President Donald Trump says his deal with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un will save tens of millions of people from a potential nuclear war. Now he just has to get everyone else on board.
Frustrated with lukewarm backing from congressional Republicans, criticism from Democratic opponents and skepticism from allies and the media, Trump made a stop on the North Lawn of the White House to promote his agreement with Kim and challenge the blow back that it’s vague and lacking in clear objectives, according to a report by Global News.
The surprise appearance Friday on “Fox & Friends,” followed by a combative round of questions with reporters, came days after Trump returned from the Singapore summit expecting a hero’s welcome and tweeting that the world now could “sleep well.”
Trump, who prides himself as a master deal-maker, feels the agreement represents a major step toward solving an intractable foreign policy problem. He has been grumbling that not everyone agrees.
Trump’s frustrations are all the more notable now during the honeymoon phase of the deal, when goodwill has yet to be tempered by reality. The U.S. goal of complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization, even in the most optimistic case, probably will take years – and that’s assuming North Korea won’t violate the accord, as it has every previous nuclear agreement.
The president is facing questions about his public embrace of Kim and the North Korean’s autocratic leadership style, including what Trump said was a joke about the obedience of the autocratic Kim’s advisers. Trump said he was doing what is necessary for peace.
“I don’t want to see a nuclear weapon destroy you and your family,” Trump told reporters. He added: “If you’re fair, when I came in, people thought we were probably going to war with North Korea. … If we did, millions of people would have been killed.”
The joint statement signed this past week by Trump and Kim promises they will work toward a denuclearized Korean Peninsula, but includes no details on how or when weapons might be eliminated or even reduced. The summit marked the first meeting between a U.S. and North Korean leader in six decades of hostility and did mark a reduction in tensions from last fall, when Trump and Kim were trading insults that raised the spectre of war.
