by Jim Acosta
About ten days later, we were all on a plane to Singapore to cover one of the most remarkable summits ever held by a U.S. president. I was in the TV pool on the day of the two leaders’ meetings, which took place at a beautiful resort on Sentosa, a lush private island located just south of downtown Singapore. Simply put, my CNN team and others in the pool that day had a ringside seat to history.
Kim Jong-un, as interpreted through his translator, had a better way of describing that day:
“Many people in the world will think of this as a form of fantasy, from a science fiction movie,” he said after his initial meeting with Trump. More like Close Encounters of the Third Kim, as the dictator was the third man in his family to rule the North Korean regime.
Trump and Kim had a series of mind-bending interactions that ended with the dictator receiving a tour of the presidential limousine, known as “the Beast,” which had been flown to Singapore to shuttle Trump around the island. Trump was no longer threatening to vaporize North Korea with talk of “fire and fury” and “Little Rocket Man.” This was a courtship. After the Saudis, Putin, Xi, and Duterte, a “bromance” with yet another dictator was born.
Surprisingly, we were able to shout questions to the two leaders after their first one-on-one meeting. Trump proudly declared that he and Kim were already off to an “excellent relationship,” despite having only just met in person. He described the North Korean strongman as “very talented.”
As you may recall from some of the coverage at the time, we tried to question Kim as well, as it was a rare but irresistible opportunity to press him on his plans.
“Chairman Kim, will you denuclearize?” a reporter with the Los Angeles Times, Noah Bierman, asked.
“Will you give up your nuclear weapons?” I tried, to no avail.
This was one of the rare moments when I actually received some praise from a few folks in conservative media, where it was noted that perhaps it is a good thing for a reporter to shout questions at a dictator.
Kim did not respond, but the show wasn’t over. After a working lunch away from the cameras, the two leaders took a carefully choreographed stroll through the lush gardens at the summit site. The stroll was rehearsed for days, with White House staffers playing the roles of the two leaders before Trump and Kim did it for real in front of the cameras, a White House official later told me. The press pool, including this reporter, was set up at the point where Trump and Kim would finish their walk, stop for a few moments, and then turn to the left to exit the scene. As the two leaders made their way down the path leading up to us, Trump pointed down to the ground as Kim nodded, right on cue. Trump and Kim then stopped just a few feet away from us, as the president declared the day a big success.
“How’s it going, sir?” the Reuters correspondent Steve Holland asked.
“A lot of progress,” Trump said. “Really better than anybody could have expected,” he added.
“Has he agreed to give up any nuclear weapons, sir?” I asked.
“What are you signing?” other reporters followed up.
I had my iPhone up the whole time, recording the entire surreal scene. The video is still on my phone, actually. It’s too crazy ever to be deleted. Kim, the most notorious dictator in the world, was standing directly in front of me. He was a bit shorter than I expected and rather boyish, with his chubby cheeks, and seemed rather jovial. He was hardly menacing, in stark contrast with his brutal reputation. He seemed more like a politician.
A few minutes later, we were hustled into a room where Trump and Kim would sign their agreement. As we all waited for the two leaders to emerge and put pen to paper, there was an incredibly chaotic scene. U.S. journalists and representatives from North Korean state TV elbowed and shouted at one another for nearly twenty minutes as we jostled for position to capture the moment when Trump and Kim entered the room. Several North Korean officials and photographers tried to muscle Associated Press photojournalist Evan Vucci out of the way, but Evan refused to budge. They then tried to move over to where I was standing, next to Steve Holland. The North Koreans attempted to push Steve around, too. Holland, who is a wonderful, fatherly figure and an incredibly friendly guy, started waving his hands, telling them, “No way!” I’ve been around Steve for years, and I had never seen him get that mad.
Trump and Kim then entered the room and sat down at a table in front of us. Then, finally, we heard Kim’s voice. Speaking through an interpreter, he told the various officials and reporters gathered in the room that he was prepared to make some major concessions to the United States and the rest of the world.
