Day 768: Trump today: North Korea should denuclearize; Trump in July: North Korea agreed to denuclearize
Donald Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un have a peculiar relationship. Trump first antagonized Kim by calling him “little rocket man,” but later announced that they “fell in love” when in Singapore and tried to send him an Elton John CD.
That wild vacillation has carried over to facts too.
Upon landing in Hanoi for a second meeting with Kim, Trump announced that Pyongyang could thrive “if it would denuclearize.”
“If it would denuclearize” is obviously saying what everyone knows: North Korea hasn’t yet denuclearized.
What’s odd is Trump — despite the U.S. intelligence community openly claiming otherwise — has professed many, many times that Pyongyang has already denuclearized. Upon arriving back in the U.S. from his and Kim’s first summit, Trump celebrated, “[t]here is no longer a Nuclear Threat [sic] from North Korea.”
A week later, as widespread skepticism of the efficacy of the summit continued, Trump changed his rhetoric to even more forceful. He categorized an agreement that objectively changed none of the status quo to a full “denuclearization deal with North Korea.”
Three weeks later, he again touted the “denuclearization of North Korea.”
To be clear, everyone saw what was agreed to by Trump and Kim. No one thought it was an actual denuclearization deal. Pyongyang made no movement to give up any of their nuclear weapons or disable their nuclear facilities. (They did, however, made a big show of blowing up some of the entrances to a test site. They did not let independent investigators examine the scene.) However, Trump was desperate to spin, spin, spin, so he claimed it was a bona fide agreement that would see Kim throw away their weapons.
But now Trump is freely admitting that there never was a denuclearization deal. And if history is any indication, Trump will soon claim that the nations have agreed that North Korea will scrap their nuclear weapons.
768 days in, 694 to go
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