The Daily - A Historic Handshake

Episode Date: June 12, 2018

For the first time ever, a sitting president of the United States has met with a North Korean leader. Was the handshake between President Trump and Kim Jong-un a beginning or an end? Guest: Mark Landler, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, who is reporting on the summit meeting from Singapore. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, for the first time ever, the President of the United States has met with the leader of North Korea. Was the handshake the beginning or the end? It's Tuesday, June 12th. Good morning. Thank you for calling JW Merit Singapore South Beach.

This is Rebecca. May I assist you? Yes, hi. I'm trying to reach a guest named Mark Landler. All right. Just one moment. Allow me to transfer your call. Thank you. You're welcome. Hello? Hey, it's Michael. Hey, how are you? Good. You sound awake, which is remarkable. I don't know why I'm awake. I can't tell you. I mean, I guess I just must be mainlining coffee or something.

Because I didn't sleep last night. At all? Literally after we spoke. No, not at all. So hopefully I will sleep tonight. But I'm only going to sleep for like, you know, four hours because then I have to get up and do the whole thing tomorrow. Right. Anyway.

Well, I'm actually really sorry to give you up even longer. I know how late it is. It's 2.37 where you are. You've got just a few hours before this meeting between Trump and Kim. The last time that I talked to you, President Trump was just arriving in Singapore. Now it's the actual day of this summit. What's been happening in the lead up to this meeting?

Well, it's kind of interesting because on the one hand, you have President Trump, who had a really quiet day. He went and had lunch with the prime minister of Singapore, went back to his hotel, met some American diplomats and has otherwise pretty much stayed out of sight. Kim Jong-un, on the other hand, who everyone expected to stay secluded in his hotel, actually went out on the town on Monday night. What did he do? Well, what he did is kind of a combination of fairly traditional sightseeing, driving around the town in his motorcade. And then he stopped off at this very stylish casino resort owned by Sheldon Adelson, which has a rooftop bar and an infinity pool. And it's really one of the big attractions for, you know, the hip crowd in Singapore.

And Kim wanted to see it for himself. And he even took some selfies up there. Wow. So it's one of the ironies of this summit that the casino magnate stayed home and the reclusive dictator went out and visited... A casino. Exactly. It's a fact that Kim Jong-un is a fun-loving guy. I mean, intelligence reports on North Korea will tell you that he likes a party. In fact, people say he's pretty much of a carouser. It is a real surprise that he would be so public about it in a place he's never visited, in a place that's way outside his comfort zone.

So this is a guy who continues to surprise people. And what about President Trump being holed up and unseen? Do you make anything of that? Well, President Trump has tended to be almost like an accidental tourist. He's not a guy who likes to get out and sample the local flavor, the local culture. He tends to stay close to his hotels in whatever city he's visiting. And I think the added element here is that tomorrow is, or I should say in five hours, is probably the most important meeting he has had during his presidency.

And I think he probably did have some things he needed to get done. And he's not a guy who likes to go out when he travels in any event. At this point, who is there on both sides? Who's actually in Singapore for this meeting? Well, on the American side, you have the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, the Chief of Staff, John Kelly, and the national security advisor, John Bolton. On the North Korean side, you have a vice foreign minister. You have one of the top intelligence figures and an advisor to Kim Jong-un, a man named Kim Yong-chol, who you may remember actually traveled to Washington last week and met with President Trump. And then you also have, interestingly, Kim Jong-un's sister, Kim Yo-jong, who gained international celebrity when she went to the Olympics in South Korea last winter. And so who's really leading the U.S. side of this?

You mentioned Pompeo, Kelly, and Bolton. Mike Pompeo has been undeniably the key figure aside from the president himself. He's the official who made two trips to Pyongyang to meet with Kim Jong-un to sort of lay out the logistics and groundwork for this summit. It's really Mike Pompeo's show from start to finish. And why does that matter? Well, it matters because the other figure who could have been very influential here and may yet be influential in the future is John Bolton, the National Security Advisor. What happened in the case of Bolton is that shortly after he came into his job, he suggested that the North Koreans should think of Libya as a model for how they give up their nuclear weapons. This didn't go over well at all with the North Koreans. They, after all,

singled him out in one of their statements, highly critical of the United States, and made it clear they viewed him as, in their words, a repugnant figure. And it actually wound up aggravating President Trump because he thought that John Bolton had, in effect, almost derailed his big show. And Bolton has taken a much lower profile on North Korea ever since. And the reason I say he may loom large in the future is that should this negotiation not go well, the skepticism that John Bolton showed at the beginning would probably come back and the president might be more receptive to it the next time around.

