Trump-Kim summit: Everything you need to know

President Donald Trump is poised to hold a historic meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Tuesday, the first known face-to-face between a sitting U.S. president and a head of the Asian country. The summit is the culmination of months of posturing and negotiating between top U.S. and North Korean officials and comes less than two weeks after Trump reversed his decision to scrap plans for the meeting, which is set to take place in Singapore. Here’s everything you need to know about the who, what, when, where and how of the highly anticipated diplomatic gathering. When will the Trump-Kim summit be held? The event will commence on Monday, June 11, at 9 p.m. ET, which is 9 a.m. Tuesday morning in Singapore. Trump flew to Singapore on Saturday after cutting short a visit to the G-7 summit in Canada. Where will the Trump-Kim summit be held? The meeting with Kim is slated to take place at the posh Capella Hotel on the resort island of Sentosa, off the southern coast of Singapore. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders unveiled the location via Twitter, adding: “We thank our great Singaporean hosts for their hospitality.” Who else will attend the meeting besides Trump and Kim? Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Thursday he will accompany Trump to the summit in Singapore and will then fly to South Korea and China to brief the other nation’s leaders on the talks. Pompeo has been a key player in establishing lines of communication between the White House and Pyongyang in recent months. Joining Pompeo will be White House chief of staff John Kelly and national security adviser John Bolton. Bolton has clashed with other Trump administration officials on their approach to North Korea, though Pompeo dismissed reports of tension between himself and the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations as “a complete joke.” Other White House staffers making the journey include chief of staff John Kelly, and his deputy, Joe Hagin, who has been a point person on planning the summit. Matthew Pottinger, the National Security Council's Asia director, is also joining, along with senior policy adviser Stephen Miller. Trump’s daughter and adviser Ivanka Trump meanwhile will not be in attendance, a White House official told CNN. The first daughter came under scrutiny last year for sitting in for her father at a G-20 summit meeting, an action usually reserved for government ministers. Trump administration officials are not the only prominent U.S. citizens expected to be present in Singapore for the summit. Former professional basketball player Dennis Rodman, a longtime friend of Kim, will be on hand. (Trump said Rodman was “not invited,” signaling he likely will not play a formal role in discussions.) And several prominent Fox News personalities, including Trump-favorite Sean Hannity and former White House aide Sebastian Gorka, are slated to touchdown in Singapore to cover the landmark discussions. How long will Trump and Kim meet? It was not immediately clear how long U.S. and North Korean officials will meet. If Trump’s prior meeting with a top North Korean is any indication, however, the summit is likely to run long. Earlier this month Trump met in the Oval Office with Kim Yong Chol, Kim Jong Un‘s second in command. The North Korea official was on hand to deliver a personal letter from Kim Jong Un to Trump, but the exchange turned into a nearly 80-minute long White House meeting. How will Trump approach the summit with Kim? Did he prepare? Trump said he didn’t feel a need to prepare for the meeting with North Korea’s leader, arguing that the high-stakes nuclear talks would be based more on “attitude” than advance legwork. White House officials have maintained that the president has been preparing for the talks in some form for months, however. Pompeo told reporters during a White House briefing on Thursday that he and Trump discussed the topic at nearly every daily briefing they held in his past role as director of the CIA. “I am very confident the president will be fully prepared when he meets with his North Korean counterpart,” Pompeo said. How Trump and Kim get along remains to be seen, though. The two leaders spent much of 2017 trading public taunts and threats, reaching a climax when Trump vowed to rain “fire and fury” on North Korea if the country did not cease its expanding weapons tests. But Trump and Kim have struck a more conciliatory tone in recent weeks, with the president praising the North Korean dictator as a "very open" and "very honorable" negotiator in April. What will Trump and Kim discuss at the meeting? The White House has not issued an official list of topics for the sit down between U.S. and North Korean officials. But the Trump administration has signaled that efforts to denuclearize the Korean peninsula will be at the forefront of discussions, including a timeline and the technical details of dismantling existing weapons arsenals and weapons-making capabilities. During his meeting with Kim Jong Un’s No. 2 earlier this month, the president indicated the two discussed international economic sanctions imposed on Pyongyang, another likely talking point for Tuesday’s negotiations. Their discussions did not touch on human rights however, according to Trump, and it remains unclear whether the issue will be broached in Singapore. Will Trump and Kim sign anything after the meeting? Will they end the Korean War? The president has offered diverging remarks on the matter of putting pen to paper with North Korea in Singapore. Following his meeting with Kim Jong Chol, Trump appeared to brush off the possibility of the U.S. striking a formal agreement with Pyongyang in Singapore. “We're not going to go in and sign something on June 12 and we never will,” Trump said. “We‘re going to start a process.