Tag: Donald Trump

Here is the latest penpal letter that President Trump has sent to Kim Jong-un:

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has received a personal letter with “excellent” and “interesting” content from U.S. President Donald Trump, Pyongyang’s state media said Sunday.

“After reading the letter, the Supreme Leader of the Party, the state and the armed forces said with satisfaction that the letter is of excellent content,” the Korean Central News Agency said, referring to its leader.

“Appreciating the political judging faculty and extraordinary courage of President Trump, Kim Jong-un said that he would seriously contemplate the interesting content,” it added.

The KCNA did not disclose when and how the letter was delivered to Kim.

The letter appears to be in answer to a letter Kim sent to Trump recently in time for the anniversary of their first-ever summit in Singapore last June.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

It looks like President Trump is continuing his charm offensive with Kim Jong-un:

President Trump promised he wouldn’t allow the CIA to use spies against North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un after reports surfaced that Kim’s half brother had been a U.S. intelligence asset before he was assassinated in Malaysia.
Kim Jong Nam was killed in February 2017 — allegedly while he was en route to meet a CIA contact — by two women who sprayed a nerve agent in his face. U.S. officials quickly placed the blame for the killing on North Korea.
Trump, speaking to reporters on the White House lawn Tuesday before leaving on a campaign trip to Iowa, was asked about Kim Jong Nam’s spying, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
“I don’t know, I have not heard about that,” the president said, before contradicting himself and assuring Kim Jong Un that his administration wouldn’t do anything so underhanded.
“I saw the information about the CIA with respect to his brother or half brother, and I would tell him that would not happen under my auspices, that’s for sure,” Trump said. “I wouldn’t let that happen under my auspices.”

Yahoo News

You can read more at the link.

What a horrible deal this would have been if President Trump would have agreed to it:

 U.S. President Donald Trump has said that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un wanted to remove only one or two of the five nuclear sites in his country during their summit in Hanoi in February.
Trump made remarks in an interview with Fox News on Sunday (Washington time), reiterating his vow not to allow Iran to have nuclear arms amid heightened military tensions with the Islamic republic.
“When I left Vietnam where we had the summit, I said to Chairman Kim … And I think very importantly I said, look, you are not ready for a deal because he wanted to get rid of one or two sites,” Trump said. 
“But he has five sites … I said what about the other three sites. That is no good,” he added.
The Hanoi summit collapsed as Trump and Kim failed to bridge their gaps over the scope of Pyongyang’s denuclearization and Washington’s sanctions relief. Since then, the bilateral negotiations have hit an impasse.
Trump, however, highlighted that there have not been nuclear and long-range tests amid his administration’s diplomatic efforts.
“They haven’t had any tests over the last two years. It is zero,” he said. 

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but I think President Trump should not be bragging too much about the missile and nuclear test moratorium. The self imposed moratorium Kim Jong-un has already said will end next year if a deal is not struck, just in time for the Presidential election season.

Honestly, I’d be grateful if they just conducted the summit via Skype or FaceTime and saved all of us time, money, energy, commotion, pollution, and annoying motorcades and sirens all around town. The end result will be exactly the same. https://t.co/mFF9h6BU6X

— 🇰🇷Edward Oh🇺🇸 (@EdwardHBOh) April 9, 2019

Is anyone surprised that President Moon is pushing for sanctions relief on behalf of North Korea before any denuclearization happens?:

Moon Jae-in plans to ask the U.S. to ease sanctions on North Korea when he meets President Donald Trump at the White House this week, say unnamed South Korean officials cited by the Korean Times.
The South Korean president is visiting Washington D.C. for a summit on North Korean nuclear diplomacy, where the two leaders are expected to discuss how to achieve the denuclearization of the north and peace on the Korean Peninsula.
“Moon plans to embrace the risk of personal diplomacy by asking Trump to grant reciprocal measures after Seoul and Washington laid out the necessary groundwork via working-level discussions,” a South Korean official told the Korea Times.

Although it remains to be seen which sanctions Moon might ask the U.S. to revoke first, officials said he is likely to focus on those that impact the country’s citizens.
“It’s likely President Moon may raise the lessening of sanctions that affect the lives of the North Korean people,” an official said, according to the Korea Times.

