US President Donald Trump has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize after his historic meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un.
The 72-year-old Trump was nominated by two Norwegian lawmakers who belong to the populist Progress Party. Trump “had taken a huge and important step in the direction of the disarmament, peace and reconciliation between North and South Korea,” they told Norwegian news agency NTB on Wednesday.
Shortly after the Trump-Kim meeting in Singapore, the US president called the North Korean leader a smart guy who is also a great negotiator.
Asked during an Air Force One interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier about meeting with a leader who is “clearly executing people”, Trump said: “Hey, when you take over a country – tough country, tough people – and you take it over from your father, I don’t care who you are, what you are, how much of an advantage you have – if you could do that at 27 years old, I mean, that’s one in 10,000 that could do that
“So he’s a very smart guy,” Trump added. “He’s a great negotiator”.
This is a departure from Trump’s earlier sentiments towards Kim. Last year, the duo traded insults following North Korea’s decision to conduct nuclear and ballistic missile tests in defiance of the international community.
This had Trump referring to Kim as a “madman with nuclear weapons” and later he threatened to “totally destroy North Korea.”
The 34-year-old North Korean leader responded calling Trump a “mentally deranged” person and saying that “a frightened dog barks louder.”
Trump had also called Kim “Little Rocket Man” and threatened to unleash “fire and fury like the world has never seen” on North Korea if it did not stop conducting ballistic missile tests.
