“He trusts me and I trust him.”
So declared President Donald Trump to ABC’s George Stephanopolous after meeting North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. Even allowing for Trump’s characteristic hyperbole and the niceties of diplomacy, it’s an absurd thing to say about the leader of a regime defined over the last 30 years by its mendacity. And it was one of many bizarre and troubling things to come out of the disastrous Trump-Kim face-to-face meeting in Singapore on June 12.
Trump and Kim signed an agreement committing North Korea to denuclearization and the U.S. to “security guarantees” for North Korea. In substance, the 403-word document, which Trump called “very comprehensive,” doesn’t differ much from the many previous agreements—written and oral—between the two nations. And while it’s possible that Kim Jong-un is suddenly willing to give up the nuclear weapons that won him an audience with the leader of the free world, the greatest difference between this summit and those in the past was the unrestrained optimism of the American side and fulsome praise for the brutal dictator from the U.S. president.
The U.S. president celebrated Kim Jong-un as “very talented” and praised him for running North Korea—home to modern-era concentration camps, mass starvation, widespread state brutality —in a “tough” manner. Trump said he’d “developed a very special bond” with Kim, whom he determined has a “good personality, very smart—a good combination.”
Trump said that while the U.S, would not be removing troops from South Korea as part of this agreement, he’d like to do so in the future. He parroted North Korean talking points about American troop exercises and war games, calling them “provocative” and promising to end them. “We will be stopping the war games, which will save us a tremendous amount of money, unless and until we see that the future negotiation is not going along like it should. But we’ll be saving a tremendous amount of money—plus, I think it’s very provocative.”
As he did on several occasions before the summit Trump declared, with something approaching certainty, that Kim Jong-un would do something no North Korean leader has done in three decades: make good on a promise to end his nuclear program and destroy his weapons. Trump touted the North Korean leader’s “unwavering commitment to the complete denuclearization” of the Korean peninsula. (At the end of the 2005 Six Party talks, for instance, the declaration read: “The DPRK committed to abandoning all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs and returning, at an early date, to the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons and to IAEA safeguards.”) North Korea is a nuclear power. There has been some wavering.
Trump says that history doesn’t concern him. He knows better. “Chairman Kim is on his way back to North Korea. And I know for a fact, as soon as he arrives, he’s going to start a process that’s going to make a lot of people very happy and very safe,” Trump said at his press conference. “I think he wants to get it done. I feel that very strongly.”
By Trump’s own telling, Kim told Trump what he wanted to hear and Trump discovered a deep bond. “He said no other president could have done this. I think he trusts me and I trust him.”
If it was disconcerting to watch Trump’s eagerness to serve as a character witness, in effect, for Kim Jong-un, what he said at the end of his press conference was even more worrisome.
“I honestly think he’s going to do these things,” Trump said of Kim’s promises, before allowing for the possibility that Kim will not, in fact do these things. “I don’t know that I’ll ever admit that I was wrong. I’ll find some kind of excuse.”
This was one of the great concerns about taking the meeting in the first place.
Having treated the meeting itself and the perishable promises of Kim Jong-Un as victories in and of themselves, Trump is unlikely to later admit that he’d been foolish in taking the North Koreans seriously. And beyond the triumphalism in his press conference, the Trump campaign sent out a statement from “Lara Trump, Senior Advisor to Donald J. Trump for President, Inc,” touting the summit not just as a victory but as a win that validates Trump’s election.
It reads:
We can all hope that history records the summit this way. But the certitude in the Trump campaign statement, like the cocky assurances from the president himself, ignores the recent history of negotiations with North Korea.
And another failure, with the president having staked so much of his credibility and that of the United States, could be catastrophic.
