Day 489: Trump hedges on North Korea meeting, looks for someone to blame, picks China
Just a week after everyone was forced to pump the brakes on proactively awarding Donald Trump the Nobel Peace Prize — 18 House Republicans formally nominated him — a planned meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un might not even happen at all now.
With South Korean president Moon Jae-in sitting next to him in the Oval Office, Trump said, “There’s a chance, there’s a very substantial chance that it won’t work out. I don’t want to waste a lot of time. And I’m sure he doesn’t want to waste a lot of time. So there’s a very substantial chance that it won’t work out and that’s OK. That doesn’t mean that it won’t work out over a period of time.”
Trump — never one to take any sort of loss in stride — needed someone to blame and picked one of his favorite bogeymen: China.
Trump told reporters he noticed a change in Kim Jong Un’s attitude after the North Korean leader met with Chinese President Xi Jinping a second time. Calling Xi a “world-class poker player,” Trump said he thought things changed after the meeting. “I can’t say that I’m happy about it,” Trump said.
To recap, Trump: 1) with no preconditions and a very short time frame, randomly accepted a meeting with North Korea; 2) was nominated by Republicans for the Nobel Prize simply for saying yes to a meeting that he had no plan for; 3) continued to promote the meeting and announced it would occur in Singapore on June 12; 4) worried many aides with an over-eagerness to make any deal, no matter the terms; 5) saw his National Security Advisor, John Bolton, publicly declare that North Korea must completely denuclearize for a deal to happen; 6) saw North Korea, by name, rebuke and lambaste Bolton; 7) had to distance himself from Bolton’s comments; 8) announced a deal might not happen at all because Kim met with the Chinese.
489 days in, 973 to go
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