US former President, Trump said he and Kim Jong Un had 'good chemistry'
Former President Donald Trump told Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward that he had “good chemistry” with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, The Hill reports, per a clip from Woodward’s new audiobook.
In the clip from The Trump Tapes: Bob Woodward’s 20 Interviews with President Donald Trump, released Tuesday, the former president can be heard telling Woodward he is “the only one [Kim] deals with.”
“The word chemistry. You meet somebody and you have a good chemistry,” Trump continued. “You meet a woman. In one second, you know whether or not it’s all going to happen.” The former president had, during his tenure, met with the North Korean leader personally to push “for peace talks between the U.S., North Korea, and South Korea,” The Hill notes.
A clip of the conversation aired on CNN on Monday, and is also included in a opinions essay Woodward penned for the Post.
Speaking with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Woodward criticized Trump’s cavalier approach toward the “thuggish” Kim, contrasting it with that of former Defense Secretary James Mattis. “I am increasingly baffled the more I hear the casual disconnect, the sense [Trump] has of obligation to himself, I guess, about Kim Jong Un. … I’ve never heard another president say anything like that,” Woodward told Tapper.
According to a report, The former US president claims to know more about the North Korean leader’s personality than the CIA
Donald Trump likened his instant personal chemistry with Kim Jong-un to meeting a woman for the first time, according to audio tapes released by veteran US journalist Bob Woodward.
Mr Woodward’s new audiobook, The Trump Tapes, was released on Tuesday and contains the 20 interviews he conducted with Mr Trump between 2016 and 2020, interspersed with some commentary.
Speaking to CNN’s Jake Tapper, Mr Woodward revealed that in one of their extraordinary exchanges in 2019, the former president claimed to know more about Kim’s personality than the Central Intelligence Agency, offering his view that the North Korean dictator was “very smart”.
The CIA had “no idea”, said Mr Trump. “I’m the only one that knows. I’m the only one he deals with. He won’t deal with anybody else. The word chemistry. You meet somebody and you have a good chemistry. You meet a woman and in one second you know whether or not it’s all going to happen.”
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Mr Trump first met Kim in 2018 at a historic summit in Singapore where they tried to start a negotiating process that aimed for North Korea’s nuclear disarmament in exchange for the lifting of harsh international sanctions that were crippling the pariah state’s economy.
In 2019, talks failed at another summit in Hanoi, Vietnam, and never recovered. The Korean Peninsula is now locked in another cycle of escalating tensions and Pyongyang has test-fired an unprecedented number of ballistic missiles this year.
Mr Trump said he was driven by “instinct” when dealing with Kim.
Mr Woodward, who has interviewed multiple US presidents, offered his own views to CNN that he had been “baffled” by Mr Trump’s “casual disconnect” when talking about Kim.
“This traumatised his national security team. Kim Jong-un, the thuggish leader of North Korea, had nuclear weapons,” said Mr Woodward.
“Defence Secretary Mattis used to sleep in his gym clothes because he knew if a missile was coming to the United States, he would be called to an emergency conference,” he added.
“Trump had given the authority to Mattis to shoot down an incoming missile like that. Mattis was going to the national cathedral to pray, to make peace with his God that as defence secretary he might have to use nuclear weapons to defend our country and the president’s presentation on this is ‘it’s instinct’.”
