Trump says Tillerson is 'wasting his time' on North Korea negotiations

(Image credit: Pool/Getty Images)

last updated 1 October 2017

President Trump took to Twitter Sunday to announce that it is futile for Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to attempt to handle U.S.-North Korea tensions with diplomacy — while Tillerson is on a diplomatic visit to Asia addressing North Korea.

Trump himself is scheduled to tour Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam, and the Philippines in November, a trip the White House says will involve talks to accomplish the "complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula" — unless, perhaps, Trump wants to save his own energy, too? After all, he reportedly believes every human body is born with a finite amount of energy, like a battery, and thus eschews exercise as a sure means to an early death. Maybe averting nuclear war just runs down the old battery too much.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.