Trump Slamming Trudeau After Leaving G7 Summit; Merkel: Trump Actions Sobering Somewhat Depressing
HALA GORANI, CNN INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Hello and welcome. I'm Hala Gorani. Tonight, you saw the images there at the top of the hour. Historic, high stakes and hugely unpredictable. The leaders of the United States and North Korea have never met. But in less than six hours now in Singapore, that will change. Donald Trump will sit down face to face with Kim Jong-un with only translators in the room, no other officials. Kim Jong-un is looking confident about meeting, if you judge by these appearances. He stunned everyone by taking a nighttime stroll in downtown Singapore, completely surrounded by his security detail with that massive entourage of bodyguards and photographers. Take a look at this. The North Korean leader posed for a selfie in between two Singaporean government ministers including the foreign minister. President Trump for his part tweeted that there is, quote, "excitement in the air." His top diplomat, the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, says he is very hopeful about the talks. Kaitlan Collins has our story.</s>MIKE POMPEO, U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE: The ultimate objective we seek from diplomacy with North Korea has not changed. The complete and verifiable and irreversible denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula is the only outcome that the United States will accept.</s>KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN WHITE HOUSE REPORTER: President Trump and North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un touching down in Singapore just hours apart ahead of the historic high-stakes summit. Both leaders meeting separately with Singapore's prime minister while aides spent the day hammering out last-minute details.</s>POMPEO: We're prepared to take what will be security assurances that are different unique than have been provided -- that America has been willing to provide previously. We think this is both necessary and appropriate.</s>COLLINS: North Korean state media broadcasting these pictures of Kim Jong- un leaving North Korea and arriving in Singapore -- and officially announcing the trip which they say will be focused on peace and the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.</s>DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: I think within first minute, I'll know.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: How?</s>PRESIDENT TRUMP: Just my touch, my feel. That's what I do.</s>COLLINS: The summit coming as President Trump escalates his feud with America's closest allies on the heels of a contentious G7 meeting. President Trump lashing out on Twitter accusing Germany, European Union, and Canada of unfair trade practices and not spending enough on security. Adding, "Then Justin acts hurt when called out." This after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that Canada would retaliate after new U.S. tariffs.</s>JUSTIN TRUDEAU, CANADIAN PRIME MINISTER: Canadians are polite. We're reasonable, but we also will not be pushed around.</s>COLLINS: President Trump responding by calling Trudeau dishonest and weak and instructing U.S. representatives not to sign the G7 joint statement. The president's advisers fiercely attacking Trudeau on the Sunday shows.</s>LARRY KUDLOW, DIRECTOR, WH NATIONAL ECONOMIC COUNCIL: Trudeau posed this sophomoric, political stunt for domestic consumption.</s>PETER NAVARRO, ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT: There is a special place in hell for any foreign leader that engages in bad faith diplomacy with President Donald J. Trump and then tries to stab him in the back on the way out the door.</s>COLLINS: Trudeau publicly ignoring the feud but his foreign minister saying this about the insult.</s>CHRYSTIA FREELAND, CANADIAN FOREIGN MINISTER: Canada does not believe that add homonym attacks are a particularly appropriate or useful to way to conduct our relations.</s>COLLINS: Mr. Trump's top economic adviser telling CNN that the strong response is related to the summit with North Korea.</s>KUDLOW: He is not going to permit any show of weakness on the trip to negotiate with North Korea. Kim must not see American weakness.</s>GORANI: That is one of the recent economic adviser hires, Larry Kudlow. Kaitlan Collins is live in Singapore with more. So we had that surprise walk around by Kim Jong-un and an appearance by Dennis Rodman, the former professional basketball player who's been to North Korea several times.</s>COLLINS: Yes, all the players ahead of this summit are now here in Singapore, just hours out from this potentially historic making summit. The White House has also announced some new developments about the president's schedule. They're going to have that one-on-one meeting just Trump and Kim and their translators in the room. And then they will go out a little bit with an expanded bilateral meeting, probably a few officials from each side. And then they will have a working lunch that will include a much larger delegation from each side, including the national security adviser, John Bolton, and the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, who we heard from earlier. So, Mike Pompeo said he doesn't believe what happened in G7 is all related to here. He said it was ludicrous to compare the two situations. He was asked how the North Koreans can trust President Trump and the United States after seeing the way that he is treating one of the United States' closest allies.