Dennis Rodman doesn't want to take all the credit for bringing North Korea to the negotiating table
Former NBA star Dennis Rodman likes to visit North Korea. He has traveled there five times in the past five years, most recently in the summer of 2017 to attend the birthday party of his "friend for life," North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Rodman's present for the birthday boy was a copy of President Trump's best-known book, The Art of the Deal, and now that Pyongyang is making historic offers at the negotiating table, Rodman is ready for some recognition.
"I think [Kim] didn't realize who Donald Trump was at that time," Rodman mused in a video interview published by TMZ on Sunday, "until, I guess, he started to read the book and started understanding." Rodman insisted he doesn't "want to take all the credit," to "sit here and say, 'I did this. I did that'" — but he clearly wouldn't be mad if he were to go down in history as the man who brought peace to North Korea.
"Now, since things have changed again," Rodman continued in the TMZ clip, "people are calling me and saying, 'Why are you not getting the credit because you're the one [who] brought awareness to everything?'" Perhaps those are the same people who in 2013 declared that if Rodman doesn't "finish in the top three for the next Nobel Peace Prize, something's seriously wrong."
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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.
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