Donald Trump abruptly walked away from the North Korea summit, after realizing Kim Jong-Un wasn’t ready to strike the deal Trump wanted. Before skipping a scheduled lunch with the North Korean dictator and hopping on a plane back to Washington DC, Trump said:
“Basically, they wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety. They were willing to denuke a large portion of the areas that we wanted, but we couldn’t give up all of the sanctions for that.”
President Trump says he has not committed to holding a 3rd Trump-Kim summit, and declines to answer when asked if he now accepts North Korea as a nuclear power.
"Sometimes you have to walk”: President Trump’s summit with Kim Jong Un, meant to demonstrate his diplomatic gamble with North Korea is working, instead ended with no joint agreement after Kim insisted all US sanctions be lifted on his country https://t.co/imz4sIbRF8 pic.twitter.com/eUIcSGCuvQ
— CNN (@CNN) February 28, 2019
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) February 28, 2019
Reuters writes:
The collapse of the talks will likely raise questions about the Trump administration’s preparations and about what some critics see as his cavalier style of personal diplomacy.
Since their first summit in Singapore in June, Trump has stressed his good chemistry with Kim, but there have been questions about whether the bonhomie could move them beyond summit pageantry to substantive progress on eliminating a North Korean nuclear arsenal that threatens the United States.
Watch what Trump said above (via CBS).
