President Donald Trump dismissed his national security advisers’ concerns about North Korea’s recent missile launches and bragged that dictator Kim Jong Un “smiled” and made fun of 2020 Democratic candidate Joe Biden.
“North Korea fired off some small weapons, which disturbed some of my people, and others, but not me,” Trump tweeted. “I have confidence that Chairman Kim will keep his promise to me, & also smiled when he called Swampman Joe Biden a low IQ individual, & worse. Perhaps that’s sending me a signal?”
After the tweet, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said on Meet the Press, “I think they agree in their assessment of former Vice President Joe Biden.”
“As Vice President Biden said in Philadelphia, Donald Trump 'embraces dictators and tyrants like Putin and Kim Jung Un' while alienating our closest allies. That is antithetical to who we are and it has to change,” Biden spokesman Andrew Bates replied in a statement.
Trump sides with Kim over John Bolton:
Trump’s tweet came after his national security adviser, John Bolton, told reporters that there was “no doubt” that North Korea violated United Nations Security Council resolutions by firing short-range ballistic missiles.
“My people think it could have been a violation,” Trump later told reporters. “I view it differently.”
“I view it as a man — perhaps he wants to get attention, and perhaps not, who knows,” Trump said of Kim. “It doesn’t matter. All I know is that there have been no nuclear tests, there have been no ballistic missiles going out, no long-range missiles going out.”
“He knows that with nuclear, that’s never going to happen, only bad can happen,” he added. “He understands, he is a very smart man, he gets it.”
After Trump’s statement, North Korea ripped Bolton.
An unidentified foreign ministry spokesman told a state news agency that Bolton is a “war monger” and a “defective human product,” according to Reuters.
“It will be fit to call Bolton not a security adviser striving for security but a security-destroying adviser who is wrecking peace and security,” the spokesman said according to The Associated Press. “It is not at all strange that perverse words always come out from the mouth of a structurally defective guy, and such a human defect deserves an earlier vanishing.”
Japanese PM disagrees:
The tweets came amid Trump’s visit to Japan and despite angling to get on Trump’s good side Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe strongly disagreed with Trump’s assessment.
“On May 9th, North Korea launched short-range ballistic missiles, and that’s a violation of the U.N. Security Council’s resolution, so, as I have been saying, this is quite a regrettable act,” he said, according to The Washington Post.
