Michael Anton, the recently departed spokesperson for President Donald Trump’s National Security Council, defended Trump’s Tuesday reference to North Korean ruler Kim Jong Un as “honorable.”
“What he specifically said was that Kim Jong Un had been honorable in the negotiation over the summit, so he limited it to that one very narrow topic,” Anton told CNN’s Kate Bolduan in an interview Wednesday, though Trump did not specify that he was referring to the negotiations.
Trump said of the North Korea’s ruler: “We’re having very good discussions. Kim Jong Un, he really has been very open and, I think, very honorable from everything we’re seeing. Now a lot of promises have been made by North Korea over the years, but they’ve never been in this position.”
Asked about the comment at a joint press conference with French President Emmanuel Macron later, Trump spoke generally about the negotiations with North Korea.
Anton told Bolduan: “I think you’re making much too much of this. The President said that in a very narrow context about the setting up of the talks.”
“Trying to extend it beyond that to a macro comment about the North Korean regime, which he clearly didn’t mean, I just don’t think that’s accurate,” he added.
Anton is best known for anonymously writing “The Flight 93 Election,” a pre-election argument for conservatives to line up behind Trump’s campaign. In it, he compared the Washington status quo — including “the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty” — to the terrorists who hijacked United Flight 93 on September 11, 2001.
“Trump, alone among candidates for high office in this or in the last seven (at least) cycles, has stood up to say: I want to live. I want my party to live. I want my country to live. I want my people to live. I want to end the insanity,” he wrote separately in the essay, referring to “mass migration.”
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