Donald Trump gives hint about Kim Jong-un’s health
Donald Trump has opened up about the mystery of Kim Jong-un’s health, while acontroversial new book says the US President revealed what the North Korean leader thought of Barack Obama.
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Donald Trump has opened up about the state of Kim Jong-un’s health, saying the North Korean leader is in “good health” despite rumours the dictator had been in a coma and was close to death.
Mr Trump tweeted about Kim on Thursday (local time), adding “never underestimate him”.
The US President’s tweet comes after a new book by respected journalist – and the man who brought down Richard Nixon – Bob Woodward unveiled 25 letters between the two leaders.
In the letters, Kim deployed flattery and florid prose that forged his diplomatic courtship of Mr Trump, according to Woodward’s new book, Rage.
The pair’s personal relationship has been a key driver of diplomacy between Washington and Pyongyang, veering from mutual insults and threats of war to a declaration of love from Mr Trump.
In over eighteen hours of recorded conversations with Woodward, the President also claimed that Kim thought former President Barack Obama was an “a**hole”.
In the letters, Kim uses over-the-top wording as he fawns over Mr Trump while they formed a most unusual friendship.
Addressing Mr Trump as “Your Excellency”, Kim’s letters are filled with flattering language and personal comments, according to transcripts released by CNN.
“Even now I cannot forget that moment of history when I firmly held Your Excellency’s hand at the beautiful and sacred location as the whole world watched with great interest and hope to relive the honour of that day,” Kim wrote to Mr Trump on Christmas Day, 2018, following their first meeting in Singapore.
It was the first ever encounter between a North Korean leader and a sitting US president and even after the collapse of their second summit in Hanoi, Kim described Singapore as “a moment of glory that remains a precious memory”.
“I also believe that the deep and special friendship between us will work as a magical force,” Kim added in a June 2019 missive.
Three weeks later the two held a short-notice meeting in the Demilitarised Zone that divides the peninsula.
Ahead of the encounter, Mr Trump wrote to the North Korean leader — the third generation of his family to rule the isolated country — that they had shared “a unique style and a special friendship.”
“Only you and I, working together, can resolve the issues between our two countries and end nearly 70 years of hostility,” Mr Trump wrote. “It will be historic!”
But little progress has been made on efforts to denuclearise North since the pair’s first summit in Singapore, and even US intelligence chiefs have warned Pyongyang is unlikely to ever surrender its nuclear weapons.
Kim Jong Un is in good health. Never underestimate him!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 10, 2020
Mr Trump — who showed Kim a video in Singapore that included images of condominium towers rising from the North Korean coast — likened Kim and his nuclear arsenal to a reluctant home seller.
“It’s really like, you know, somebody that’s in love with a house and they just can’t sell it,” Mr Trump told him, according to the Washington Post.
He insisted that he “gave up nothing” in his three face-to-face meetings with Kim.
Negotiations between Pyongyang and Washington have been deadlocked since the Hanoi summit collapse in February last year.
But even with diplomacy at a standstill, Mr Trump has frequently boasted of receiving “very beautiful” and “excellent” letters from Kim.
A few months after the Singapore meeting, Mr Trump had told a rally of his supporters that the two men had fallen in love.
“No, really, he wrote me beautiful letters, and they’re great letters. We fell in love,” he said.
In the book, Woodward writes that the CIA never conclusively determined who wrote and crafted Kim’s letters, but the agency considered them “masterpieces”.
“The analysts marvelled at the skill someone brought to finding the exact mixture of flattery while appealing to Trump’s sense of grandiosity and being centre stage in history,” he wrote.
US SOUNDS ALARM ON ‘HARD TO DETECT MISSILE’
North Korea may be preparing to unveil a new “harder to detect” long-range missile capable of reaching America, US government officials have warned.
The public display of the solid-fuelled intercontinental-range ballistic missile could come at the Oct. 10 military parade for the 75th-anniversary celebration of the Workers’ Party of Korea, the officials told The National Interest.
“That seems to be the most likely of scenarios based on their history — and it’s what we are expecting, but, of course, we are hoping to be proven wrong,” a senior White House official told the magazine.
“As we have stated on numerous occasions, we strongly encourage North Korea to return to the path of dialogue and negotiation and refrain from all provocations. If they are looking for regime security, that is the only way they can ensure such a goal.”
North Korea currently uses liquid-based fuel missiles, which take a longer time to prepare and can’t be left in a ready-to-launch state because of the combustibility of the chemicals, according to The National Interest.
Solid-fuel missiles, however, can be left in a fuelled state, meaning they can be launched much more quickly. The magazine noted that those projectiles would be “harder to detect and destroy in a military conflict.”
North Korea has gone several months since its last missile test and nearly three years since testing an ICBM or nuclear weapon, reports the New York Post.
The unveiling of a new rocket right before the US presidential election in November could be a show of strength to the winning candidate, the magazine said.
TRUMP TOLD AIDE ‘TO TAKE ONE FOR THE TEAM’
Meanwhile, a former senior White House aide has claimed US President Donald Trump encouraged her to pursue a romantic liaison with Kim during a state summit.
In a soon-to-be-released memoir, Mr Trump’s former Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders claims the US President told her to “go to North Korea and take one for the team”, after Kim Jong-un reportedly winked at her during a 2018 summit held in Singapore.
The then 36-year-old Huckabee Sanders claims Mr Trump was delighted, saying, “Kim Jong-un hit on you! He did! He f***ing hit on you!” the Guardian reports.