“The world will see major change,” Kim said.
After they signed their agreement, I tried for a third time to ask my question.
“Mr. President, did he agree to denuclearize?” I asked Trump.
“We’re starting that process very quickly. Very, very quickly,” he responded.
I also tried to ask whether Trump and Kim had discussed American college student Otto Warmbier, who had died after being held in a labor camp by the North Koreans. But Trump didn’t respond. My question clearly irked the U.S. team. National Security Advisor John Bolton turned around to give me the evil eye. Trump had repeatedly talked about Warmbier’s case in the past. I thought, at the very least, he would bring it up and perhaps warn Kim to stop taking Americans hostage.
There was another indication that my questions had pissed off the Trump team. Brad Parscale, Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, took to Twitter to call on the White House to pull my press pass, again.
Jim @Acosta should immediately have his press credentials suspended, Parscale tweeted. He is an absolute disgrace!
It wasn’t long after the signing ceremony that we hustled over to a ballroom so he could take some questions—though we had had no idea that Trump was planning to hold a news conference at the conclusion of the summit.
“Be nice,” Trump told me as he called on me for a question. “Be very respectful,” he added.
“I’ll be very respectful, sir,” I responded. And then I asked a fairly benign question, as we were all just trying to figure out what the hell had just happened.
What had Kim Jong-un said to the president, I wanted to know, that would reassure him that the North Koreans were finished playing games?
“Very fair question,” Trump responded. “He was very firm in the fact that he wants to do this,” he continued, without offering any specifics. But even Trump sounded unsure.
“You never know, right,” he added with something of a shrug. It was one of those rare moments of candor from Trump. He knew it was possible he was being played. “But I believe he’s going to live up to that document,” he continued, referring to the agreement they had just signed.
I had given my microphone back to a White House official who had come over to retrieve it from me. But off-mic, I asked Trump if he trusted Kim.
“I do. I do,” he answered.
All in all, it was a pretty even-keeled exchange. Other reporters at the press conference were far more aggressive, pressing Trump on what he and Kim had just signed, what appeared to be a toothless document. Where were the guarantees that Kim would give up his nuclear weapons in a complete, irreversible, and verifiable manner? others wanted to know. It was all a leap of faith. There were no guarantees. Yet Trump had given Kim, a tyrant who had murdered untold numbers of North Koreans, the platform he was seeking: sharing the stage with the American president. The Trump team would later learn just how wedded Kim was to his nuclear arsenal. The two leaders met again for a second summit in Vietnam. Their meetings ended abruptly with no agreement.
After the news conference in Singapore, it was off to the airport and the marathon flight back to Washington, with a refueling stop in Honolulu. Despite having extracted little more than a written agreement from Kim, Trump and his team left Singapore feeling pretty victorious. Trump was definitely in a good mood. He came back to the press cabin on Air Force One to chat with reporters. We shook hands, and
he shared some of his thoughts about what it was like being face-to-face with the North Korean dictator. At the time, Trump was optimistic that he had achieved something . . . well, presidential. He had just taken questions from reporters for an hour, and he was well aware he had just rolled the dice with Kim.
Trump had come back to the press cabin of his plane to chat with reporters on countless occasions, but nearly all those chats had been off the record. On this day, as we were taking off for Washington, he didn’t seem to mind being quoted. There was no animosity. There were no cries of “fake news.” It was all strangely pleasant. For once, it seemed that Trump had pulled off something historic. Sure, the North Koreans were probably pulling a fast one on him, but there was a strong chance this initial summit could someday lead to a larger breakthrough. Trump sensed that. Within a few minutes, he returned to his section of Air Force One.
Looking back, I find it hard to sort out exactly what was going on inside Trump’s head that day. As we later realized, he had become, once again, somewhat enamored of a dictator. As he told voters a few months later, in the weeks leading up to the midterms, at a rally in West Virginia, he and Kim “fell in love.” Trump recounted the letters the two leaders had exchanged as they prepared to meet in Singapore.
