MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough ripped President Donald Trump’s treatment of North Korea, warning that allowing the development of nuclear weapons capable of striking U.S. soil will be his legacy.
Discussing Trump’s upcoming summit with dictator Kim Jong Un in Hanoi, Vietnam, on Monday’s “Morning Joe,” the anchor was stupefied by Trump’s claim that war would have broken out between the U.S. and North Korea had he not assumed the Oval Office.
“The president keeps pushing this alternate reality, this political fantasy that we would have been in a war had the great peacemaker Donald Trump had not been elected president of the United States,”
Trump made the remarks in a White House briefing Friday, also claiming “we have such a great relationship” with North Korea.
“The reason why we’re not close to war is because the North Koreans know Donald Trump has capitulated, and he’s basically given up, caved in, and now the North Koreans know,” Scarborough said. “They’re going to have those nuclear weapons, and Donald Trump is going to have the legacy of being the president of the United States that allowed North Koreans to be able to deliver a nuclear weapon to Seattle, to Oklahoma City, to Charlotte, North Carolina.”
This will be Trump and Kim’s second summit, which is scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday. The primary topics on the table are expected to be denuclearization and easing sanctions on Pyongyang.
On Sunday the president argued on Twitter that if the regime gives up its nuclear weapons, North Korea “could fast become one of the great economic powers anywhere in the World.”
A Pew Research poll released Monday indicated that much of the world remains alarmed about North Korea’s nuclear weapons development, particularly in the more geographically vulnerable Asia-Pacific region.
In the U.S., nearly 60 percent of those surveyed said the nuclear program is “a major threat.”
Questions remain whether Trump will return with any accomplishments from the summit. As Politico reported last week, a handful of the president’s top advisers worry he could stumble in negotiations, making significant concessions in return for worthless guarantees of denuclearization.