U.S. President Donald commended North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as a “tough guy” in an interview that aired Wednesday night on Fox News.
Fox’s Bret Baier interviewed Trump aboard Air Force One before the return flight to the United States from Singapore. During their conversation, Baier pressed Trump on human-rights abuses, including executions, under Kim’s regime.
Trump’s response?
Those weren’t the only generous words Trump had for Kim, whom he described as a “tough guy” and “a great negotiator.”
“Hey, when you take over a country, tough country, with tough people, and you take it over from your father, I don’t care who you are, what you are, how much of an advantage you have,” Trump said in the interview. “If you can do that at 27 years old, I mean that’s one in 10,000 that could do that.”
“But he’s still done some really bad things,” Baier reminded Trump.
“Yeah, but so have a lot of other people done some really bad things,” Trump said. “I mean, I could go through a lot of nations where a lot of bad things were done.”
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The interview that aired on Fox didn’t mark the only time Trump went long on compliments about North Korea and. During a press conference on Tuesday[3] after the historic meeting between Trump and Kim, Trump called him a “talented” guy[4] who “loves his country very much.”
North Korea has been described as “one of the most repressive authoritarian states in the world” by Human Rights Watch. The country sharply curtails freedom of expression, religion and assembly, and it also prohibits political opposition and independent media. North Korea allegedly operates secretive prison camps where perceived opponents of the government face torture, starvation rations and forced labor. Many instances are documented in a United Nations report.[5]
Among those sent to a forced-labor camp was American university student Otto Warmbier, who spent nearly 18 months in captivity after being forced to falsely confess to accusations that he was a CIA spy, the legal filing states, according to a legal filing by Warmbier’s parents...