In a Saturday tweet from Japan, President Trump took a rhetorical swing at former Vice President Joe Biden when he suggested North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un called his 2020 rival “a low IQ individual”. The anti-Trump alarmists over at ABC did the only reasonable thing, to them, and decided that the President had taken the “side” of a “murderous dictator” over one of their presidential candidates.
ABC White House correspondent Tara Palmeri wrapped up her Sunday report on Good Morning America by noting that “an aide to Biden said the tweet is erratic and unhinged.” Co-host Dan Harris pounced on the tweet as he brought on chief foreign affairs correspondent Martha Raddatz.
Harris tried his hand at mindreading to tell viewers what was really going through the President’s mind when he sent out the tweet:
So put this Trump tweet in context for us. Here we have the President of the United States appearing to side with a murderous dictator, who by the way has a nuclear program that could endanger our people, over a former Vice President of the United States who happens to be campaigning against him. So, am I seeing this correctly? What's going on here?
“I think you are seeing that correctly,” Raddatz agreed.
After seeming to suggest Trump didn’t understand the seriousness of North Korea’s recent missile test, Raddatz appeared to mock the lack of clear progress on denuclearization: “We are about two weeks away from the anniversary of the Singapore summit where he said that North Korea no longer posed a danger with its nuclear weapons, and there has been zero significant progress in denuclearizing North Korea.”
Before formally engaging with North Korea for the first time last year, the President made it clear that he wouldn’t agree to a deal just to say he got something. He told Americans he was willing to walk away if Kim was being unreasonable, and he did just that at their Vietnam summit earlier this year.
In contrast their Sunday reporting, ABC heaped arguably unwarranted adulation onto former President Obama for his weak deal with Iran. And they did everything in the power to defend it, even ignoring Iranian transgressions against the United States to protect it from public scrutiny.
When it was first announced that Iran had sentenced Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian to an unspecified prison sentenced on trumped-up charges, ABC ignored it. The networked also chose to bash then-candidate Trump when it was discovered that Obama had paid a $400 million ransom to Iran for captured Americans. And when the ransom was discovered to have been worth $1.7 billion, they sprinted pass it.
Speaking of taking the side of murderous regimes, ABC had no words for the massive Politico investigative report that uncovered Obama’s “sabotage” of operations against the Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorist group to help secure the deal.
ABC doesn’t think Iran is a threat, suggests the U.S. is the destabilizing force in the Middle East and not Iran, and were unimpressed by Trump bringing American hostages home from North Korea. These are their priorities.
The transcript is below, click "expand" to read:
ABC’s Good Morning America
May 26, 2019
8:13:03 a.m. Eastern(…)
TARA PALMERI: While in the region, Trump sending a message to North Korea by brushing off their latest rocket launches. Tweeting: “North Korea fired off some small weapons which disturbed some of my people and others but not me. I have confidence that Chairman Kim will keep his promise to me.”
[Cuts back to live]
In that tweet, President Trump boasts about his relationship with Kim Jong-un as a way to take a jab at his political rival, Joe Biden. He tweets that Kim Jong-un called Biden a “low IQ individual”. An aide to Biden said the tweet is erratic and unhinged. Dan?
DAN HARRIS: Tara, thank you. I want to pick up on this tweet. So let's bring in our chief foreign affairs correspondent Martha Raddatz who's in D.C. where she's going to be hosting This Week, later this morning. Martha, good morning.
So put this Trump tweet in context for us. Here we have the President of the United States appearing to side with a murderous dictator, who by the way has a nuclear program that could endanger our people, over a former Vice President of the United States who happens to be campaigning against him. So, am I seeing this correctly? What's going on here?
MARTHA RADDATZ: I think you are seeing that correctly. And whether President Trump wants to just confuse North Korea by going against John Bolton, who is the one who said these missiles were very dangerous. And by the way, those small weapons can travel about 300 miles that he tested and probably do violate U.N. sanctions, U.N. regulations.
So, I don't know whether he's trying to confuse someone, but I think the bottom line, Dan, is that he wants a deal with North Korea. We are about two weeks away from the anniversary of the Singapore summit where he said that North Korea no longer posed a danger with its nuclear weapons, and there has been zero significant progress in denuclearizing North Korea.
(…)
