What is Trump doing to prepare for the North Korea summit?
President Trump on Thursday said he doesn't think he has to prepare much for Tuesday's North Korea summit, claiming it isn't a question of preparation so much as a question of attitude.
Asked what he is doing to prepare for the summit, Mr. Trump said the summit comes down to a "willingness to get things done."
"I'm very well prepared," the president, seated alongside Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, told reporters in the Oval Office Thursday. "I don't think I have to prepare very much. It's about attitude. It's about willingness to get things done. But I think I've been preparing for this summit for a long time, as has the other side. They've been preparing for a long time, also. So this isn't a question of preparation. It's a question of whether or not people want it to happen. And we'll know that very quickly."
But that remark raises the question — one reporters have asked in the past – about what exactly the president is doing, days out from the summit, to prepare. Mr. Trump did say he has "been preparing for this summit for a long time." The administration first announced the president's intention to meet with North Korea's Kim Jong Un in early March, leaving only a few months to prepare.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Thursday the president is being briefed on a daily or nearly daily basis. Pompeo said he is "very confident" Mr. Trump will be "fully prepared" with he meets with "his North Korean counterpart."
"So in my previous role -- and I've said this before, you can look it up -- there were few days that I left the Oval Office after having briefed the president that we didn't talk about North Korea," Pompeo told reporters in a briefing Friday. "So over months and months, days and days, President Trump has been receiving briefings on this issue about the military aspects of it; the commercial, economic aspects of it; the history of the relationship."
"And in the past few months, there have been near-daily briefings, including today, where we have been providing the president all the information that he needs," Pompeo continued. "And I am very confident that the president will be fully prepared when he meets with his North Korean counterpart."
Pompeo said there has been progress on bringing the U.S. and North Korean definitions of denuclearization closer together, although he declined to expand on that. Pompeo insists the U.S. will settle for nothing less than complete, verifiable denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.
But more specific details of what the president has been doing to prepare haven't been provided. U.S. teams have been preparing for the meeting for weeks, although one senior White House official expressed skepticism about the ability to pull off a June 12th summit after Mr. Trump canceled it temporarily in May.
"June 12th is in 10 minutes and the president has said that someday he looks forward to meeting with him," the official told reporters at the end of May.
The summit is expected to kick off the morning of June 12 local time, or the evening of June 11 on the East Coast, at Singapore's Capella Hotel on Sentosa Island.