It's not rhetoric, it's salesmanship or geniality. He's talking like a regular person does to indicate things went well, almost as if he thinks communicating with the normal people who elected him should be more of a priority than using the precise intra-Beltway jargon to delineate his administration's position in terms easy for a universally hostile media & insider community to understand. That's how people talk after they had a dinner they liked at a new restaurant or when they come out of a meeting with a contractor with a hopeful outlook, and the CNN & Economist people don't like it because their job security rests on a very limited number of people understanding what goes on and what politicians mean with certain word choices.
So, basically, just like any other summit ever, where the President managed to avoid handing over vital US interests.
How is this news? This statement could have been written before the summit in the expectation that something almost exactly like it would have been said. Who's ever going to come home complaining that they failed in negotiations? Offhand, Adolf Hitler is the only one I've ever heard of owning that kind of honesty, though that might only have been to his inner circle.

Isn't that what everyone wanted? Isn't that the sole point of interest in North Korea, that they have nukes? Isn't that the best possible outcome of this summit, short of an absurd fantasy, like Kim personally handing over the keys to a truck with their entire nuclear arsenal aboard?

Me, I don't really care about North Korea having nukes, since it was okay for the USSR & China to have them, for India and Pakistan to have them and even France & Israel, as well as a country that tried harder than any other to wipe the USA off the map, and the only European country ever to actually invade us. I say, give 'em to Iran AND Saudi Arabia and let THEM have to be the grown-ups in the Middle East.

Again, news? What else were they going to say "We're utterly giving up on this?" The last summit where the Western leader came home claiming to accomplish everything they wanted in one shot was Munich.

Given the individuals involved, why does the article imply more than this should have been expected? What president has ever come back with more than this from a first ever summit with a hostile power?
That's how EVERYTHING the president does works. Ever hear of Obamacare? Are we now blaming Barack Obama for being a shit website programmer?

So the guy who was hired to be the top foreign policy official in the US is going to handle a high level foreign policy negotiation? Good heavens, does Trump have the SLIGHTEST clue how to run a country?!

Making this different from ANY other peace negotiation in the history of ever, how?

As I said, par for the course. What the article seems to be saying is that Trump is to be implicitly criticized for positive pleasantries without substance, AND for NOT offering substantial but false specific promises. They wanted him to come home with very sober & conventional expressions of success and guarantees of substantial action which would never be carried out, which they seem to be saying is the best anyone before this has ever managed.

"Courtesy costs nothing" - Rand al'Thor. If we can toss that bone to the kleptocrats and corporate or criminal puppets who run most countries with whom the US has media-approved dealings, why not someone who managed to get his country up to nuclear power status against the express wishes of US foreign policy think tanks? As with Putin, you might not like him, but he's actually accomplished something.

As you would expect in such a setting.
I doubt he spelled it like that.

At least he didn't bow. That's called being polite. If the article is to be believed it is probably something that made Kim very happy, and costs Trump and the country nothing. It certainly isn't an image like the US President bowing to a monarch, which has far more propaganda value.

But isn't breaking out of the expected mold what Trump ran on, that he could make deals and get things done that the typical captured-by-the-system insider wouldn't dream of doing? If the article agrees with Kim's comment, then they have no business holding Trump to account for not bringing home a better deal. The implication here is that just getting the meeting to happen is sufficiently impressive in its own right.

Oh, damn! Trump just cut the legs out of the strong, vibrant and internationally connected North Korean resistance! We hear all the rhetoric and condemnations comparing North Korea to a brain washed ant colony, but we expect Trump to treat the population like an informed western democracy?

And if this is a real thing, where was all the indignation on the part of the intellectual elites and progressives when President after President did the exact same thing with far worse tyrants and despots, like Mao & Stalin and their successors? All the conservatives who complained about the actual resistance, like Hong Kong, Taiwan or Solidarity getting undercut by the legitimization of their dictatorial enemies by liberal or faux conservative Presidents, received condescension and dismissal from such publications & experts as this, who applauded equally insubstantial summits as progress and appeasers of communist dictators as mature.

What seems far more likely to me is that Kim wanted to sit down with Trump for ego reasons, rather than practical domestic ones. The man is known to be a celebrity-phile, and Trump has the widest Q-rating of any president in a long time. He was probably more than willing to have his pussy grabbed.

Oh no! Good AND bad Asians like this! How will we ever decide what to think about it.

There's not a hell of a lot North Korea could give us. About all we want or need from them is not to shoot nuclear missiles at us. If Kim comes away feeling puffed up and flattered by the US President, isn't that outcome more likely? The meeting and flattery don't cost us anything. It's like that stupid episode of The Crown where they seem to think that by lowering herself to touch a Negro, QE2 achieved a major diplomatic triumph for her country. The same sort of people who were appalled or indignant that she danced formally with a African head of state are the exact same sort of idiot who is all het up and bothered at seeing the US flag flying alongside that of North Korea. If Trump can win any sort of practical concession from Kim for mere courtesies and symbolism, that's a huge profit.

There are a lot of people who want that. Why are American troops necessary to defend a much larger & wealthier country from a smaller & poorer? South Korea has twice the population & like 50 times the economy of the North. Let them defend their border and foot the bill.

According to the left, offense is determined by the reaction of the offended party, NOT the intentions of the acting party. If a black person claims to be offended by what he perceives to be a racist connotation to something Trump says, the same media would be all over Trump's responsibility to make it right, regardless of any lack of proof of racial intent on his part. By this same standard, is provocation not something that is determined by the one who feels threatened?
Approaching a black man while wearing a police uniform is sufficiently provocative to justify a violent response, according to all non-Fox media. Using North Korea's terminology is the only right thing to do, by their measures.