TIME Magazine

The only reason sanctions are impacting the lives of ordinary North Koreans is because the Kim regime allows them too. They have enough money to fund a nuclear weapons and ICBM program, which means they should have enough money to spend on the welfare of their own people if the regime wanted to.

Is anyone surprised that CNN is trying to sensationalize this nuclear football story to make the claim that President Trump doesn’t care about Puerto Ricans:

He was there to survey the path of destruction left by Hurricane Maria. But when President Donald Trump visited Puerto Rico in October 2017, the island’s dire predicament was hardly the only topic on his mind.
People familiar with the visit said the President was distracted by other matters — including his then-devolving war of words with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un — as he toured devastated neighborhoods and took an aerial tour of the damage.
At one point, Trump pointed to the “nuclear football” — a briefcase always in the President’s vicinity that can be used to authorize a nuclear attack — and claimed he could use it on Kim whenever he felt.
“This is what I have for Kim,” he said, according to three people familiar who witnessed the remark.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the incident.
The episode came amid an increasingly acrimonious period that saw Trump boast of the size of his “nuclear button” and threaten to rain “fire and fury” on North Korea. Since then, he and Kim have developed a warm friendship and met for two summits.
But at the time, the casual reference to his nuclear capabilities was another sign of the spiraling rhetoric that marked his early interactions with Kim.
And, to some officials, it was an indication of Trump’s disinterest in the plight of Puerto Ricans, who suffered for months without power and limited resources as their island recovered from the walloping storm.
“There were other topics that were being discussed and my view is that the sole focus of that trip should have been on Puerto Rico,” said Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló in an exclusive interview on Thursday.

CNN

You can read more at the link.

I think President Trump is signaling to the Kim regime it will not be business as usual if they restart a provocation cycle:

President Donald Trump said he’d be very disappointed in Kim Jong Un if reports are accurate that North Korea has begun rebuilding a missile test site it dismantled last year.
“I would be very disappointed if that were happening,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Wednesday. “It is a very early report — we are the ones who put it out — but I would be very, very disappointed in Chairman Kim.” (……)

In a separate report, South Korea’s National Intelligence Service spotted “special activities” with transport vehicles at a North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) research and production site called Sanumdong located in the Pyongyang area, the JoongAng Ilbo newspaper of South Korea reported, citing an unidentified member of parliament’s intelligence committee.
U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton warned North Korea that it must be willing to completely give up its nuclear weapons program or it may face even tougher sanctions.
“If they’re not willing to do it, President Trump has been very clear they’re not getting relief from the crushing economic sanctions that have been imposed on them,” Bolton told the Fox Business Network on Tuesday evening. “And we’ll look at ramping those sanctions up, in fact.”

Bloomberg

You can read more at the link.

It looks like President Trump is not interested in the “pretend denuclearization” that the North Koreans want and instead is committed to pressuring them to really denuclearize by walking away from the summit:

U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un failed to reach an agreement on denuclearization at their summit here in the Vietnamese capital, Thursday.

Ultimately, the breakdown of the summit “was about sanctions,” Trump said in a press conference after the meeting with Kim. 

“It wasn’t a thing to be signing anything today. He (Kim Jong-un) is quite a guy, quite a character. We had some options but at this time, we decided not to do any of the options,” Trump told reporters in a hurriedly arranged press conference after holding extended talks with the North Korean leader.

“Sometimes, you have to walk. This was just of those items. Basically, they (North Korea) wanted the sanctions lifted, and we couldn’t do that. We haven’t given up anything. He wants denuclearization. He just wants to do areas that are less important than what we want.”

Ahead of the conference, the White House said in a statement that dialogue on nuclear disarmament would continue. “Their respective teams look forward to meeting in the future.” But top U.S. officials went on to say that the negotiations will take time.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link, but I have to wonder if the North Koreans misread the Trump administration based off of media coverage? Maybe they thought that with all the negative media and analysts saying Trump was desperate for a deal that they actually believed it; thus they kept pressuring him on sanctions thinking he would fold. If this what the North Koreans were thinking they obviously don’t know President Trump very well.

It seems the one good thing that came out of this summit is that Kim Jong-un has heard for himself from President Trump instead of from surrogates and the media that he is serious about sanctions remaining in place until they commit to real denuclearization.