How to "play" a narcissist

Also sprach (or tweeted) POTUS:

So funny to watch the Fake News, especially NBC and CNN. They are fighting hard to downplay the deal with North Korea. 500 days ago they would have “begged” for this deal-looked like war would break out. Our Country’s biggest enemy is the Fake News so easily promulgated by fools!

I really don't think that anybody ever would have begged for a deal in which the United States agrees in effect to legitimize North Korea's monstrous regime, end the sanctions (even gradually, over time, and as North Korea is perceived as living up to its side of the deal), and cease joint military operations with an ally threatened by a desperate, unstable neighbor who is a nuclear power and has one of the largest armies on the planet in exchange for literally nothing but vague, empty promises.

Mr. Trump has also tweeted that "there is now no nuclear threat from North Korea." He even made the same absurd assertion to the media. Does he really believe that? That he does is one possibility even more frightening than the obvious explanation: that he's trying once again to pull the wool over the eyes of the gullible. Does he even realize the number of times North Korea has promised to denuclearize and then broken its word?

Either Mr. Trump deep down is more concerned with making a splash in the news than with the welfare of the nation, or he was played. He, in turn, is trying to play the American people by portraying what seems to be an absolutely insubstantial deal in which North Korea at the very least gets legitimacy and we, in all likelihood, get nothing at all as some sort of diplomatic triumph. Sorry, Trumpophiles, but there will be no Nobel Prize coming out of this deal.

Yes, the rhetoric from Kim's regime has been very pleasant. But thus far rhetoric appears to be all the agreement offers. I don't think there are many but the most rabid and die-hard Trump partisans who really expect Kim to denuclearize. Of course, probably the most paranoid, brutal, and repressive regime on Earth was not even asked to lighten up on its poor, much-abused population. And does POTUS really trust the world's most secretive nation to be transparent, or to keep its word about something which cannot be assumed without very close verification?

All-in-all, it shouldn't be surprising that at what from a PR point of view is Donald Trump's finest hour wins the approval, according to the first polls, of only about half of the American people. As Mr. Lincoln, expanding on Aesop is supposed to have said, "You can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."

That quotation might have been written with Donald Trump in mind, and it's the reason why the most unfit president in modern times is not going to get a second term.

The North Korean press has flattered Mr. Trump lavishly, while the media in the rest of Asia is not nearly as pleased with what transpired in Singapore. Mr. Trump's erratic personality and naivete are worrisome enough, and two of the things which terrified many of us about the possibility of his becoming president. But the really troubling thing is that narcissists not only tend to do everything chiefly for their own glory rather than for the actual consequences to anyone else, and are among the easiest of all people to manipulate.

All you have to do is flatter them- and it's amazing the lengths to which they'll go to be flattered.