… but it’s nervous laughter. Via commentor EBT, a report from Reuters:
One day before U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s first meeting with a foreign leader, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Japanese officials said they had not finalized when or where in New York it would take place, who would be invited, or in some cases whom to call for answers…
Japanese and U.S. officials said on Wednesday the State Department had not been involved in planning the meeting, leaving the logistical and protocol details that normally would be settled far in advance still to be determined.
“There has been a lot of confusion,” said one Japanese official.
The meeting was only agreed to last week and Trump and his advisers have been busy in meetings at his headquarters in Manhattan’s Trump Tower in recent days to work out who gets which job in the new administration.
While world leaders sometimes hold loosely planned bilateral meetings at regional summits, it is unusual for foreign leaders to hold high-level diplomatic talks in the United States without detailed planning. Abe is on his way to an Asia-Pacific summit in Peru.
State Department spokesman John Kirby said that to his knowledge, Trump’s transition team had not been in contact with the department either to discuss the transition of government or to seek information ahead of his meetings with foreign leaders…
Trump on Wednesday denounced reports of disorganization in the team, singling out the New York Times for saying world leaders have had trouble getting in touch with him since his upset victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton in the Nov. 8 presidential election.
The Republican real estate magnate said on Twitter he had taken “calls from many foreign leaders despite what the failing @nytimes said. Russia, U.K., China, Saudi Arabia, Japan.”
The Times, a frequent target of Trump’s Twitter blasts, said on Tuesday that U.S. allies were “scrambling to figure out how and when to contact Mr. Trump” and blindly dialing in to Trump Tower to try to reach him…
Trump and Pence had spoken to 29 foreign leaders, the transition team said on Wednesday…
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, an army general who seized power three years ago, appears to have been the first leader to speak to Trump after the election, ahead of closer allies like the leaders of Britain and Germany…
Australian media reported that Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was the second leader Trump spoke to, after the Australian ambassador to the United States got Trump’s personal phone number from Australian golfer and Trump friend Greg Norman.
Trump also talked on the phone to the leaders of Britain, Germany, Turkey and other allies.
But a phone call on Monday with Russian President Vladimir Putin, in which the two men agreed to aim for “constructive cooperation,” raised eyebrows among Democrats and traditionalist Republicans worried about a resurgent Moscow.
Trump also met Britain’s anti-EU Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage at Trump Tower last weekend, ahead of any meeting with British Prime Minister Theresa May.
State Department spokesman Kirby said: “There’s been no outreach to date” from Trump’s transition aides. “But it’s not for us to approve or disapprove of conversations that the president-elect is having or may have in the future with foreign leaders.”…
President-Elect Smallgloves thinks he can run the country the way he’s run his businesses — gladhanding other machers, networking a non-stop round of ‘incidental’ meetings where his peers / temporary allies can be schmoozed or bullied into the best yooooge deals for Donald Trump, and maybe secondarily Trump’s temporary associates. Apart from all the normal problems with that approach to international diplomacy, there’s the very real issue that Trump’s business history shows that he can be rolled by any half-competent challenger — his only ‘success’ has been in fleecing the vulnerable and siphoning unearned profits through semi-legal shell corporations. Although he had a pretty good career as a reality-show figurehead, if only his handlers could convince him to stick with that role while the serious people do the backstage work.
Prime Minister Abe has a reputation for his “light touch with geopolitical strongmen.” Assuming Thursday’s meeting even takes place (it’s certainly not past imagining that Trump’s “team” might be too busy infighting or just too incompetent to get their man in the right place at an appointed time, an error they would no doubt defend as ‘keeping the foreigners guessing’), it’ll be… instructive to hear what the two sides say afterwards.
Open Thread: Trump’s Already A Global LaughingstockPost + Comments (38)