Despite no longer working for Mr trump, her memoir, Speaking For Myself: Faith, Freedom, and the Fight of Our Lives Inside the Trump White House is set to offer a staunch defence of Trump and document her two years serving as the White House Press Secretary.
“She’s tough and she’s good … She’s a warrior,” Mr Trump said of Ms Huckabee Sanders upon her resignation.
JONG-UN’S POWER ‘STRONGER THAN EVER’
Meanwhile, the North Korean leader’s hold on power is stronger than ever despite reports he is in ill health, according to a defector with contacts inside Pyongyang.
The 36-year-old ruler has for months been dogged by rumours that he is gravely ill and possibly in a coma — fuelling speculation that his younger sister, Kim Yo-jong, could take control of the brutal regime.
But in an exclusive interview with The New York Post this week, North Korean dissident Yeonmi Park, 26, said the strongman isn’t going anywhere.
“I still have contacts in North Korea and people in North Korea giving me information,” she said from her home in Chicago.
“We can agree that Kim Yo-jong is not taking over North Korea and I don’t think that is in her interest. Kim Jong-un is very much in power and he’s not dying anytime soon,” she said.
Park, who escaped the regime with her mother at the age of 13, said whenever a previous ruler had been in ill health, the first thing they did was secure a successor.
The fact that Kim has not executed his younger sister, unlike his uncle and half-brother, means he doesn’t consider her a threat, Park, an activist and outspoken critic of the dictatorship, said.
“Kim Il-sung prepared Kim Jong-il for decades to be his successor and made it very clear from the beginning, ‘This is my son and he’s going to lead the country’ and that took more than 10 years — almost 20 years,” Park said of the country’s first exchange of power in 1994.
“Before Kim Jong-il died, it wasn’t like one day Kim Jong-un took over. Kim Jong-il made sure his son was known to the North Korean people and it was clear that he was the next heir.”
“He prepared him for at least three years beforehand,” Park said of Kim Jong-un’s ascension to power in 2011.
“I’m sure if Kim Jong-un’s health is bad that he would announce his sister to be the next successor, but direct from my North Korean source, that is not the case. He’s not anywhere near to being replaced.”
Media first began reporting that Kim had either died during a botched operation or was in a vegetative state in a coma in April.
But he appeared to be in fine health during a rare public appearance last week when he visited a western coastal area of North Korea hit by Typhoon Bavi.
Kim Yo-jong, 32, has vanished from public view and not been seen since July 27 – at the height of the leadership – leading South Korean media to speculate the paranoid tyrant may have purged her.
But Park said there were multiple reasons why all these reports are untrue, and said Kim was hiding out to avoid becoming infected with the coronavirus.
“North Korea is a very Confucius country. We respect the elders, the hierarchy. It’s not like America where anyone can step up and do things, we have our tradition,” she explained of the secretive country.
“Kim Yo-jong is not going to get any respect if she one day she just says, ‘I’m going to replace him.’”
Park pointed to the execution of Kim’s uncle Jang Song-thaek in 2013 and his half brother Kim Jong-nam at a Kuala Lumpur airport in 2017, saying those men posed real threats to Jong-un’s grip on power.
“Because there’s no two powers that can coexist, Kim Jong-un had to get rid of his uncle in a brutal way. Why did he get rid of his brother? Because of the same reason,” Park said.
“He cannot have anyone who can possibly threaten him while he’s in power. The reason why Kim Yo-jong is still OK and in public is because she has no chance to replace Jim Jong-un right now,” she said.
KIM ‘VINDICTIVE’ ABOUT RIVALS AS SISTER GOES MISSING
But Jong-un is said to have taken offence to his sister’s rising profile amid rumours on his health, and that Yo-jong has long been referred to as her brother’s “de facto second-in-command,” according to Chosun Ilbo.
North Korea expert Professor Nam Sung-wook told the Chosun Ilbo that Kim Yo-jong’s increasing profile could actually be her undoing, according to the New York Post.
“In the past, anyone was deprived of their position the moment they were described as the number two person in the North,” the Korea University educator said.
“There must be a semblance of checks and balances, although Kim Yo-jong is a family member,” he said, adding that it remains possible that she decided on her own to take a back seat.
Yo-jong was last seen when she stood beside her brother last month as he gave commemorative pistols to military leaders on the 67th anniversary of the Korean War armistice. But she did not appear in state-sanctioned photos released earlier this week of Kim at a high-level meeting to discuss the COVID-19 pandemic and prepare for a typhoon.
The photos emerged after a former South Korean official claimed the dictator had fallen into a coma.
His sister has also been a no-show at other meetings this summer, though she is now an alternate member of the Politburo, the senior body of North Korea’s ruling party, CNN reported.
Experts have said these absences are unusual, but could be explained by her attending to other business, the outlet reported.
NEW PHOTOS SHOW ‘HEALTHY’ KIM
The newly released photos of Jong-un show a healthy-looking leader, and according to the New York Post, were syndicated through the Associated Press, which noted that independent journalists weren’t given access to the event and that the date of the images could not be independently verified.
The meeting reportedly assessed “some defects in the state emergency anti-epidemic work for checking the inroads of the malignant virus,” KCNA said in a statement.
North Korea has not reported any confirmed cases of COVID-19, but Kim Jong-un said last month that the virus “could be said to have entered” the country, and issued a lockdown order after a man was reported to have symptoms. Test results on the man were inconclusive, according to the World Health Organisation.
The meeting also discussed state emergency measures on preventing crop damage and casualties from Typhoon Bavi, which is expected to wallop the country in the coming days.
North Korea’s economy has taken a hit from recent border closures and flood damage.
Originally published as Donald Trump gives hint about Kim Jong-un’s health