The President of the United States, Donald Trump, expressed on Saturday his joy at the return to the public scene Kim Jong-un, whose absence for almost three weeks of any act, including several official commemorations, had fueled rumors about his state of health. -even his death- on the leader of the opaque and iron dictatorship of North Korea. “At least I’m glad to see you back and [que esté] all right!”, the US president wrote on his Twitter account, citing another tweet with the photographs of the plant inauguration in which Kim had appeared.
Shortly after that message, on the same social network the name of Otto Warmbier became one of the main trends in the United States. Warmbier is the name of the young man from Ohio whom the Kim regime arrested in 2016 accusing him of “crimes against the State” for allegedly sneaking into a hotel employee area where he was staying and trying to pick up a political propaganda poster. They sentenced him to 15 years of forced labor. In June 2017, 17 months later, Pyongyang released him in a vegetative state and died in the United States within days of arriving.
Trump’s approach to North Korea is shocking not only because of the heavy-handed strategy for which he opts with other regimes -such as the Cuban one, liquidating the thawing process initiated by Barack Obama-, but also because of the warm words that he usually dedicates to Their leader. His term began taunting him, calling him “fat and short”, “Rocket man”, exchanging serious threats of war, to end up being the first president to set foot on North Korean soil. He has met three times with the leader between 2018 and 2019 and started negotiations for the denuclearization of the regime, but they have not come to fruition.
“If I were not president, we would be at war with North Korea,” Trump recently said at one of the daily press conferences to address the coronavirus crisis, defending his strategy with Pyongyang. When the rumors about Kim’s health doubled this week, the president indicated that he knew the state he was in and, although he pointed out that he could not give details, he hinted that he was alive and said that he wished him “what best”.
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