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Greg Evans
Jun 14, 2018
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Kevin Lim/The Strait Times/Handout/Getty Images
It has been another wild week in the Presidency of Donald Trump.
In one of the most significant moments of his time in office, Trump met with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Singapore where they effectively agreed to the dismantlement of the Asian nations nuclear arsenal.
The historic meeting seemed to go pretty well according to Trump and there is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea - at least that's the impression that we got from his Twitter account.
Now that he and Kim are basically best mates it's probably time that he addressed the shocking human rights record that North Korea has.
Human Rights Watch has labelled North Korea as one of the most repressive and authoritarian nations on Earth with the Kim family continuing to perform public executions and enforcing arbitrary detention, forced labour and travel restrictions upon their citizens.
Despite Trump being criticised for the praise that he bestowed upon Kim, he has yet to be questioned on the North Korean's totalitarian dictatorship.
During an interview with Bret Baier of Fox News on Air Force One Trump was asked about some of the atrocities and his reply was curious, to say the least.
Trump's quote in full was
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.
To which Baier replied:
But he has done some really bad things.
Trump responded:
Yeah, but so have a lot of other people have done some really bad things. I mean, I could go through a lot of nations where a lot of bad things were done.
Trump's casual dismissal of North Korea's abuses was lambasted online.
Some people also chose to point out that Trump used a similar line to dismiss Russia's human rights records when asked about them in 2017.
More: These are the North Korean human rights violations Trump doesn't seem to be talking about