That's interesting. So Bolton's skepticism at a moment when the president was feeling optimistic about this all might have gotten him sidelined. But if things take a turn for the worse, Bolton might be back in the president's good graces. Yeah, that's right. Remember, John Bolton has called for years for a preemptive military strike on North Korea. So his views on North Korea are well established. They're extremely hawkish. And at this very moment, they're not particularly fashionable.

But in the future, if things go south, he may yet find himself back in the driver's seat. So I want to talk about possible outcomes. Obviously, the best possible outcome is that North Korea agrees to denuclearize. What would be the worst possible outcome today? been used for the political benefit of Kim at home and overseas. And it ends up poisoning Trump's views toward Kim and throws the United States back into a much more confrontational stance vis-a-vis North Korea. I think that would be probably the worst outcome at this point that one could imagine. And what would it mean for Kim to use Trump at the summit? What would that look like? Well, if Kim were to stand there and pump the president's hand and smile broadly for the

cameras and then turn around and offer him nothing more than any previous North Korean leader had offered the president, and perhaps even less, and basically say to the president, you've now recognized me as a fellow leader of a nuclear state, and this is now the way we're going to do business. I think that would be extremely antagonistic and would probably make the president feel like he had been snookered. And it is hard to imagine him reacting well to something like that. So President Trump now infamously said that he would have a feel within the first minute for how this summit was going to go and whether or not he was compatible with Kim. With that in mind, what will you be looking for that might kind of give you an early sense of how things are

going to play out? Well, I would look at the handshake itself. If you recall, in a very famous case, when Trump first met the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, they had this almost death grip of a handshake where Macron, who had been briefed in advance about how Donald Trump likes to grab a person's hand and pull it and pump it in such a way that puts that person on the defensive. Macron didn't let that happen. At the time, a lot of us thought this boded ill for the relationship between the two men, but I think in the end, it turned out to be the opposite. I think Trump, in some ways, maybe quietly admired Macron for rising to the occasion like that, for showing he wasn't going to be bullied.

So I think it would be interesting to watch the body language of Trump and Kim. Will Kim energetically grab the president's hand, or will he allow himself to be manhandled? Will he approach the president in a shy or somewhat intimidated manner, or will he stride right up to him? If you look at his body language when he met the South Korean president Moon, he was very self-confident. He walked in a kind of a loose-limbed style. He smiled a lot. He made that unforgettable gesture of asking the South Korean president to step back across the border into North Korea. If we see the same sort of behavior with Donald Trump, I think Donald Trump will appreciate it. And I think that could get things off on the right foot. Trump likes

people who are willing to engage with him and show a little humor, show a little willingness to be off the cuff, to be improvisational. In short, the qualities he likes in himself. I don't want to overstate this. There's a lot about Kim Jong-un we don't understand, and he has a pretty horrifying track record in his own country. So he is a very different creature than Donald Trump. in his own country. So he is a very different creature than Donald Trump. But I do think that if Kim projects confidence, it might have the effect of making Trump feel more comfortable cutting a deal with this guy for the simple reason that he actually believes this guy can deliver. He's not going to read in three months that the guy's been sidelined or he's being pushed out by other forces. He'll feel like he's dealing with a guy he knows is in control, is going to be in control. And so

he's a reliable partner. Right. In other words, he's a formidable negotiating partner, just the way Trump sees himself. Exactly. Okay. So we will talk to you in a few hours once the summit is underway, and I hope that you do finally get some sleep. Thank you, Michael. Okay, cheers. Talk soon. All right. Take care. Bye. We'll be right back. Hello?