“ But Trump later expressed a willingness to sign onto a deal to bring a formal end to the Korean War, which halted in 1953 after an armistice. But the conflict has never been fully concluded through an official peace treaty. “We could absolutely sign an agreement with North Korea,” Trump said of the possibility. “But that’s really the beginning. The hard part remains after that.” Trump could also follow the template set by Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in after the two leaders held a summit at the border in April — the first inter-Korean summit in over a decade. At the conclusion of the gathering, the two sides formally agreed to work towards the “common goal” of denuclearizing the peninsula. Will Kim give up North Korea’s nuclear weapons? Pompeo said Thursday that Kim Jong Un had expressed to him a willingness to denuclearize, the latest indication Pyongyang may be serious about scaling back its weapons program. But North Korea has wavered after providing past assurances that it is serious about potentially giving up its nuclear ambitions, raising doubts over the country’s commitment on the matter. For its part, the Trump administration has insisted that talks with Kim start and end with the issue, and that any progress hinges on their willingness to carry out “complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization," as State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert stated in May. But it could take years if not decades for North Korea to fully realize that goal though, experts have warned, leaving lingering questions about what immediate commitments U.S. officials will be able to obtain from Kim in Singapore. North Korea officials have already taken some self-proclaimed steps toward denuclearizing, claiming in May they destroyed the country’s key nuclear weapons testing site. Will Trump invite Kim to the White House or to Mar-a-Lago? Trump openly mused last week about potentially inviting Kim to the White House “if it goes well” in Singapore. “The answer is yes ... but certainly if it goes well. And I think it would be well-received. I think he would look at it very favorably,” Trump told a reporter who asked if he might invite the North Korean leader to the U.S. “So, I think that could happen.” The remarks followed a Bloomberg report that Trump is weighing an offer to Kim of a second meeting between the two, potentially this fall at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Will the summit be canceled? All signs point to the meeting taking place as scheduled on Tuesday — but there’s a high degree of unpredictability on both sides of the negotiating table. In a stunning reversal, Trump announced in a May 24 letter addressed to Kim that he was pulling the U.S. out of the meeting. The decision followed an aggressive statement from a North Korean official warning the country could “make the U.S. taste an appalling tragedy it has neither experienced nor even imagined.” Trump cited the “tremendous anger and open hostility” of the remarks in scrapping plans for the time being. The same day as the cancellation, North Korea changed its tune, signaling its willingness to engage in talks with the United States “at any time, at any format.” Just over a week later, Trump announced the summit was back on. Lawmakers across the political spectrum have urged Trump to approach negotiations with Kim cautiously, citing his country’s history of erratic behavior. Will Trump and Kim shake hands? Will they eat together? Talks of the nuclear disarmament aside, the optics of the historic summit will be heavily scrutinized as the event unfolds. Everything from whether the two dine together, to how the finances for the event are managed, to where officials sit in relation to one another and whether the U.S. and North Korean flags are displayed together will be under the microscope. The White House has not offered specifics on many of these details. And it remains to be seen whether Trump will shake hands with and embrace the brutal dictator whom he’s both derided as “Little Rocket Man” and a “sick puppy” and also praised as “very honorable.” For his part, Kim once famously labeled the U.S. leader a “dotard” — a dated barb for an old, senile individual. After Trump’s meeting with Kim Yong Chol, Trump shook hands with the North Korean official and posed for pictures with him outside the White House, a potential indication he will afford Kim Jong Un the same treatment. Kim meanwhile grabbed international headlines in April when he held hands with South Korea President Moon Jae-in as they crossed the demilitarized zone that separates their two countries, a symbolic gesture of historic proportions. Will Trump play golf while in Singapore? The Daily Beast reported last week that Trump has floated the idea of “hitting the links” with Kim in Singapore. But the president on Thursday shot down speculation over whether he would play golf. "No,” Trump said when asked about the possibility, "I’d love to but no.” Why did the White House produce a commemorative coin for the summit? The White House gift shop in May began selling pre-ordered commemorative coins marking the historic meeting between U.S. and North Korean leaders. On their official online gift site, the coin is billed a “representation of the the [sic] momentous Korea peace talks.” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the West Wing was not involved with the development of the memorabilia item, attributing it instead to the White House Communications Agency. The coin, according to an image obtained by Getty Images, depicts Trump and Kim facing one another with their country’s respective flags draped in the background. The coin’s price has fluctuated several times since its unveiling in May. It was originally listed for $24.95, but after Trump initially canceled the summit, the White House began offering it at a discounted “deal of the day price” for $19.95. Now that the summit is back on, its “regular price” is listed at $49, though it continues to be offered under a “deal of the day price” for $39. Where can I watch the Trump-Kim summit? Several major networks quickly moved to release live coverage plans for the summit after its date and location were solidified, including Fox News, NBC News and MSNBC and ABC News, among others. Coverage of North Korea became a hot button issue during the 2018 Winter Olympics, during which outlets were hammered for using uncritical and "fawning" terms to describe North Korean officials and fans, despite Kim Jong Un’s history of oppressing his own people. source: https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/10/trump-kim-summit-everything-you-need-to-know-635005 #Headlines by: clima@politico.com (Cristiano Lima)

Original Post: https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/10/trump-kim-summit-everything-you-need-to-know-635005