Don sees ‘brilliant’ hope, revives Kim meet

AIDES IN the United States and North Korea were scrambling Sunday to salvage a high-stakes summit just days after President Trump terminated the talks amid tough talk from his counterpart.

Trump’s team and a coalition from North Korea were working behind the scenes to put together a joint agenda by June 12, according to reports.

The State Department said earlier that a team was in Panmunjom, which straddles the border inside the demilitarized zone, or DMZ, separating North and South Korea.

“Our United States team has arrived in North Korea to make arrangements for the Summit between Kim Jong Un and myself,” Trump tweeted Sunday. “I truly believe North Korea has brilliant potential and will be a great economic and financial Nation one day. Kim Jong Un agrees with me on this. It will happen!”

Trump withdrew Thursday from the planned June 12 Singapore summit with Kim, but he quickly said it could get back on track.

Trump, in calling off the hotly anticipated sitdown with Kim , wrote the North Korean leader and blamed “open hostility” from Pyongyang for the cancellation. The U.S. and North Korea have been hostile to each other for decades.

But since then, the White House has gone back and forth on whether the meeting will in fact happen.

Sung Kim, the U.S. ambassador to the Philippines who was formerly ambassador to South Korea and a nuclear negotiator with the North, is leading the preparations, according to The Washington Post.

A separate advance team is also traveling to Singapore to make logistical preparations for a possible meeting.

Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in had a surprise twohour meeting Saturday, and Moon said his northern counterpart is still committed to “complete denuclearization.” He said both Korean leaders agreed the summit with Trump should go forward.

South Korea, which has acted as a mediator between Kim and Trump, had been blindsided by the decision to cancel.

Earlier Sunday, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said North Korea would never get rid of its nuclear weapons — and Kim’s conciliatory gestures to the international community are just a “show.”

“I remain convinced that he does not want to denuclearize, in fact he will not denuclearize,” Rubio, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on ABC’s “This Week.”

Rubio (below) dismissed recent concessions by the North Koreans, including releasing three Americans who had been held captive by the regime and blowing up a site used for nuclear testing.

“It’s all a show. It’s a show,” he said. “Released three Americans that were innocently there, blew up a facility that was probably already damaged . ... Plus here’s the bigger point: The facility he

blew up was a testing site. He can test (nuclear weapons) anywhere.”

Rubio credited the flip-flopping with throwing the North Korean regime “off balance.”

“They are usually the ones that out there doing this sort of dramatic action and this sort of unpredictable action that set everybody off,” he said. “The President has given him a taste of his own medicine.”

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden also said Sunday he does not believe that a dismantling of the North Korean nuclear arsenal will happen.

“These folks are not going to get rid of all their nuclear weapons,” he told “This Week,” adding that Trump should set a more modest goal if he goes ahead with the sitdown.

“If President Trump’s brand, and that’s the right word here, going into this meeting demands something like that, this is going to end up in a very bad place,” Hayden said.

“I think the realistic expectation for the meeting is that you do something at the beginning, not the end of a process, that you begin to stabilize the Korean problem, not solve it.”