Book reveals how North Korea’s Kim wooed Trump with flattery-filled letters
- Bob Woodward’s ‘Rage’ unveils 25 letters the pair exchanged, in which Kim fawns over the US president while they formed a most unusual friendship
- ‘I also believe that the deep and special friendship between us will work as a magical force,’ the North Korean leader wrote in a June 2019 missive
Rage by The Washington Post investigative journalist Bob Woodward unveils 25 letters the pair exchanged, in which Kim uses over-the-top wording as he fawns over Trump while they formed a most unusual friendship.
Addressing Trump as “Your Excellency”, Kim’s letters are filled with flattering language and personal comments, according to transcripts released by CNN.
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“I also believe that the deep and special friendship between us will work as a magical force,” Kim added in a June 2019 missive.
Three weeks later the two held a short-notice meeting in the demilitarised zone that divides the peninsula.
“Only you and I, working together, can resolve the issues between our two countries and end nearly 70 years of hostility,” Trump wrote. “It will be historic!”
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But little progress has been made on efforts to denuclearise Pyongyang since the pair’s first summit in Singapore, and even US intelligence chiefs have warned the North is unlikely to ever surrender its nuclear weapons.
Trump – who showed Kim a video in Singapore that included images of condominium towers rising from the North Korean coast – likened Kim and his nuclear arsenal to a reluctant home seller.
“It’s really like, you know, somebody that’s in love with a house and they just can’t sell it,” Trump told him, according to The Washington Post.
He insisted that he “gave up nothing” in his three face-to-face meetings with Kim.
Negotiations between Pyongyang and Washington have been deadlocked since the Hanoi summit collapse in February last year.
A few months after the Singapore meeting, Trump had told a rally of his supporters that the two men had fallen in love.
“No, really, he wrote me beautiful letters, and they’re great letters. We fell in love,” he said.
In the book, Woodward writes that the CIA never conclusively determined who wrote and crafted Kim’s letters, but the agency considered them “masterpieces”.
“The analysts marvelled at the skill someone brought to finding the exact mixture of flattery while appealing to Trump’s sense of grandiosity and being centre stage in history,” he wrote.