by Doug Wead
“It was a great summit. It was a tremendously successful summit. Again, think of this: No more missiles. No more launches. No nuclear. We are now talking about economic development. And I think that is what he really wants.”
The president was hopeful at this luncheon back in January 2019. The next summit would bring him back down to earth.
MELANIA TRUMP WAS WATCHING CNN
“Melania called me and said that she was watching CNN,” the president said. “And they were stunned by what had happened. The idea of a summit had just been announced. They were talking about what a breakthrough this was. How previous administration had tried to set up a meeting and failed.
“‘They are saying this is a great achievement,’ Melania said, ‘They cannot believe it because, you know, it is the hermit kingdom.’”
It had been a long time since the first lady had seen such objective reporting about her husband, such straight news.
“The media didn’t know how to react,” the president continued. “They hadn’t got their marching orders yet so they were just frozen and had to act like real journalists for a change, reporting on a story. And so for twenty-four hours I got the best press since I had been elected president. Everyone. The haters. They were all saying, ‘This is the most incredible thing that we have seen.’”
For more than a year, right up to the moment of the announcement of a Trump-Kim summit, pundits had been daily attacking the president, suggesting that the United States was locked into a one-way pneumatic tube toward war.
The former CIA director James Clapper had declared on CNN that Trump’s words were to blame. “They can easily construe what he has been saying as a declaration, or at least a threat, of war.”12
Mike Mullen, who had served as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, had appeared on the ABC show This Week with George Stephanopoulos to say that “we are actually closer, in my view, to a nuclear war with North Korea, and in that region, than we’ve ever been, and I just don’t see the opportunities to solve this diplomatically at this particular point.”13
As a guest pundit on MSNBC, Dan Rather had joined the queue. “We’re probably closer to an outright war with North Korea,” said Rather, “than we have been in a very, very long time.”14
Joe Scarborough of MSNBC had said, “You have reason to be scared of a war that can wipe out five hundred thousand people.”15
His sidekick, Mika Brzezinski, had attributed the worst intentions of all to the president, “No,” she said, “I just think he wants to use nukes.”16
After a year of such expert commentary, the news that North Korea was actually ready to meet and to talk with Donald Trump came to the monolithic, single-minded American national media like a head-on collision.
“In fact, in some cases, they didn’t believe it,” President Trump said. “They would accept any bogus, false story that they thought would hurt me or the people who supported me, but here was real news, a real story, and they were just stunned. ‘Could this be true?’ Then when it was being reported around the world and the people from North Korea were issuing statements, our own media followed after them, saying, ‘Well, I guess it’s true. I guess it’s true. It’s on German television, it’s on French television, so now we can tell the American people.’
“You can go back and look,” the president chuckled. “For twenty-four hours, held in time on the internet, you will find positive press for one day about Donald Trump and the coming summit with Kim Jong-un. You would have thought that I was the greatest genius of all time. At least for one day. And then the media got their bearings and the bosses called in and said to the anchors, ‘What are you doing?’ And so the whole message shifted the next day to ‘What is the big deal?’
“And it went downhill from there. They actually started telling the American people that we had lost by having the summit; that the very act of meeting was a net loss because we had given up too much. Have you heard that one?”
“Yes,” I agreed. “I had heard it.”
“And in fact, nothing we did was irreversible. Canceling the war games saved us millions of dollars and we can start them up anytime we want.
“So what had we given up, what? We put vicious sanctions on them. The sanctions are still on, and they involve nations that had never joined in before. Now that they see we are talking with North Korea, that we are getting somewhere, the other nations are more committed than ever to keep it going. These are tough sanctions. North Korea is paying a price for what it is doing. We got the hostages free. We got the remains back of our soldiers from the Korean War. We had to wait for many presidents to get that.”
“Eleven,” I said.
The president was easily making his case. “Look at what has happened since: There are no nuclear tests. No missiles firing over Japan, No bellicose statements about attacking the United States. No more hostage taking.”
“No Nobel Peace Prize,” I shot back.
The president laughed.
THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE
After the Singapore summit there were many who argued that in a fair world, Donald Trump should have won the Nobel Peace Prize. James S. Robbins, a USA Today columnist and a senior fellow in national security affairs at the American Foreign Policy Council, called the summit “a critical element in shifting the ground toward peace, something that was unprecedented in U.S./North Korean relations.” Robbins wrote that “what President Trump achieved—and which few thought was even possible—more than merits the Nobel Peace Prize.”17
Trump’s supporters were arguing that he had achieved in months what had eluded other American presidents for more than a quarter of a century. President Barack Obama had pursued a policy of “strategic patience” with North Korea. It hadn’t worked. Foreign policy experts were openly ridiculing the policy as “strategic passivity.”18
Dan Rather, who had only weeks before insisted that we were headed to war, now argued in a headline that Trump should not get the Nobel Peace Prize. “Hold Trump’s Nobel Prize, for Now: Kim Jong-un Won Big.19
Trump was amused by the rapid change in language. “So the big criticism was that I had ‘met.’ That was what they said was wrong. ‘He met.’ In other words I lost because I met Kim Jong Un. ‘I met.’ What does that mean? ‘I met.’ That was the best thing they could come up with? That’s all they could think of?
