White House Backs Off Meeting With Kim Jong-Un

March 9, 2018 Donald Trump, North Korea

That took about 18 hours:

The White House says the president won’t hold a highly-anticipated meeting with North Korea’s leader unless he takes “concrete steps” that match promises made ahead of the talks. Spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders says North Korea has made promises to denuclearize, stop its nuclear and missile testing and allow joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises. Sanders says President Donald Trump won’t have the meeting “until we see concrete actions that match the words and the rhetoric of North Korea.” No time or place has been chosen. No sitting U.S. president has ever met with a North Korean leader.

Jonathan Chait tees off at New York Magazine:



Trump had no real idea that North Korea has always wanted a face-to-face meeting with the U.S. president, and the U.S. has always imposed conditions. That would certainly be the logical interpretation of this account, given that, in the last week, Trump has confused North Korea with the other, extremely different South Korea, and demanded a laughably tiny $1 billion trade concession from China when he was supposed to demand $100 billion. It certainly appears Trump believed, in the moment, that North Korea had not been interested in a meeting until then, so he needed to take the deal before they changed their mind. Whatever. Art of the Deal.

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