated him in the fashion he was treated.”

Mr. Barrett declined to say how many officers were disciplined or describe the extent of that discipline. He said he expected that information to be released eventually, but that department procedure prevented that from being divulged immediately.

In a statement, Mr. Brown said Wednesday that his treatment by the police was wrong and “has forced me to stand up and tell my story so that I can help prevent these injustices from happening in the future.”

“Situations like mine and worse happen every day in the black community,” Mr. Brown said.

In a separate statement, the Bucks organization, for whom Mr. Brown plays, said it supported him.

“The abuse and intimidation that Sterling experienced at the hands of Milwaukee police was shameful and inexcusable,” the team’s statement said.

Fred Royal, the president of the Milwaukee branch of the N.A.A.C.P., called for changes to the Police Department’s policies. “For a person to go and have to be physically accosted at the hands of police for a parking citation speaks volumes,” he said.

”

– The New York Times, “Sterling Brown Arrest Video Shows Milwaukee Police Use Stun Gun on NBA Player”

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The hallmark of President Trump’s Twitter feed is that it sounds like him — grammatical miscues and all.

But it’s not always Trump tapping out a Tweet, even when it sounds like his voice. West Wing employees who draft proposed tweets intentionally employ suspect grammar and staccato syntax in order to mimic the president’s style, according to two people familiar with the process.

They overuse the exclamation point! They Capitalize random words for emphasis. Fragments. Loosely connected ideas. All part of a process that is not as spontaneous as Trump’s Twitter feed often appears.

Presidential speechwriters have always sought to channel their bosses’ style and cadence, but Trump’s team is blazing new ground with its approach to his favorite means of instant communication. Some staff members even relish the scoldings Trump gets from elites shocked by the Trumpian language they strive to imitate, believing that debates over presidential typos fortify the belief within his base that he has the common touch.

His staff has become so adept at replicating Trump’s tone that people who follow his feed closely say it is getting harder to discern which tweets were actually crafted by Trump sitting in his bathrobe and watching “Fox & Friends” and which were concocted by his communications team.

Those familiar with the process wouldn’t fess up to which tweets were staff-written. But an algorithm crafted by a writer at The Atlantic to determine real versus staff-written tweets suggested several were not written by the president, despite the unusual use of the language.

“Looking forward to greeting the Hostages (no longer) at 2:00 A.M.” someone tweeted from Trump’s account at 6:41 p.m. May 9. The Atlantic’s analysis pegged it 17 percent likely written by Trump, based on a complex comparison with past Trump tweets.

Staff-written tweets do go through a West Wing process of sorts. When a White House employee wants the president to tweet about a topic, the official writes a memo to the president that includes three or four sample tweets, according to those familiar with the process.

Trump then picks the one he likes best, according to the two people, neither of whom wanted to be named because they’re not authorized to talk about the operations. Sometimes Trump will edit the wording and sometimes he’ll just pick his favorite for blasting out to his 52 million Twitter followers.

While staff members do consciously use poor grammar, they do not intentionally misspell words or names, one person familiar with the process explained.

“Tweets that are proposed are in his voice,” said one of the people. “You want to do it in a way that fits his style.”

”

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The Boston Globe, “Inside the Trump Tweet Machine: Staff-Written Posts, Bad Grammar (On Purpose), and Delight in the Chaos.”

Ahhhh.  Surrogate dickheads.