Hey, it's Michael. Hey, how are you? Good, good, good. Did you get any sleep? Only three and a half hours. Oh, that's good. Yeah, I'm okay. Okay, we're going to jump in. It's 10.29 in the morning in Singapore,

and this handshake has just happened. History has been made. Give us the scene there, Mark. Well, in the minutes leading up to 9 o'clock, you had two motorcades converging on this colonial-style hotel on Sentosa Island. Island. At about 8.59, the two leaders walked toward one another into a sort of an open veranda-like space and walked in front of a wall of American and North Korean flags, which were standing on a riser behind the leaders as they walked on a red carpet. As the two men converged, they shook hands, and President Trump, as he often does, reached out with his other hand and clasped Mr. Kim's elbow. The two men then turned to face the cameras. Neither of them

smiled. In fact, their faces, I think it can fairly be said, were somber and perhaps a little bit nervous as well. Though afterward, as the two men turned to walk out of the veranda space and toward their first meeting, President Trump again reached out and subtly guided Chairman Kim by putting his hand on his elbow. And for the first time in the morning, Kim's face broke into a smile. And it was that moment, I think, that broke the initial tension between the two men. Mark, you told us that you'd be looking really closely at this handshake. It looked to me like a very firm handshake. Yes, I think they both wanted to look like they were being firm and robust, but it didn't have the fight to the death quality that Trump's first handshake with Emmanuel

Macron of France had. It felt to me like a real 50-50 kind of exercise, perhaps with a slight advantage on Donald Trump's part, because as I said, he was able to reach out and put his hand on Kim's elbow. So in a very subtle way, in the dynamics of personal interaction, President Trump looked like he was the senior partner. Chairman Kim, you know, by contrast, was carrying a pair of reading glasses, which he sort of fidgeted with and fiddled with with his hands. And I think somehow the effect of that was to make him look like a more contemplative figure, while President Trump was perhaps more of the take charge figure. So if you're President Trump, and you're judging this thing on the first

minute, which Donald Trump says he is, what are you making of this? Well, I think that Kim Jong-un certainly radiated a sense of being receptive. You know, he didn't do any of the things that you might expect a leader to do who wanted to project any resistance. He didn't cross his arms. You know, he seemed very open to the president. He cracked a smile periodically. So if you're President Trump, you might conclude on the basis of the first minute or two that, you know, this is a guy who perhaps I can establish a rapport with. And what happens after those first couple of minutes? Well, the two gentlemen sit down and engage in something called a pool spray,

which is cameramen and reporters and sound men holding boom mics come in and try to catch a few phrases from each of the leaders. And Trump gave the kind of remark we've heard from him really hundreds of times. I feel really great. We're going to have a great discussion and I think tremendous success. He said, I feel really great. And it's my honor. And we will have a terrific relationship. I have no doubt. Kim then followed him. He spoke, of course, in Korean.

And he offered a very different kind of tone. Well, it was not easy to get here. He said, well, it was not easy to get here. The past has placed many obstacles in our way. But we overcame all of them. But we overcame all of them, and we are here today. That's true. So that was basically the opening lines from each of the gentlemen. Trump then turned to the cameras and said, thank you very much.

And the press was hustled out of the room. So it was Kim who chose the more kind of historically minded language. Yes, and Kim also who struck the more candid note. I mean, Kim who acknowledged that the past was difficult, and there were many reasons why this meeting took so many decades to happen. After this one-on-one meeting concluded, they then sat down at a longer table across from each other and flanked by senior aides. And again, there are usually very brief remarks by the two leaders as they start. Mr. Chairman, today I want to be with you, and I know we're

up to the money success together, and we'll solve the big problem, the big dilemma that until this point has been unable to be solved. And we're working together, we will get it taken care of. So, great on you. Thank you. And then the cameras and the journalists are excused from the room, and they get down to business. It has been so far a rigorously scripted event, and people are sticking to the clock. The big question I think people have is, will there be some unscheduled surprise? I think people have is, will there be some unscheduled surprise? Will the two leaders perhaps go for a walk on the grounds of this very beautiful hotel where they're meeting? Will the two leaders grab a little bit more time on their own? And we may be able to form some judgments about how productive the encounter has been by how long these gentlemen are willing

