One of the bolder actions Donald Trump took as president-elect was to be entirely dismissive of the daily intelligence briefings given to the president, which … well, lets him know every day what’s going on in the world.
Indeed, it was reported that Trump found them superfluous, and Fox News claimed that he preferred to get one a week as opposed to one a day.
“I’m, like, a smart person,” he said. “I don’t have to be told the same thing and the same words every single day for the next eight years … I don’t need that.”
Maybe—just maybe—he should reconsider that position because it might appear that President Trump 1) Doesn’t know the name of the leader of North Korea, with whom he’s been saber-rattling with for a week, but also 2) Doesn’t seem to know that the country’s leader during the Clinton administration died and that he’s now dealing with a different person.
Speaking with Fox News’s Ainsley Earhardt, Trump had this to say about either Kim Jong-un or Kim Jong-il.
“I don’t want to telegraph what I’m doing or what I’m thinking. I’m not like other administrations where they say, ‘We’re going to do this in four weeks.’ It doesn’t work that way. We’ll see what happens. I hope things work out well. I hope there’s going to be peace,” Trump said.
“But, you know, they’ve been talking with this gentleman for a long time,” he continued. “You read Clinton’s book, he said, ‘Oh, we made such a great peace deal,’ and it was a joke. You look at different things over the years with President Obama. Everybody has been outplayed, they’ve all been outplayed by this gentleman. And we’ll see what happens. But I just don’t telegraph my moves.”
.@POTUS on tensions between U.S. and North Korea pic.twitter.com/k10z2tUxbH
— FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) April 18, 2017
So, Trump seems to refer to Kim Jong-il, with whom Clinton dealt, in the same fashion as he refers to “this gentleman” who leads North Korea, which is Kim Jong-un, Kim Jong-il’s son. He has ruled the communist country since his father’s death in 2011.
This just another one of Trump’s major foreign policy gaffes in recent weeks. Last week, the president said in an interview that he bombed Iraq instead of Syria.
But maybe it’s just been six days since his last briefing and he’s a bit rusty. Certainly, he’ll be caught up to speed before he does anything militarily. Right?