</s>GORANI: Kaitlan Collins live in Singapore where it's just past 3:00 a.m. Thanks, Kaitlan. So, while President Trump prepares to talk peace with the North Korea, he's left many of America's closest allies infuriated and some befuddled, others depressed. Before he left for Singapore, he was in Canada for the G7 Summit. There he clashed with America's traditional allies, its closest friends, calling trade with them unfair. After he left, he kept up his attacks on Twitter singling out Canada's prime minister. Paula Newton is covering this story for us from Ottawa and Atika Shubert is in Berlin with the European fallout. First of all, Justin Trudeau called this news conference and essentially said, look, we in Canada are nice, we're polite but enough is enough. This is not a fair attack on the friends of the United States, Canada.</s>PAULA NEWTON, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, he said that we won't be pushed around. Guess what? The week prior I was with Justin Trudeau and his foreign minister at another press conference which he said exactly the same thing. That's why the reaction here really has been so shocking, so surprising for so many Canadians. I will tell you what it's done. People on political right and left of Justin Trudeau, even the former prime minister, Steven Harper, that he defeated in the last election, is coming to his defense, obviously coming to Canada's defense and saying we are sticking up for our trading rights. There might be a better trade deal to be had. But doing this way and to have those advisors that we just heard from Kaitlan talk about there's a special place in hell and backstabbing political moves, it really stunned many, especially because those advisors, Hala, made it clear, look, this is not us going off on our own. This sentiment came straight from Air Force One and Donald Trump.</s>GORANI: It is indeed baffling. What is the probability, I guess, that this will really explode into an all-out economic war, an all-out trade war that -- as we all know historically, trade wars are damaging even to the country that imposes the tariffs of goods coming in.</s>NEWTON: Let's just put it out there, Hala. We have one of the largest trading relationships in the world, that's the United States and Canada. OK. Canada is the -- Canada buys more products from the United States than China, the U.K. and Japan combined. OK? You put all that on the table. But what Canadian officials worry about right now, Hala, is two things. One is the fact that Donald Trump will go ahead and unilaterally pull out of NAFTA and then try and negotiate a bilateral deal with Canada. Not sure that there is any compromise to even do that at this time, but number two and very significantly, he said in one of this tweets that he might apply and is looking at applying very strict tariffs to Canadian cars going into the U.S. market. What does that mean? Their supply chain by some in estimate the same car part crosses the border five, six, seven times to make the one car. Whether it's sold in the Canadian market or the U.S. market. A lot at stake here economically. One thing that the Trump administration is marked by from when it started, Canadian officials will tell you is unpredictability. They really don't know where this is going right now.</s>GORANI: And these Canadian carmakers are usually American carmakers that assemble their automobiles in Canada. It hurts consumers all around. Atika Shubert is in Berlin. There was an interview with the German chancellor saying she found the whole thing just depressing.</s>ATIKA SHUBERT, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes. She said sobering and a bit depressing. I mean, I think it certainly shows that Chancellor Merkel was disappointed at what happened at the G7. But she didn't seem surprised either. I mean, she's had to deal with this sort of attitude from President Trump over and over again, whether it's the Iran deal, the Paris climate agreement or Transpacific trade partnership. So, I think at this point Germany is saying, look, we're trying our best, but we can't rely on the U.S. and that's what she said. It would be good to have a good working relationship with the U.S., but it doesn't seem to be something that we can really rely on at this point. So, instead, you know, she trying to roll up her sleeves and figure out what to do when the president of the world's largest economy decides to rip up the rule book on trade. She's meeting with the heads of the IMF, the World Trade Organization and the World Bank here in Berlin today. You know, and all of them had a press conference and they said, look, it's a gloomy outlook for the economy if we have a looming trade war with the United States.</s>GORANI: All right. Atika Shubert in Berlin, thanks very much. Paula Newton in Ottawa as well covering our top story. Let's get to Robin Wright, a contributor for "The New Yorker." She joins me now live from Washington. We'll get to the G7 in a moment. This iconic picture of Donald Trump with his arms crossed there around a table with Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron. What do you expect, though, in Singapore? What do you think will come out of this summit?