A week after abruptly scrapping his prized summit with Kim Jong-un, US President Donald Trump buoyantly announced on Friday the talks were back on for June 12 in Singapore.
His reversal came after receiving a letter from Kim, hand delivered to the White House by the North Korean leader's top envoy. Trump initially told reporters the missive was "very interesting". But he later acknowledged he had not read it yet, CNN reported.
The contents of the note from Pyongyang appeared to matter little to Trump, who sounded an optimistic and conciliatory note about the prospects for a deal. He said harsh statements from the North lampooning Vice President Mike Pence and threatening nuclear war were a thing of the past.
"I think we're over that, totally over that, and now we're going to deal and we're going to really start a process," Trump said on the South Lawn at the White House after meeting with the North Korean envoy, Kim Yong-chol, for more than an hour in the Oval Office.
"We're meeting with the chairman on June 12 and I think it's probably going to be a very successful—ultimately a successful process," Trump said.
The announcement capped an electric day of diplomacy at the White House, which included the highest-level meeting between a US president and a North Korean official since 2000.
>Cliffhanger
Trump's announcement that the summit is back on amounted to a plot twist in a reality-show back-and-forth over whether the summit would actually occur. With just over a week until the scheduled sit-down, few expect the cliffhanger aspect of the encounter will wane.
"We'll see. Remember what I say. We will see what we will see, but I think it's going to be a process that we deserve to have," Trump said.
Kim Yong-chol, a former spy chief and currently North Korea's top nuclear negotiator arrived just after 1 p.m. ET on the South Lawn, where foreign dignitaries are typically received by the US president. This time, Trump did not greet his visitor in person, leaving that task to his chief of staff John Kelly and a top CIA official.
There was little ceremony and no handshake. They walked along the Rose Garden to the Oval Office, where Kim met with Trump for more than an hour.
When they emerged, Trump shook Kim's hand before seeing him off in a black US government SUV. He strolled to a group of nearby reporters to declare the meeting a success.
"The relationships are building and that's a very positive thing," he said. Asked about Pyongyang's commitment to denuclearization, Trump said, "I think they want to do that. I know they want to do that."
"They want to develop as a country," Trump said.
>Prevailing Skepticism
Those assurances, however, will do little to quiet skepticism about Trump's willingness to meet Kim. It is not yet clear what steps, if any, the North has signaled it is willing to take to negotiate away its nuclear program. There are doubts Pyongyang would agree to fully relinquish its arsenal, which it has described as a survival mechanism.
Trump himself sounded conciliatory, telling reporters he was holding off applying new sanctions on North Korea and declaring he would no longer use the phrase "maximum pressure" to describe his campaign to choke off the isolated regime.
"I don't want to use the term maximum pressure anymore. I don't want to use that term," he said. "We're getting along. You see the relationship. It's not a question of maximum pressure," he said.
As Trump met with Kim Yong-chol at the White House, separate teams of US officials were making preparations for the summit in Asia. A team of negotiators were holding talks along the Korean Demilitarized Zone to draft some type of document that both leaders could agree to, and a logistics team was in Singapore arranging final details for the talks.
Trump himself was expected to participate in some briefings on the upcoming meeting at Camp David this weekend. He departed for the mountainside presidential retreat Friday afternoon with his children Donald Jr., Tiffany and Ivanka, along with Ivanka's husband Jared Kushner.
