Donald Trump Said North Korea Wasn’t a Nuclear Threat. Mike Pompeo Just Contradicted Him on CNN.

“I know precisely what he said.”

Susan Walsh/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo aren’t on the same page on North Korea’s nuclear weapons, just days away from a major summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Vietnam. In a Sunday morning interview on CNN, Pompeo was asked if he believed if the dictatorship still posed a “nuclear threat.”

Pompeo said that it did. When pressed by host Jake Tapper about Trump’s past assertion to the contrary, Pompeo told Tapper that Trump had never said such a thing. “I know precisely what he said,” Pompeo responded.

But Trump did say that. After the much-hyped 2018 summit between the two heads of state in Singapore, Trump announced that “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea” [sic]:

There’s a significant difference posing a nuclear threat and no longer posing a nuclear threat, inasmuch as there’s a real difference between “the annihilation of the planet” and “Wednesday.” The president and his secretary of state have three more days to get their position straight before the big meeting.

BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

payment methods

BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate