Kim could ‘visit the White House’
Trump ‘admires’ dictator following their summit
‘Liked how Kim’s aides obeyed him’
DONALD Trump yesterday said that he was impressed with how enthusiastically aides to North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un obeyed him during their summit this week in Singapore.
After telling the audience of ‘Fox & Friends’ that a White House visit with Kim ‘could happen’, the US president complimented the tyrant’s authoritarian leadership style.
‘Hey, he’s the head of a country. And I mean he is the strong head – don’t let anyone think anything different. He speaks, and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same!’
Trump was gesturing to the White House behind him as he commented, suggesting ‘my people’ referred to his staff, not the overall US population. Trump gave the Fox News Channel show an unscheduled 30-minute interview on the North Lawn of the White House after disappearing from public view on Thursday, his 72nd birthday.
Minutes later, amid a shouting scrum of journalists clustered around him as he walked back to the West Wing, the president was asked if he was serious about being impressed with Kim’s autocratic management style.
‘I’m kidding,’ he scolded. ‘You don’t understand sarcasm.’
Then the president demanded to know the inquisitive reporter’s media affiliation. ‘Who are you with?’ he asked. ‘CNN,’ came the reply – the TV outlet Trump most loves to hate.
‘You’re with CNN!’ Trump boomed. ‘Hey, you are the worst!’
Kim’s extraordinarily attentive underlings might not get Trump’s sense of humour about staff etiquette. The 34-year-old despot has ordered the execution of at least 30 high-ranking officials in the past seven years, and was behind the deadly nerve-agent poisoning of his half-brother Kim Jong-nam last year.
A South Korean think tank, the Institute for National Security Strategy, believes Kim’s purge of government officials has been much larger, numbering at least 140 people of the more than 300 he has ordered killed to date.
Kim’s defence ministers, in particular, tend to have short shelf-lives – he purged five of them in the first five years of his reign.
Most of his high-profile victims have met their ends via firing squad, like top education minister Kim Yong-jin in 2016. He was put to death for displaying a ‘bad attitude’ during the country’s Supreme People’s Assembly meetings.
His crime consisted of having ‘bad sitting posture’ in front of his country’s ruling despot. He was interrogated and found to be an ‘anti-revolutionary agitator’.
In May 2015, Kim had Defence Minister Hyon Yong-chol blown to bits with an anti-aircraft gun at a Pyongyang military school, in front of an audience that included members of his family. He had dozed off during a ceremony.
In 2017 five senior officials from the State Security Department faced the same fate for issuing what Kim called ‘false’ reports that were critical of his regime.
Three years earlier, Kim ordered his deputy public security minister O Sang-hon tied to a stake and burned alive with a flamethrower.
Less than a year after taking power upon his father’s death in 2011, he became enraged by army vice minister Kim Chol ‘disrespecting’ him – and had him executed on the spot.
Trump is in the position of having to negotiate with Kim, now armed with weapons of mass destruction. The US president insisted yesterday that America now has ‘a really great relationship for the first time ever’ with the hermit kingdom, and told a reporter that he agreed to Tuesday’s Singapore summit because that way ‘there won’t be nuclear weapons and they won’t be aimed at you and your families’.
The White House’s openness with Pyongyang is a marked contrast from what the Obama administration called a philosophy of ‘strategic patience.’
The Trump doctrine has so far consisted of a ‘maximum pressure’ campaign that the administration says forced Kim to the bargaining table.
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