“I was really being tough and so was he. And we would go back and forth. And then we fell in love, ok? No, really. He wrote me beautiful letters. And they’re great letters. And then we fell in love,” he told the crowd.
I’m just going to let that one speak for itself.
But speaking of strange and surreal, as we were flying back from Singapore, another member of the Trump team visited the press cabin. It was Stephen Miller. Stephen and I chatted for a bit about the summit and then turned to talking about, of all things, favorite places to eat in DC. He even asked me what my dream job was. (They were all on a high after Singapore, that’s for sure.) Ours was a very pleasant exchange, in stark contrast with our confrontation in the Briefing Room over the Statue of Liberty. Another reporter in the press cabin, Catherine Lucey with the Associated Press, commented that it seemed Stephen had come back to the press cabin just to see me. I thought it odd, too, but at the end of the day, my attitude was that I had a job to do, and that meant I was perfectly capable of brushing aside their insults and personal attacks. You have to take the high road. Don’t let them see you sweat. If Stephen wanted to put aside our very different views on immigration and talk about the DC restaurant scene for a few minutes, I could do that.
Not everybody on the Trump team was capable of being civil. As we stood on the tarmac in Honolulu during a refueling stop, soaking up the Hawaiian sunshine for about forty-five minutes, Steve Holland asked if I wanted to take a picture with him and Sarah Sanders. Sarah did it begrudgingly, after complaining that she didn’t want to pose in a photo with me. This was all unprovoked; I was trying to be nice. She wasn’t in the mood for that.
“What’s the point? You’re just gonna go back [to DC] and say bad things about us,” she said to me. I just smiled and returned to my seat on Air Force One.
But there was a far more acidic reaction to my reporting waiting for me when I arrived back in Washington. After hours of sleeping and no Wi-Fi service (an annoying feature of flying in the press cabin on Air Force One), I scrolled through the notifications I had received on my Instagram account. There were dozens of messages from Trump supporters who had seen Parscale’s tweet about the questions I had asked at the signing ceremony in Singapore. The comments left below my Instagram photos of the summit were far more sinister than Brad’s threat of yanking my press pass. I was beginning to see more evidence that the maniacal ripple effect of the Trump echo chamber was expanding and getting darker.
“I can’t wait for the day millions of me come knocking on your door and make you run the gauntlet o’ pain all the way to the guillotine you piece of chit,” an Instagram user said in a garbled and misspelled comment left on my account. “If I was president trump I think I would order the Marines to walk over to you and plant a bullet in your skull for what you did,” the commenter added.
That happens only in dictatorships like North Korea, not democracies.
Arguably, this meeting with a reclusive and oppressive dictator was probably Trump’s best-executed initiative since taking office. This summit had been his doing, his stagecraft, but more than that, the various petty bureaucracies in Trumpworld had finally laid down their arms long enough to get something almost right. At least it seemed that way at the moment. The agreement signed by the two leaders didn’t amount to much. It had no teeth, no requirements that Kim abandon his nuclear weapons program; but it was a first step. Still, the spectacle in Singapore almost showed the kind of production that could have been possible if the White House hadn’t been such a dysfunctional and operational nightmare from day one. It demonstrated Trump was capable of being more than a one-trick POTUS.
Still, I was under no illusions that this was a sign of a change within the administration. If there’s one thing we’ve had to learn over and over since Trump took office, it’s that there is no new leaf to turn over. The same would be true in the aftermath of Singapore, when Trump would embark on one of the most ill-conceived and troubling moments of his presidency: a meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki.
10
Humbled in Helsinki
As the facts now demonstrate, Hillary Clinton was certainly on to something in her final debate with Donald Trump in Las Vegas in October 2016. During that debate, Clinton cited what had become a major national security concern to the U.S. intelligence community: that hackers working on behalf of Russian operatives had joined forces with WikiLeaks to release damaging information obtained through cyberattacks on Democratic officials, all in an effort to weaken the party’s nominee. This was way before Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation was launched into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, a probe that did not prove a conspiracy. Clinton had already made the connection that, as Democratic accounts had been infiltrated, Trump had adopted much of the Kremlin’s foreign policy agenda as his own: weaken NATO, abandon Ukraine, and so on.
