Sen. Graham Eyes Trump for Historic Honor with Denuclearization on the Table
South Carolina senator and one-time Trump rival Lindsey Graham thinks a significant honor may soon be in order for the president following the historic summit between the leaders of North and South Korea.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in met at the truce village of Panmunjon on Friday and confirmed their goal of “a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula through complete denuclearization.”
If North and South Korea do truly make peace and the peninsula is denuclearized, President Trump should receive the Nobel Peace Prize, the senator contended.
“What happened? Donald Trump convinced North Korea and China he was serious about bringing about change,” Graham said. “We’re not there yet, but if this happens, President Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.”
Graham argued that Trump was vital player in the peace process up to this point, since he was able to impress upon Kim that “we will take you down if you keep trying to build missiles to hit the American homeland.”
“And I think they convinced North Korea and China that Trump is serious.
“A word of warning: the worst thing Kim Jong Un could do is play Trump,” he continued. “To go through all these motions and go back to the old way of doing business, Donald Trump will not tolerate being played.
“We’re either going to have peace or we’re going to have a war now because Kim Jong Un has made a mistake if he’s not serious,” Graham added.
Graham isn’t the only one who is giving significant recognition to Trump for his hand in the historic Korean meeting.
“Clearly, credit goes to President Trump,” South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in Seoul. “He’s been determined to come to grips with this from day one.”
In an analysis piece by Stephen Collinson, CNN also admitted Trump’s role in bringing Kim to the negotiating table. “Any way you cut it, President Donald Trump is entitled to significant credit for Friday’s historic opening between the two Koreas,” Collinson wrote.
“Whether he deserves as much as he’s claiming or whether he’s wise to bullishly declare a new era of denuclearized peace on the peninsula seems much more doubtful,” he noted. “Still, the summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in keeps alive the possibility of a legacy win for Trump that would rank as one of the top presidential achievements since World War II.”
President Trump is set to meet with Kim Jong Un at the end of May, and has announced that they are deciding between a few meeting locations.
.@POTUS: "The United States in the past was played like a fiddle." pic.twitter.com/HxjoYszxJi
— FOX Business (@FoxBusiness) April 27, 2018
“We’re not going to be played,” Trump said Friday of his talks with North Korea. “We’re going to hopefully make a deal, if we don’t that’s fine.”
“In the past, the United States was played like a fiddle… that’s not happening to us.”
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