</s>ROBIN WRIGHT, CONTRIBUTING WRITER, "THE NEW YORKER": Well, I think both Kim and Trump are very invested in trying to find some common language that will lead to an agreement on principle. The danger, of course, is that the details are much more difficult, and it could take years to actually implement the denuclearization of the entire North Korean region. So, I'm hopeful short-term, pessimistic long term. But this is a moment for President Trump that he probably faces even greater pressure than Kim Jong-un does in getting an agreement. In part because of what happened in Quebec, this disarray among the tapestry of the western alliance that the United States has spent seven decades building. Pulling the rug from underneath the alliance and challenging our closest trading partners, our partners in security and NATO really puts the pressure on President Trump in a year of rocky foreign policy to produce some kind of success and look presidential in Singapore.</s>GORANI: Also, it will all come down to what do -- what does the United States, what does North Korea, what do they understand by denuclearization? Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state said it has to be irreversible and verifiable. North Korea might not see it that way.</s>WRIGHT: Absolutely. In the past, the North Koreans have referred to denuclearization as lifting the U.S. nuclear umbrella that protects South Korea. They have asked for the withdrawal of U.S. forces. We have 28,000 troops in the South. They wanted the end of military exercises. So, we come into these negotiations with very different visions of what one word means. Can you imagine what it will take to actually produce an agreement? The start agreement with the Soviet Union in 1991 was 700 pages. There's a lot at stake here. Not just nuclear weapons, but intercontinental ballistic missiles, chemical weapons, biological weapons. There's just enormous amounts of questions and issues that have to be resolved.</s>WRIGHT: And the U.S. president has said he doesn't need to prepare. He has prepared his whole life for this. You mentioned that G7 Summit in Canada, as far as European and our -- the U.S. allies in Canada are concerned went disastrously wrong. I showed the picture at the top of the hour where you see Trump kind of with his arms crossed. John Bolton, his national security adviser with that same kind of body language. Also, Shinzo Abe, the prime minister of Japan, standing it seems like in the Trump/Bolton camp. Then we see Merkel and Macron, a little bit of the picking out of the frame there at the corner of the picture, Theresa May, the prime minister of the U.K. What's going on there? Could it cause irreversible damage?</s>WRIGHT: It's not irreversible. These allies really are important to each other, but it does do a lot of damage short term to our ability to cooperate with each other on these fundamental issues of security and climate and trade.</s>GORANI: But why short-term because this could really realign the western world order, couldn't it?</s>WRIGHT: Absolutely. The German foreign minister made that point today. You can't repair 280-character tweet with another 280-character tweet when it is challenging the basic principles of an alliance and an ally personally. So, yes, the damage here is -- can it be repaired? Yes, let's hope so. But this was the rockiest summit of the G7 since it was formed in 1975. This is one of the toughest weeks in the Trump presidency. There is an enormous amount at stake, not just for his presidency but for the state of the western alliance and the state of the world order or disorder. This is a very --</s>GORANI: You say it can be repaired, which means it's broken. How broken is it? I mean, could we see -- let's assume this. Could we see as Macron floated the idea of a G6 plus one? Where now the six countries within the G7 are allied together, maybe minus Japan, so say it's five. And then Japan and the U.S. on another side.</s>WRIGHT: Well, as your correspondent pointed out Canada and the United States are strong trading partners. That may change at little bit. But at the end of the day, we share a geographic space and that we can't change the reality of how we need each other. So, there are basic truths. The western alliance is important to every single member. I think all parties will at some point try to repair the damage. The problem is that by the president challenging our allies, he weakens them as well. He weakens the institution and the danger is we have a security threat, we need our allies to stand with us as we did with Afghanistan and we wanted them too in Iraq, and you know, we find that they are not as interested or as willing to expand their resources, their treasury or their personnel to help us.</s>GORANI: And the president is calling on Russia to be reintegrate the G7.</s>WRIGHT: Yes, that's the wild card in the middle of all this turmoil. He is calling -- suggesting it's time to bring Moscow back into the G7. Seeming to defy the realities of its intervention in an American election, its annexation of Crimea in 2014, providing the weaponry to shoot down a Malaysian aircraft over Ukraine. Its intervention in the Syrian civil war, it's staggering that at this moment, he'd bring up that idea. Why now?</s>GORANI: Robin Wright, thanks so much for joining us. Always a pleasure. Still to come tonight, Malta says Italy broke international rules, but that country's new right-wing government is claiming victory. We have details of a standoff in the Mediterranean with more than 600 lives in the balance. We take you on board that very ship at the center of it all. We speak to a reporter who says areas of the vessel are unbearable after the break.