The exchange between Clinton and Trump over Russia’s apparent interference in the American democratic process must have gone over a lot of heads at the time. It was not as sensational as the revelations from the Access Hollywood video. “Grab ’em by the pussy” was something people could understand; hacks and WikiLeaks, at least at the time, seemed more complicated and unsubstantiated. Clinton’s words at that debate did little more than trigger a nasty exchange with the Republican contender. In the end, her warning in Vegas, that Trump could very well be Putin’s “puppet,” stayed in Vegas. Still, it makes for fascinating reading:
CLINTON: So I actually think the most important question of this evening, Chris, is, finally, will Donald Trump admit and condemn that the Russians are doing this and make it clear that he will not have the help of Putin in this election?
Trump never really responded to the substance of the WikiLeaks charge and instead started a food fight with Clinton. The tactic worked for Trump, who continued to advocate for better relations with Russia, something the Kremlin obviously also wanted. He dodged the issue altogether.
TRUMP: Now we can talk about Putin. I don’t know Putin. He said nice things about me. If we got along well, that would be good. If Russia and the United States got along well and went after ISIS, that would be good. He has no respect for her [Hillary Clinton]. He has no respect for our president.
Then, a few moments later, came what was, in hindsight, a seminal moment from the campaign.
CLINTON: Well, that’s because he’d rather have a puppet as president of the United States.
TRUMP: No puppet. No puppet.
CLINTON: And it’s pretty clear—
TRUMP: You’re the puppet!
CLINTON: It’s pretty clear you won’t admit—
TRUMP: No, you’re the puppet.
CLINTON: —that the
Russians have engaged in cyber-attacks against the United States of America, that you encouraged espionage against our people, that you are willing to spout the Putin line, sign up for his wish list, break up NATO, do whatever he wants to do, and that you continue to get help from him, because he has a very clear favorite in this race.
It was an eerily prescient exchange.
In a text to me, a former senior Clinton campaign adviser looking back on the Vegas debate, wrote, “Seemed too fantastic to be true. BUT IT IS.” The adviser put that second part in all caps, not me.
By the summer of 2018, almost two years after Clinton called Trump Putin’s puppet, Trump seemed to have gone out of his way to prove her right through his incessant attacks on the Russia investigation, his campaign against the media for reporting on it, and his erosion of long-standing U.S. policies that Putin was unhappy with. When his side meetings with Putin on the international stage weren’t raising eyebrows, it was his rhetoric around NATO and his refusal to accept the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia had interfered in our election. Factor in the incessant drumbeat of decidedly real indictments from the Russia investigation, and there seemed to be more and more evidence that the Trump-Putin relationship was questionable at best.
Prior to the summer of 2018, though, that unnerving feeling about Trump’s seeming ease with Russia’s autocratic ruler could be measured largely by a series of occasional interactions, court filings, and press reports. One-off encounters and statements had shown Trump’s general reluctance to challenge Putin, but had left the overall portrait of their interactions to the public’s imagination. What exactly was going on between these two guys? Even Trump’s own national security team couldn’t be sure, a former senior NSC official who served under Trump told me.
The shroud concealing much of their unusual relationship seemed to fall in July 2018, when Trump met with Putin for a summit in Helsinki. Given the enormous focus on the Russia investigation, it was a crucial time for a meeting that would put the Trump-Putin relationship on display for the world to see. Indeed, by the summer of 2018, the Mueller investigation had been in motion for more than a year, and in that relatively short time it had already shown itself to be one of the most successful and efficient special counsel operations in the history of the Justice Department. Evidence had already been presented that showed a number of attempts by Russia to penetrate Trump’s orbit, with several indictments handed down and more coming continually.