President Trump said Thursday his administration is proceeding with North Korea “like nothing happened,” days after officials in Pyongyang threatened to call off an upcoming summit between the leaders of both countries.
“North Korea’s actually talking to us about times and everything else as though nothing happened,” Trump told reporters during an Oval Office meeting with NATO’s secretary general. “We have not been told anything. We’re just reading stories like you are.”
North Korea’s vice minister of foreign ministry said in a statement earlier this week that Kim’s meeting with Trump might be off the table after the U.S. resumed its joint military exercises with South Korea. The official also criticized White House national security adviser John Bolton for previously suggesting the administration was using Libya’s disarmament as a “model” for talks with the Kim regime.
Trump dismissed that comparison, saying “the Libyan model is not one that we have at all” in mind during negotiations with North Korea. But Trump appeared to confuse the Libya model of 2003, which dealt with Libya’s nuclear program, with the Libya model of 2011, which was about forcing out Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi .
“This would be Kim Jong Un, where he would be there, he would be running his country. He would be rich,” Trump said, suggesting Kim would not suffer the same fate as Gadhafi, who was assassinated in 2011, years after the country agreed to abandon its nuclear weapons program.
“I think when John Bolton made that statement, he was talking about if we were going to have a problem,” Trump said.
But he also added later, “That model would take place if we don’t make a deal, most likely.”
The president on Thursday said he remains hopeful that a summit with Kim is still in the works, despite Pyongyang’s change of tone earlier this week.
“I want to give everybody the benefit of the doubt,” he said. “I can only say our people are literally dealing with this right now in terms of making arrangements for the meeting. We may have the meeting, we may not have the meeting.”
“If we don’t have it, it would be very interesting,” Trump said.
[Related: Sarah Sanders still ‘hopeful’ Trump, Kim Jong Un summit takes place]