Day 663: Trump keeps getting humiliated by North Korea
His “great negotiation skills” continue to be exposed as a farce as Kim Jong-un continues building nuclear program.
Despite a skeptical nation, Donald Trump swore good would come out of June 2018 meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. That meeting disastrously saw Trump salute a North Korean general, allowed Kim to get a long-desired photo op and generated tons of propaganda material for the reclusive nation. Meanwhile, the U.S. got…well, not much.
Trump claimed that North Korea agreed to denuclearize and any threat was over. However, a deal beyond preexisting platitudes was never signed. Why was nothing with actually teeth reduced to writing and executed by both nations? Because according to Trump, the parties ran out of time.
Still, that didn’t stop him from pretending that the world won big from the summit.
Except that was a lie and everyone knew it.
Trump’s National Security Advisor, John Bolton, admitted that North Korea wasn’t going to denuclearize. Trump’s Elton John CD featuring “Rocketman” didn’t cause Kim to suddenly disband his nuclear weapons program out of friendship. Many reports indicated that — contrary to Trump’s promises — Kim wasn’t just not ceasing North Korea’s nuclear program, he was actively building more sites.
Now, there’s another such damning report from The New York Times.
North Korea is moving ahead with its ballistic missile program at 16 hidden bases that have been identified in new commercial satellite images, a network long known to American intelligence agencies but left undiscussed as President Trump claims to have neutralized the North’s nuclear threat.
The satellite images suggest that the North has been engaged in a great deception: It has offered to dismantle a major launching site — a step it began, then halted — while continuing to make improvements at more than a dozen others that would bolster launches of conventional and nuclear warheads.
North Korea’s actions are so brazen that while building, they’re getting past U.S. sanctions. Because of their promise to denuclearize, and Trump’s need to pretend that those promises are being followed through on, North Korea is able to resuming trade with both China and Russia. This is vitally important to a nation that was brought to its knees by sanctions under Barack Obama.
Trump, meanwhile, pushed back on the Times’ story in the weirdest way: he confirmed it.
He says the news is fake, but also said that the U.S. “fully know[s] about the sites” discussed in the piece.
In other words, Trump wants to claim that the Times’ story is wrong in the sense that the U.S. government knows exactly what’s going on as North Korea develops more sites. But he also wants to continue to claim that North Korea is denuclearizing as a result of a June 2018 agreement.
Both can’t be true.
So when he says he’ll be the first to let everyone know if things go bad, he’s already been proven to be a liar since he’s been scooped by the free press.
663 days in, 799 to go
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