Trump Takes Shot at Hillary and Media After Getting Pestered About N. Korea Summit Preparations
President Donald Trump is set to engage in a summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in Singapore on June 12 to discuss a complete end to their nuclear program and potential peace on the Korean peninsula, which has officially been at a war since the 1950s.
Despite the incredible proposition of hope offered up by the summit, Trump has continued to receive incredible amounts of abuse and criticism from those who underestimate his abilities, or worse, want to see him fail, even as his failure would place our nation at greater risk.
Among those who underestimate Trump is a significant contingent of the liberal media who subscribe to the belief that the president is a rather unintelligent man who has no idea what he is doing and has no business making monumental decisions on the geopolitical stage.
As such, Trump has been berated by criticism that he has not undergone sufficient preparation for the upcoming summit with Kim, as if he should lock himself away for a week’s time to study nothing but North Korea in advance of the high-stakes meeting.
But according to Fox News, Trump just brushed away that particular bit of criticism — and took a stinging shot at failed Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton — while speaking to members of the media while awaiting Marine One’s arrival at the White House to take him to Air Force One, which will transport him to the G7 meeting in Canada.
Trump was asked if he was “serious” about remarks made the day before when he claimed he didn’t need to “prepare very much” for the upcoming summit, reports of which omitted that he had added right after that remark that he’d been “preparing all my life” for just such a high-level meeting.
“I always believe in preparation, but I’ve been preparing all my life,” Trump stated Friday. “You know, these one-week preparations, they don’t work, just ask Hillary what happened to her in the debates.”
That was a pointed reference to reports from 2016 that Clinton had essentially locked herself away from the campaign trail for nearly a week in order to fully prepare for a presidential debate against Trump, a debate that Trump handily won with minimal advance preparation in spite of Clinton’s supposed advantage in preparedness.
Trump then proceeded to call out the “fake news” for perpetuating the story that he was unprepared for his meeting with Kim, and reiterated once again that he had been “preparing all my life.”
The president also spoke briefly about a leaker from the Senate Intelligence Committee staff who’d been arrested and indicted the previous night, and also offered condolences to the families of famed food critic Anthony Bourdain and fashion industry icon Kate Spade, both of whom took their own lives in recent days.
He further discussed how Russia should be brought back into the fold of the G7 group — which used to be the G8 prior to kicking Russia out in 2014 — and said they deserved a seat at the international economic negotiating table, even if such a view would be considered “politically incorrect” these days.
While speaking about Russia, he proclaimed his administration had thus far been “Russia’s worst nightmare,” and took another shot at Clinton by suggesting she wouldn’t have been as hard on our nation’s rival as he has been via his MAGA agenda, which is crushing Russia in terms of energy production and economic improvement.
President Trump also addressed his commutation of the life sentence in prison for Alice Johnson, and suggested more pardons could be forthcoming in the near future — such as champion boxing legend Muhammad Ali, convicted of draft evasion in 1967 — for people who’d, in his view, been treated unfairly or received prison sentences of far greater length than their actual crime committed deserved.
As for the criticism Trump has received for a supposed lack of preparation in advance of his summit with the North Korean leader, those who proffer such criticism fail to accept the fact that Trump is, at his core, a deal-maker and negotiator, who understands inherently how high-stakes meetings work.
Those critics also fail to accept the fact that Trump receives briefings on a near daily basis, and contrary to their assumptions is actually quite intelligent and perceptive, and thus has been “preparing” for the meeting with Kim since he first entered office.
Trump could have locked himself away for a week at Camp David to pore over every single bit of information about North Korea and game out every possible scenario for the summit, like Clinton most likely would have done, but that would have come at the expense of the G7 meeting and all the other things he has done this past week … which also would have drawn criticism from the perpetually anti-Trump media. Go figure.
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