“And what is funny,” President Trump said—although he was not laughing—“is that finally, afterward, the media found a way to make the whole summit disappear, like it never happened. So there will be no nuclear war, after all. So what? That doesn’t count as news. That is not important.”
The president was making a good point that was frustrating to media critics and to a previous generation of journalists. Monday we avert a nuclear war, but Tuesday the news shifts to a rainstorm in Denver, Colorado.
“I have never been given so little credit for something that was actually so important,” the president said. It’s interesting. As I read those words now on the page, they sound harsh, or pouty, but if you could hear them on the voice recorder, you could tell that there was not the slightest trace of bitterness in his voice. Rather, he seemed genuinely fascinated.
“We would be in a war right now. It would probably be a nuclear war, to be honest with you. Right now. And if a normal guy had been president, it would have happened. Nothing would have stopped it. It would have been a rough one.
“You know, they’ve got several million soldiers, by the way? North Korea? That is a lot of bullets even if you look at it that way.
“And my administration gets no credit for it. But we get no credit for anything. You know the economy, you said it this morning, the economy is really good and the world is collapsing. The economy is really good, great numbers came out today on Wall Street. They do not even talk about it. They never talk about it.”
I had appeared on Fox and Friends that morning and had talked about the good unemployment numbers. One repor
t claimed that the media devoted 0.7 percent of its coverage to the booming Trump economy.20
“Doug, they don’t talk about it, because they are such good stories.”
“Well, Mr. President”—I laughed—“you won the election and it wasn’t expected. And the economy is flourishing in spite of the prediction of the world’s greatest economists. ISIS is on the run; you’ve got to give your enemies a win somewhere.”
“But the big one, Doug, was North Korea. Remember, it’s not how many nukes you have that make you dangerous. One nuke is dangerous. Now we have a great relationship. If you were to come here two years ago and you had asked, ‘So what is your biggest problem?’ I would have said North Korea.
“When I said to Obama, ‘What is your biggest problem?’ No hesitation! ‘North Korea. I think you will go to war with North Korea.’
“So I said to Obama, ‘What is that all about? Tell me why?’ And then I realized it was really tough, really tough. My first few months. The level of anger at us was terrible.”
“Do you mean from Kim?”
“Yes. Do not forget we have forty thousand soldiers in South Korea all year around. Do you know how much we spend defending South Korea? Four and half billion dollars a year. Figure that one out?”
“It’s a lot of money.”
“So now you understand.”
“Yes. I understand.”
“If Obama would have been able to pull off that summit he would have had five Nobel Peace Prizes,” Trump concluded.
“That may be true,” I ventured. “But he would say that he got one anyway, even without having a summit.”
“He got one and said he didn’t know why he got it.” Trump chuckled. “They asked him why he got it and he said he didn’t know. And that was the right answer too, by the way, because there was no reason.
“Look, at what happened in Idlib, in Syria?” the president said. “At the time all kinds of terrible motives were tossed at me. But as the world later learned, I got the Russians and Iran to suspend their attacks. What they were going to do could have killed three million people. Nobody writes about it. Everyone knows it. It was very real. Now nobody writes about it. Nobody cares. Three million lives saved.”
When that crisis was imminent, the Washington Post published a big story about it. They mocked the president. “Can a Tweet Stop Another Bloodbath in Syria? Evidently Not.”21 When it was over, when Trump’s private diplomacy had worked and the lives had been saved, the story quietly disappeared. Trump is right: it is almost never mentioned.
HISTORY KEEPS A RECORD
Donald Trump seemed resigned to a monolithic, corporate media opposition. His rank-and-file supporters would say that he was taking on the establishment, both the Democratic and the Republican. “The Swamp” they called Washington, DC. Trump didn’t respond to the lobbyists. They had ways of getting money to congressmen and office holders. It was how politicians came to Washington broke and left as multimillionaires. Presidents, if they did what they were supposed to do for lobbyists, came out especially well, with corporate jets available for their use the rest of their lives. The author was, himself, sometimes involved in making those arrangements. Incidentally, the lobbyists often came from the same companies that financed the network news. It was an unbroken, insular cycle.
The presumption was that if Donald Trump played to the monopolies and gave into the big companies, as other presidents usually did, they would finally let up on him. If he made their corporate CEOs ambassadors, in his retirement their companies would give plush jobs to his children and nieces and nephews, or donate to his foundation.
The problem was that Donald Trump already had money. He already had his own jets. And his children had their own companies. So, was his money a curse as well as a blessing? It gave him independence and freedom, but he was using that freedom to take on entrenched powers. At least, that was how the young men and women in the red MAGA hats saw it.
