If anyone has attempted a « great deception » over the last six months, it is the administration officials that have pretended that North Korea agreed to disarm at Singapore.
The framing in this New York Times article on North Korean missile production is a bit, shall we say, deceptive:
It is wrong to say that North Korea is being deceptive by continuing to develop the missile program that it has been developing for years. There is no agreement that prohibits them from doing what they are doing, and so they can’t be deceiving anyone by carrying on with their missile development. It is to be expected that North Korea would continue to develop and build missiles when their government has never said that it would not do so.
If anyone has attempted a “great deception” over the last six months, it is the administration officials that have pretended that North Korea agreed to disarm at Singapore. If the existence of these sites “contradicts Mr. Trump’s assertion that his landmark diplomacy is leading to the elimination of a nuclear and missile program,” the fault lies entirely with Trump. He is the one making false claims of progress in pursuing the administration’s unrealistic goals, and it is hardly the first time that reality has not lined up with the president’s statements.
