After their sabre-rattling of the past several months, during which they have traded some of the choicest personal invectives, President Donald Trump on Saturday said he was open to the idea of speaking with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, albeit not without conditions.
“Absolutely I would do that. No problem with that at all,” Trump told reporters at Camp David in Maryland, when asked if he would be willing to engage in phone talks with Kim as a follow-up to the upcoming talks between North Korea and South Korea over the Winter Olympics.
Trump, who last September mocked Kim as “Rocket Man” at the UN General Assembly and the latter retorted by calling him a “mentally ranged US dotard”, said he always believed in talking.
For starters, however, he welcomed the North-South Korea talks slated for Tuesday, commenting: “look, right now, they’re talking Olympics. It’s a start. It’s a big start.” He even went on to claim credit for the upcoming meeting, suggesting that if not for his tough stance, they wouldn’t be talking even about Olympics right now.
“I would love to see it go far beyond the Olympics, absolutely,” Trump said, adding, “And at the appropriate time, we’ll get involved. But I like the idea of their dealing on the Olympics. That should be between those two countries.”
When a reporter quizzed if there would be no prerequisites for coming to the table and talking with Kim, Trump snapped: “That’s not what I said, at all.” The US, he said, has a “very firm stance”, in an apparent reference to the long-held position about denuclearising the Korean peninsula.
“If we can come up with a very peaceful and very good solution — we’re working on it with Rex (Secretary of State Rex Tillerson) and we’re working on it with a lot of people — if something can happen and something can come out of those talks, that would be a great thing for all of humanity,” he said.
Tillerson’s earlier proposals for a diplomatic solution to the Korean nuclear issue had only met with frowns from Trump, who had then held them to be an exercise in futility.
Trump, who held the impromptu news conference during a retreat with Republican lawmakers and his Cabinet colleagues, took a fresh round of dismissive shots at the explosive new book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trup White House”, particularly over suggestions about his mental state and intellectual ability.
Trump, who had earlier in the day tweeted that he was not just smart but “a very stable genius”, told a questioner: “I went to the best colleges for college….Came out and made billions and billions of dollars. Became one of the top businesspeople. Went to television and, for ten years, was a tremendous success, as you probably have heard. Ran for President one time and won.”
In his tweet, Trump slammed the Democrats and the liberal media, saying, “Now that Russian collusion, after one year of intense study, has proven to be a total hoax on the American public, the Democrats and their lapdogs, the Fake News Mainstream Media, are taking out the old Ronald Reagan playbook and screaming mental stability and intelligence.”
“Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart. Crooked Hillary Clinton also played these cards very hard and, as everyone knows, went down in flames. I went from VERY successful businessman, to top TV Star, to President of the United States (on my first try),” he tweeted, adding: “I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius…and a very stable genius at that!”