Trump takes credit for korea's summit

President WASHINGTON — Donald Trump claimed credit Friday for a historic inter-Korean summit and insisted that the United States was “not going to be played” by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Trump said the U.S. had narrowed down to two or three locations his planned meeting with Kim. The U.S. president pushed back against critics who doubt the North Korean dictator is really willing to give up the nuclear weapons his nation took decades acquiring.

“Idon’t think he’s everhad this enthusiasm for somebody, for them wanting to make a deal,” Trump said in the Oval Offiffice as hemet German Chancellor Angela Merkel .“We’re not going to be played, OK. We’re going to hopefully make a deal. The United States in the past has been played like afifiddle.”

“That’s not happening to us. We will, I think, come up with a solution. And if we don’t, we will leave the room,” Trump said.

He spoke hours after Kim became the fifirst North Korean leader to visit south of the demarcation line between the two Koreas, meeting with President Moon Jae- in. They pledged in a joint statement to seek a formal end to the Korean War by year’s end and to rid their peninsula of nuclear weapons, without specifying how it would be achieved.

“When I began, people were saying that was an impossibility,” Trump said earlier during an appearance with U.S. athletes who participated in this year’s Winter Olympics in South Korea. “They said there were two alternatives: Let them have what they have, or go towar. And now we have a much better alternative than anybody thought even possible .”

The Kim-Moon meeting was the culmination of a rapprochement inspired by the February games.

Responsibility for turning a bold vision for peace into reality will in large part rest with Trump, who has often vowed to succeed where his predecessors as president have failed in eliminating the North Korean nuclear threat to America. His former CIA director and new Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, met Kim four weeks ago in North Korea to prepare the ground for the Trump-Kim summit, tentatively scheduled for May or early June.

“I did get the sense that he was serious,” Pompeo told reporter sat NATO headquarters in Brussels, where he was making his fifirst trip as top U.S. diplomat.

Pompeo said the economic pressure on North Korea spear headed by Trump“has led (Kim) to believe that it is in his best interests to come to the table to talk about denuclearization.”