UN-controllable
Aides urged Prez: Don’t rip Kim before world
STRANGE DAYS indeed. President Trump delivered a rambling and meandering speech on Friday, pontificating for nearly 90 minutes on a plethora of topics and dropping an obscenity in the process. Trump, stumping for GOP Senate candidate Luther Strange in Huntsville, Ala., used some salty language as he expressed his belief that NFL players should be cut for protesting the national anthem, referring to Colin Kaepernick (inset). “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, get that son of a b---h off the field right now. He is fired,” Trump said. “Total disrespect of our heritage, a total disrespect of everything that we stand for.” During his WASHINGTON — Senior aides to President Trump repeatedly warned him not to deliver a personal attack on North Korea’s leader at the United Nations this week, saying insulting the young despot in such a prominent venue could irreparably escalate tensions and shut off any chance for negotiations to defuse the nuclear crisis.
Trump’s derisive description of Kim Jong Un as “Rocket Man on a suicide mission” and his threat to “totally destroy” North Korea were not in a speech draft that several senior officials reviewed and vetted on Monday, the day before Trump gave his first address to the UN General Assembly, two U.S. officials said.
Some of Trump’s top aides, including National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, had argued for months against making the attacks on North Korea’s leader personal, warning it could backfire.
But Trump felt compelled to take a harder line.
Some advisers now worry that the escalating war of words has pushed the impasse with North Korea into a new and dangerous phase that threatens to derail the months-long effort to squeeze Pyongyang’s economy through sanctions to force Kim (photo) to the negotiating table.
A detailed CIA psychological profile of Kim, who is in his early 30s and who took power in December 2011, assesses hour-and-a-half diatribe, Trump also kept up his heated rhetoric regarding North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, using the name “little rocket man” for the rogue nation’s leader Kim Jong Un.
“We can’t have mad men out there shooting rockets all over the place,” he said.
A day earlier, Pyongyang threatened to test a hydrogen bomb over the Pacific in response to Trump’s continued barbs and economic sanctions.
The President praised Strange throughout his speech, but also said that should former Alabama chief justice Roy Moore beat out his pick in the Republican runoff, he’d be in his corner.
“By the way, both are good men, both good men,” he said. “Luther is going to win easily, and Roy is going to have a hard time winning. But I will be backing him if he wins.” that Kim has a massive ego and reacts harshly and sometimes lethally to insults and perceived slights. It also says that the dynastic leader — Kim is the grandson of the communist country's founder, Kim Il Sung, and son of its next leader, Kim Jong Il — views himself as inseparable from the North Korean state. As predicted, Kim took the Trump jibes personally and especially chafed at the fact that Trump mocked him in front of 200 presidents, prime ministers, monarchs and diplomats at the UN. Kim volleyed insults back at Trump in an unprecedented personal statement Thursday, calling Trump “a mentally deranged U.S. dotard,” and a “gangster” who had to be tamed “with fire.”
Kim’s foreign minister, Ri Yong-ho, threatened to respond with “the most powerful detonation,” a hydrogen bomb test in the Pacific Ocean, according to South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency.
Trump lobbed another broadside Friday, tweeting that Kim “is obviously a madman” who starves and kills his own people and “will be tested like never before!”
John Park, a specialist on Northeast Asia at Harvard’s Kennedy School, said the tit-fortat insults have created a “new reality” and likely have shut off any chance of starting talks to freeze or roll back North Korea’s nuclear program.