Stephanie Grisham is already proving her mettle in her first days as White House press secretary, elbowing her way through a press and security scrum as American journalists tried to bulldoze their way into President Donald Trump’s meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Grisham clearly did not take any guff from the North Koreans or from the “U.S. pool” reporters involved in the minor melee.
It looks like Ms. Grisham will fit in just fine at the Trump White House!
President Donald Trump has reclaimed the upper hand in renewed trade negotiations with China, befriending China’s nuclear weapon-wielding ace in the hole in Kim Jong Un.
After President Trump became the first sitting Commander in Chief to step foot on North Korean soil — on a peacemaking trip attended by America First stalwart Tucker Carlson but not by neocon adviser John Bolton — Trump invited Kim to visit America “when the time is right,” as teams from both the Trump and Un camps work out details of their ongoing negotiations.
If Trump can neutralize Un as a China-supported threat to the United States, the Chinese lose leverage in their angling with Trump over the US-China trade imbalance. Trump managed to revive talks with China at the G20 Summit in Japan after negotiations stalled for a while. The deal looked close to getting done back in March when Trump’s envoy Steven Mnuchin and Robert Lighthizer met with the Chinese on their turf and ours. China agreed in principle to purchase $1.2 trillion in American goods over a six-year period to wipe out the US-China trade deficit by the year 2024, a result of Trump’s tariffs sticking China with its worst economic growth figure in 2018 since 1990. But disputes lingered over China’s intellectual property theft of American tech inventors, and their anticipated spying on American citizens through 5G technology. Talks stalled, and China went to the European Union — still reeling from Trump outplaying them and getting them to buy massive amounts of American soybeans — for diplomatic support.
President Trump is not raising tariffs on the beleaguered Chinese at this time.