elise, to you on the phone, i mean, listen, this kind of rhetoric this is old news, the bellicosity from north korea, and, frankly, some of it from washington that we ve witnessed the last couple of months. add to that the fact we know the north koreans know that president trump tried to go to the dmz and had to bail because of bad weather. the white house had to be expecting this kind of rhetoric from the north koreans. well, they absolutely did, brooke. and, listen, as ryan said, this rhetoric is typical, but it is pretty clear that this is very personal between these two leaders. president trump and kim jong-un have really gotten in each other s head and the rhetoric has become very personal against each other. i think the north koreans are, you know, kind of hunkering down. they don t know what to do, really, with this president trump. they re not sure if he means what he says and they re hearing conflicting messages. they re hearing from secretary of state rex tillerson that
cha, after the president has called kim jong-un rocket man leading to kim jong-un going on camera, the first time, his grandfather and father didn t do that to respond to that speech from president trump. the first thing i would say is the north koreans are used to bellicosity, so when they hear forceful language, i think that s something they understand. diplomacy is always an option. it s been set forth by this administration as something they re willing to do if the north koreans are willing to talk about denuclearization. the key piece, as wendy said, is the sanctions piece, and he s got japan and korea on board for sanctions, but the harder one is china. that is why the china part of this trip becomes very important. he s leading with this issue of going into beijing. it s clearly the number one issue for president trump, going
of military force in korea. it would be good if congress was pretty directive as to how that power should be exercised. i think it would be very difficult to get congress to act, but yes, we could take some action, and it could have some impact. ambassador hill, we ve had some dark and sobering assessments on the show this week about the situation in north korea both from experts on the subject and from nick christoff who got back from five days there and said he didn t see a country or leadership that was going to be deterred by sanctions. in fact, was energized by having been elevated to the level of the united states by president trump on the world stage. where are you right now on this crisis? how concerned are you as a former ambassador to south korea? well, i m very concerned. i mean, there are a lot of reasons to be concerned coming out of the region. first of all, the president s bellicosity on this is not helpful. i mean, i don t know where he got a north korean speech wri
but we have to remember, stepny, that in this situation, the e v es calais, the bellicosity from all sides, none of these countries involved japan, south korea, the united states, north korea they ve not shown any real military movement on the ground or at least nothing matching the level of the rhetoric that we ve been hearing. stephanie? aggressive rhetoric, two nuclear nation, this is a time. thank you, matt. we ll take a break. next, a new trump campaign ad out yesterday, the day when so many were calling for unity, it targets democrats and the media using stronger language than he did after saturday s attack.
matthew, can you walk us through the evolution of donald trump s language of this week? first of all, we note that we can only hope the expression locked and loaded translates approximately, at least, in north korean, just as they promised today in one of their statements to reduce us to jelly, probably in english, that means some version of a pulp. but these are the kinds of things that diplomats worry about. yeah. i mean, you have this increasing bellicosity, which is no surprise from the north koreans, but it is a surprise coming from the american president. and you have language that is at once both startling and juvenile. he talks about how we could have a good or bad solution. how if the situation continues, there s going to be big trouble