The set of “Morning Joe” analyzed the growing challenges President Trump is facing ahead of his planned summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in June.
Co-host Willie Geist said that North Korea’s assertion last week that they would not be denuclearizing had derailed the meeting.
“Well, Kim Jong Un threw him off balance last week when the North Korean government put out a statement that says we’re not giving up our nukes and President Trump went ‘uh-oh, that was the point of doing this,’” said Geist. “When the bar had been set at fire and fury — the alternative is war — anything beneath that, it seems to me, Donald Trump will claim as some victory … maybe even a photo-op.”
Joe Scarborough said it wasn’t too long ago that Donald Trump was preparing to accept his Nobel Peace Prize.
“We had a president here who went from a Nobel Prize so certain that wherever he went, the teeming masses would chant it,” said Scarborough. “We’ve gone from the certainty of a Nobel Prize to a quite uncertain Donald J. Trump.”
The show’s foreign policy analyst, Richard Haass, said it might be for the best if the summit were just scrapped and that pressure for a “win” could goad Trump into giving away too much.
Trump surprised many earlier this year when he agreed to meet with Kim Jong Un. The June 12 summit in Singapore would be the first time a sitting U.S. president has met any Supreme Leader of North Korea.
The ruling Kim family — now in its third generation — is famously reclusive. With the exception of a few recent secretive meetings in China, Kim Jong Un himself has never left the country since taking power six years ago.