to hang out with one another. So there's one more thing I wanted to ask you about. In the time since we last spoke and you told us about Kim Jong-un's nightlife there in Singapore, the North Korean state newspapers have been published. page is this elaborate spread of big color images of Kim on this tour being followed around and looking very important and pleased. Might that explain why he was out and about on the town for the message that it would send back home to North Koreans? I think there's a lot to that. I think that by going out and being seen in these public places, in this relaxed setting, Kim is projecting a sense of confidence, a sense that he knows how to carry himself on the world stage. And that's an extremely important message to send home to his people. It makes them probably feel proud that

they have a leader who's able to do this. And as I said before, it's an interesting contrast to Donald Trump, who actually decided to take an extremely low profile. I think that when this is all over, people here in Singapore will remember Kim Jong-un's performance. Donald Trump came and went without making much of an impact. Is that symbolic that Kim is there for the images and Trump is there to get a deal made? I think that Trump is also there for the images. But I don't think Trump feels any pressure to prove himself to an American audience in terms of his ability to carry himself internationally. For Kim, the mere fact of the meeting, the image of these two gentlemen standing in front of a wall of North Korean and American flags, that's already the whole ballgame for Kim. And I think it's worth noting sort of parenthetically that the display of flags was no doubt something negotiated quite actively between the two sides.

And it is something that must have been very gratifying for Kim Jong-un to see the North Korean flag, you know, on an equal plane with the U.S. flag. It sort of drove home symbolically why this summit is so valuable for Kim. You typically see this display of the stars and stripes next to the flag of a foreign country, and it instantly confers a level of legitimacy and sovereignty on the other country. And for North Korea, a country whose very existence has sometimes been seen in question, that's a huge validation. And so I think for Kim Jong-un, that, in addition to the handshake, made this a trip well worth taking. Thank you, Mark.

Thank you very much, Michael. So we're signing a very important document, a pretty comprehensive document, and we've had a really great term together, a great relationship. On Tuesday morning, after more than four hours of meetings in Singapore, President Trump and Chairman Kim signed an agreement setting

the path forward for the denuclearization of North Korea. On behalf of Chairman Kim and myself, and we're both very honored to sign the document. Thank you. Would you like to say something to the press? 그리고 모두 모두의 기뻐에 대해 기록을 받았습니다. 감사합니다. 오늘의 기록은 무엇입니까? 오늘의 기록은 무엇입니까?

오늘의 기록은 무엇입니까? 우리가 희생적인 대회가 있었고, 과거의 과거를 잊고, 희생적인 도쿄에 도착하고 있습니다. 세상은 아마 중대한 변화를 보게 될 것입니다. 세계는 큰 변화를 볼 것입니다. 오늘과 같은 이런 자리를 위해서 노력해주신 트럼프 대통령께 사의를 표합니다. 트럼프 대통령에게 이 대회가 일어날 것을 감사드리고 싶습니다. 감사합니다. I would like to express my gratitude to President Trump to make this meeting happen. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Okay. A few hours later, Trump held a news conference. Our unprecedented meeting, the first between an American president and a leader of North Korea, proves that real change is indeed possible. My meeting with Chairman Kim was honest, direct, and productive. We got to know each other well in a very confined period of time, under very strong, strong circumstance. We're prepared to start a new history, and we're ready to write a new chapter between our nations. The past does not have to define the future.

Yesterday's conflict does not have to be tomorrow's war. And as history has proven over and over again, adversaries can indeed become friends. We can honor the sacrifice of our forefathers by replacing the horrors of battle with the blessings of peace. And that's what we're doing and that's what we have done. After the news conference, the president boarded Air Force One for a flight back to the U.S. Here's what else you need to know today. On Monday, the Supreme Court upheld the state of Ohio's aggressive efforts to purge its voting rolls. In a 5-4 ruling, the court said that Ohio can continue to remove people from voting registries

if they skip a few elections and fail to respond to a public notice from state officials. Opponents of the Ohio law said it disproportionately affected poor and minority voters and resulted in the removal of far more Democratic voters than Republicans. But the justices found that the Ohio system was a legitimate way to update voting rolls, to remove those who either moved or died. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.