The set of “Morning Joe” mocked President Trump relationship’s with North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Un on Monday, telling viewers that the two might as well exchange Valentine’s Day cards as part of the love fest.
“Did the president say that he loved Kim Jong Un again this weekend?” Scarborough asked. “Did they send each other a Valentine’s card?”
Scarborough then invoked the death of University of Virginia college student Otto Warmbier, who was captured and held in North Korea for more than a year before returning back to the U.S. with severe neurological damage. Warmbier died a short time later in June 2017.
“[Kim] killed an Ohio college student, brutalized him, killed him, sent him back to the United States brain dead where he died because what he took a poster? This is who Donald Trump loved and adores and worships,” Scarborough continued. “That’s screwed up.”
The show also noted how the president has consistently refused to address a plot to kill multiple liberal journalists and politicians by a coast guard lieutenant last week.
On Wednesday, Trump will meet with Kim Jong Un in Vietnam. It will be their second summit to address denuclearization of the Korea peninsula. The two previously met in Singapore in June of last year. Departing from conventional orthodoxies of both parties, Trump has repeated professed his “love” for dictator.
“We fell in love,” Trump told a rally last September, with the president adding that he was won over by the “beautiful letters” Kim wrote him.
The rapprochement has resulted in a halt of North Korean nuclear testing — something Trump and his surrogates have frequently lauded. Though to date, there is no evidence that the country has taken any real steps to dismantle their program and as “Morning Joe” noted Monday, it remains unclear whether they could ever be persuaded.
The Trump-Kim love is a sharp reversal for the two leaders who traded barbs for most of 2017. The president frequently derided Kim as “little rocket man” and famously warned him that the United States would rain “fire and fury” upon him if North Korea didn’t knock of their nuclear testing.