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Secretary of State Mike Pompeo should know better than to contradict anything that President Donald Trump has said publicly.
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The White House is practically littered with the metaphorical carcasses of former staffers and cabinet members who dared to stray from Trump’s uniquely deluded world view.
Yet, there was Pompeo speaking with CNN’s Jake Tapper this morning on “State of the Union,” replying to Tapper’s question about whether North Korea was still a nuclear threat to the U.S. and the world with an answer directly opposed to Trump’s own tweeted conclusion about the peril posed by the atomic weapons in the isolated nation’s arsenal.
“Do you think North Korea remains a nuclear threat?” CNN’s Tapper asked Trump’s latest Secretary of State.
Pompeo replied, “Yes.”
“But the President said he doesn’t,” Tapper quickly pointed out.
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“That’s not what he said … I know precisely what he said,” Pompeo said.
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Tapper had the goods to prove his assertion, replying “He tweeted: ‘There is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea,” referring to these tweets that Trump sent out shortly after the last summit between the two leaders.
Just landed – a long trip, but everybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office. There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea. Meeting with Kim Jong Un was an interesting and very positive experience. North Korea has great potential for the future!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 13, 2018
Before taking office people were assuming that we were going to War with North Korea. President Obama said that North Korea was our biggest and most dangerous problem. No longer – sleep well tonight!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 13, 2018
Pompeo scrambled to come up with a response that could cover his butt and keep him in the president’s good graces.
“What he said was that the efforts that had been made in Singapore — this commitment that Chairman Kim made — have substantially taken down the risk to the American people. It’s the mission of the Secretary of State and the President of the United States to keep American people secure. We’re aiming to achieve that,” Pompeo said, straining his diplomatic skills to the max in his reinterpretation of a direct quote saying something quite different.
Pompeo’s backpedaling from Trump’s undeniable assertion of no nuclear threat from North Korea to his own statement that this week’s summit was aimed at achieving “a demonstrable, verifiable” step toward denuclearization was a clumsy and obvious admission of the failure of the first round of talks to achieve any substantial results.
Luckily, with North Korea’s failure to make sufficient progress towards eliminating its nuclear weapons program, UN sanctions against the rogue regime remain in place, albeit reportedly widely ignored by both Russia and China. Pompeo reiterated the Trump administration’s commitment to keeping sanctions in place until “full, verified denuclearization” is completed.
Whatever the outcome of this week’s summit between President Trump and Kim Jong Un, you can expect that the president will be bragging about the results and tweeting out self-congratulations once it is completed — and perhaps soliciting other world leaders to add their names to his nomination request for the Nobel Peace Prize.
After all, do you really believe that the safety of America is his primary motivation in holding these summit talks with Kim Jong Un? Or is it more likely that the bright shiny object of a self-aggrandizing Nobel Prize is what has gotten him to make the long journey to Vietnam tomorrow?
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You can watch a clip of Jake Tapper’s interview with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in the video below.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says he believes North Korea remains a nuclear threat and disputes the fact that President Trump thinks otherwise. “What he said was … the efforts that had been made in Singapore … have substantially taken down the risk to the American people” pic.twitter.com/CjusKHeKUj
— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) February 24, 2019
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Original reporting by Devan Cole at CNN.
