Michael Warren is on vacation this week, and Andrew Egger is filling in for him on White House Watch. Michael will be back in the saddle on July 3.
President Donald Trump will meet with South Korean president Moon Jae-in today, his latest diplomatic meeting focusing on how to deal with Korea’s troublesome neighbors to the north.
President Moon, who was elected last month after his predecessor was impeached, is a liberal who has advocated for a softer diplomatic approach toward North Korea’s bellicose Kim regime in the past. But Moon struck a different tone after he arrived in the U.S. on Wednesday, pledging to stand with America as it pursues the goal of total North Korean nuclear disarmament.
“Together we will achieve the dismantlement of North Korea’s nuclear program, peace on the Korean Peninsula and eventually peace in Northeast Asia,” Moon said during a visit to a Marine Corps base in Virginia.
Earlier on Wednesday, the White House welcomed South Korea’s support and insisted that the United States has only just begun to take a hard economic line on North Korea.
“We are adding pressure and have really only begun to do so,” a White House official told reporters in an on background call. “It’s really the one approach that we haven’t tried yet—acute economic pressure on North Korea. That campaign is only now gathering momentum. And the president is determined to follow through with that and to see how it works.”
Trump and Moon will meet for the first time at the White House Thursday evening, and will hold a joint press conference on Friday.
As Moon’s visit approaches, the White House has walked back some of the president’s more bellicose rhetoric about South Korea. During his campaign, Trump said that South Korea “is a money machine but they pay us peanuts,” adding that the South Koreans “should pay us very substantially for protecting them.”
In contrast, the White House official today said that “South Korea in many respects is the model ally because they are spending somewhere on the order of 2.7 percent of their GDP on their defense. … We shouldn’t view South Korea as somehow laggard on that front.”
The Trump administration’s newfound warmth toward South Korea comes amid cooling relations with China. The White House today said there was “no evidence that [China] was working to reduce the threat” of North Korean belligerence.
Trump’s Travel Ban Takes Effect, But Where’s the Vetting?
The State Department will today begin to enforce the president’s ban on travel from six Muslim-majority countries, following the Supreme Court’s partial lifting of a lower court’s moratorium on Monday.
But the specific criteria by which the ban will be enforced have yet to be released. The Supreme Court ruling said that citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen will be unable to enter the country unless they have a “bona fide relationship” with a U.S. company or citizen. In a press conference on Tuesday, spokesperson Heather Nauert said that the State Department had yet to issue guidance on the exact interpretation of “bona fide relationship.”
“I can tell you in terms of refugees who are already slated to be coming here, we have been in touch with them,” Nauert said. “By that I mean we have advised our refugee resettlement partners overseas that they should currently proceed with the resettlement of refugees who are scheduled to travel to the United States through July the 6th. Beyond that, we are not totally certain how that will work because, again, this is in flux.”
I asked the State Department whether the implementation of this ban would have any impact on their ordinary screening of people entering the country, including the process of “extreme vetting” that President Trump has repeatedly promised will be put into place. The State Department spokesperson deferred to a briefing that will be held Thursday at 12 p.m., but said that the current checks on refugees entering the country were “extensive.”
“Refugees undergo highly rigorous security checks before being approved for resettlement in the United States, including by the Department of State,” the official said. “Extensive interviews, conducted by DHS/U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, are also conducted to verify identity, establish eligibility, and identify any information that could render an applicant inadmissible, to include security-related concerns.”
Trump Remains Optimistic on Healthcare, Skeptical on Media
As the Senate GOP caucus continues to scramble to assemble a health care coalition, President Trump took an optimistic tone on their prospects Wednesday afternoon.
“Healthcare is working along very well,” Trump told reporters while hosting the Chicago Cubs MLB team at the White House. “We’re going to have a great, great surprise.”
The president was cordial with reporters at the event, although he had fired shots at them on Twitter Wednesday morning.
“The failing @nytimes writes false story after false story about me. They don’t even call to verify the facts of a story. A Fake News Joke!” Trump tweeted. “Some of the Fake News Media likes to say that I am not totally engaged in healthcare. Wrong, I know the subject well & want victory for U.S.”
