This is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Bob Garfield. This week, two gigantic Trump stories

were slated to occur simultaneously on opposite sides of the globe, both fundamentally about our

president, though in one case in absentia, and both so keenly anticipated that many media

watchers predicted that cable news would have to present them on a split screen.

The event in Hanoi with the president incarnate was his second meeting with Supreme Leader King Zhang Un.

Last year they captured the world's attention with Trump's charm offensive in Singapore.

This year he sought to recapture

some of that magic and to finish what he never actually started, taking a big step towards

North Korea's denuclearization. It was a big fizzle on both counts. That's right, it's over, and there

was no deal to curb North Korea's nuclear

weapons program. This time we decided not to do any of the options, and we'll see where that goes.

Some say the deal failed because Trump was woefully, willfully unprepared. As for the magic,

it was gone. Not that the audience doesn't enjoy some improv or a high wire act,

but there's much less appetite for reruns. And there was a hot-ticket live show right here at home.

Michael Cohen, Trump's former personal lawyer, in an all-day engagement before the House Oversight Committee.

The fact-checkers and the news analysts have had their way with it, but the drama worked its

way into the amygdala and hippocampus of every viewer who thrilled or quailed or mostly

cringed at the spectacle, but found it hard to turn away. It was monotonous sometimes, since some committee members were reading from the same page,

but it was gripping, and it was also familiar.

A popular genre, a procedural, with a dash of movie mob melodrama thrown in.

The organized crime type of language has kind of been a theme throughout this presidency.

I know all about flipping for 30, 40 years I've been watching flippers.

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