President Trump said Friday that he has praised North Korean leader Kim Jong-un despite the despot’s human-rights abuses in an effort to protect Americans from Pyongyang’s nuclear threat.
“You know why? Because I don’t want to see a nuclear weapon destroy you and your family,” Trump told a gaggle of reporters on the White House lawn after being asked why he’d had such kind words for Kim.
Trump was roundly criticized for praising the North Korean tyrant in the aftermath of their historic summit meeting earlier this week. The president called the dictator “very smart” and a “great negotiator.”
“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 president continued, citing the millions of residents of Seoul, South Korea’s capital.
North Korea spent much of 2017 threatening the U.S. and mounting showy displays of military might, but the regime has not launched a missile since November.
“Who knows what would have happened?” Trump said. “That should have been solved long before I got there. I did a great job this weekend.”
“He gave us a lot,” the president said of Kim, before promising that we are “well on our way” to denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula. On Wednesday he tweeted that North Korea is “no longer a nuclear threat.”
The agreement signed between the U.S. and the North stipulated that the North will begin dismantling its nuclear weapons permanently in exchange for “security guarantees” from the U.S.
Trump also wants to halt what he calls “war games” in South Korea, which he said are financially draining and not conducive to a good relationship with the North.
“It can become whatever they want,” the president said of the brutal regime. “But there won’t be nuclear weapons, and they won’t be aimed at you and your family.”
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