The conversation returned to the Nobel Peace Prize and some Republican senators who were wanting to advance it. Trump would be meeting with Kim again in two months.
“Hey, that’s okay,” the president said about the snub. “I expect that.” And since we were on the subject of unrequited love, he added this thought, “I should have had the Emmy three times for The Apprentice too.” If we were going to take the trouble of reviving aspirations for the Nobel Peace Prize, why not add an Emmy to the list?
We all laughed.
I was reminded of President Theodore Roosevelt, who had risked his life charging up San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War. So I told the president the story. Roosevelt had been recommended for the Congressional Medal of Honor. It was refused. Again and again. Three of his sons would be wounded in battle, trying to make up for it. Trying to win it for their wronged father. One of the sons, Theodore Roosevelt Jr., would finally be awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously, only months after his death, after the landing on D-day in World War II.
And then, 103 years after the Battle of San Juan Hill, President Theodore Roosevelt was finally awarded his Medal of Honor. It would come from President Bill Clinton, on January 16, 2001, four days before Clinton would leave office. Of course, Theodore Roosevelt and his family never lived to see any of it. But at least history kept a record.
“Nobody notices those things,” Trump said.
“Well, somebody noticed,” I answered. “After all, you were elected president of the United States.”
Sarah Huckabee Sanders spoke up: “Sixty-three million people noticed.”
“And we are a stronger country today,” the president said. “It’s all worth it.”
DON’T FORGET THE LETTERS
There was no dessert. No two scoops of ice cream. No crème brûlée or miniature hot fudge sundae. It was my misfortune to have had lunch with the president after the first lady’s big summit meeting with the White House kitchen personnel. At that meeting she had kindly explained that she wanted her husband to eat a healthier diet.22
Throughout the luncheon I had the impression that the president was keenly conscious of the Kim letters. He occasionally glanced at them stacked on the table next to me. No doubt he wanted to maintain discretion and protect his relationship with his partner on the world stage. And then there were protocols about state secrets.
Before we left the room, the president said, “Sarah, Doug hasn’t had a chance to read these yet. Can you get him a little room where he can read them?”
And then he reiterated, “Sorry, Doug, you can’t take them, and you can’t take pictures of them. But I want you to read them. This will be good for the book.”
I thanked the president and said goodbye to him and deputy chief of staff, Bill Shine, and followed Sarah Huckabee Sanders out of the Oval Office. We retreated into the labyrinth of back offices in the press secretary’s lair. Sarah gave me a little cubicle and left me alone.
The letters were truly history making. Better than any dessert.
I would later have to submit to the White House anything I wanted to write or say about the exchange. Without recounting all of the details here I can offer this impression. Kim is fascinated by Donald Trump. He sees him as a unique figure on the stage of world history. And he wants to make history with him.
In one letter Kim wrote, “I firmly believe that the strong will, sincere efforts and unique approach of myself and your Excellency, Mr. President, aimed at opening up a new future between the DPRK and the US will surely come to fruition.”
Included in the remarkable exchanges was the very clear goal of actually, formally, ending the Korean War. The armistice was signed in 1953, and when I had lunch with the president that January, it was still, just that, an armistice. Could these two men finally end that war?
A few days after my interview with the president I was able to visit alone with his son-in-law and close adviser, Jared Kushner. He was surprised when I told him that the president had allowed me to read the letters from Chairman Kim. After I quoted from
them, he overcame his initial skepticism and actually seemed pleased to be able to talk to someone about them.
“It’s a father thing,” Jared observed. “You can see from these letters that Kim wants to be friends with Trump, but his father told him never to give up the weapons. That’s his only security. Trump is like a new father figure. So, it is not an easy transition.”23
THE SAIGON SUMMIT
The second Trump-Kim summit was set for March 2019 in Saigon, Vietnam. After my luncheon with the president I strongly suspected that at some point in the future, Trump and Kim were wanting to shock the world again. But it would not be in Saigon.
Trump’s opponents, the American media and their Democratic Party allies, would prove to be every bit as formidable as the Communist dictator. In an extraordinary moment in American history, the national media and the Democratic Party offered the world’s television audiences a split screen. In one corner would be the picture of an American president, trying to negotiate with a man who had threated to level American cities with nuclear bombs. On the other screen would be a witness testifying before a congressional hearing called by the Democrats. Michael Cohen, the president’s estranged former lawyer, ironically convicted of lying to Congress, would be telling the world that Trump was “a con man and a cheat.” And the American media would make his accusations a coequal story with a summit held by the heads of state of two nations.
For some, the message that the media and their partners in the Democratic Party was sending to Saigon, Vietnam, was deeply troubling. Trump called it almost treasonous.24 Chairman Kim should not give up, the message seemed to say. America was a divided nation. If Donald Trump wanted to find peace for the world, he would first have to find more of it at home. The American media seemed to be more committed to hurting Donald Trump than protecting their own children and the world from a nuclear war.