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Trump-Kim summit: What happened at their first meeting – and what to expect at their next
WASHINGTON – The "Dotard" and the "Rocket Man" are ready for their second pas de deux.
The world will be watching when President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un sit down for their second summit in less than a year.
The meeting, which will take place Feb. 27 and 28 in Vietnam, follows their first round of face-to-face talks last summer in Singapore and will give the two leaders a chance to flesh out some of the details of a history-making denuclearization agreement that emerged from their initial dialogue.
Here’s a look back at what happened during the first summit and what we can expect during the second:
A historic meeting
Trump and Kim had a troubled history – one filled with taunts, threats and colorful name-calling – before their historic meeting last June.
Trump mocked Kim as “Rocket Man,” called him “a maniac” with nuclear weapons and warned that he if didn’t stop threatening the United States he’d be met “with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Kim bragged that he has a nuclear button on his desk, dismissed Trump as “a rogue and a gangster” and – in one of their more imaginative insults – blasted the U.S. president as a mentally deranged “dotard.” (A dotard, for the record, is an old person, especially one who is weak or senile.)
Given their war of words, the world was stunned when Kim announced last March that he had invited Trump to meet and discuss North Korea’s nuclear program and that Trump had accepted the invitation. The meeting would be the first ever between the nations’ two leaders after more than a half-century of tensions between their countries.
The setting chosen for the summit was a luxury resort hotel in Singapore.
Pageantry and surreal moments
After weeks of preparations, the two adversaries finally came face to face on June 12 in a day filled with pomp and ceremony.
Trump arrived first; Kim showed up 17 minutes later. In front of a backdrop of American and North Korean flags, the two leaders stood on a red carpet and shook hands, which itself was a history-making gesture and one that critics said gave too much prestige to Kim, a dictator who imprisons and murders his opponents.
Then they got down to business. The four-hour summit included a private one-on-one meeting between Trump and Kim and their translators, which was followed by a bilateral meeting between delegations of the two countries.
Amid the serious discussions, there were lots of surreal moments. Trump and Kim participated in frequent photo ops that showed them getting along. They took a lunchtime stroll on the hotel grounds. Trump gave Kim a peek inside of his presidential limousine known as “The Beast.”
Despite their past animosities, Trump and Kim had nothing but nice things to say about each other. Trump said he and Kim had developed “a very special bond.” Kim said he and Trump had decided “to leave the past behind.”
And then the the two leaders who had spent months threatening to annihilate each other signed an agreement pledging to work toward the “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”
“We’re ready to write a new chapter,” a triumphant Trump said at a news conference.
Hạnh Dương
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