President Donald Trump held his long-anticipated and controversial summit with North Korean Dictator Kim Jong Un on Tuesday, in which Trump and Kim signed a pact pledging to "denuclearize" the Korean Peninsula.
During the signing, CNN's Jim Acosta shouted a couple questions at the president.
“Mr. President, did we agree to denuclearize?” Acosta asked. The president responded that he and Kim are "starting that process very quickly, very, very quickly. Absolutely.”
In response, Brad Parscale, Trump's campaign manager for the 2020 election, tweeted that Acosta should have his press privileges revoked.
"Jim Acosta should immediately have his press credentials suspended," Parscale wrote. "He is an absolute disgrace."
Acosta and Trump have had a contentious relationship since the president took office. Trump regularly refers to CNN, and Acosta in particular, as "fake news."
Acosta also asked the president if he and Kim discussed Otto Warmbier, the American student who died upon returning to the United States after he had been detained in North Korea for stealing a poster from his hotel.
Parscale's tweet is an ominous foreshadowing of the Trump administration's expected future assaults on the free press. Trump and his armada of confederates, which includes anchors on Fox News, habitually refer to any negative coverage of the president as "fake," even when what is being reported is true.
It's not like Acosta's questions were out of left field, either. The agreement signed by Trump and Kim contains the weakest and least enforceable terms yet pursued by the United States in the decades-long effort to get North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program.
It contains no language establishing any inspections, verification, or demands for complete, unequivocal denuclearization, despite Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other administration officials' assurances of enforcing North Korea's promise. Of course, we've been down this road many times before, and North Korea has never kept its word.
Trump also lavished praise onto the 34-year-old autocrat, whose country operates as a prison-state, complete with concentration camps, brutal public executions, and starvation of its 25 million citizens. Trump said it was an "honor" to meet Kim and that he could tell that Kim "really loves his people."
North Korea's human rights abuses were not mentioned in the 45-minute closed-door chat between Trump and Kim, nor have they been challenged by Trump or his team of negotiators who arranged the summit. Trump did, however, manage to pitch potential real estate development on North Korea's "beautiful beaches."
Parscale's tweet drew some harsh rebukes on Twitter.
One said the Trump administration is trying to "recreate a NK press corps in the United States."
Seems like people are tired of Trump and his team's continual "stomping on the Constitution."
Jane Rosenberg
Jane Rosenberg
@arianagrande/Instagram
@arianagrande/Instagram