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At another point, Trump marveled at how “tough” the North Korean guards seemed, noting that they were always stone-faced and refused to shake hands, the two people said. One recalled the president joking that they could likely take on White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general. A second did not remember the president specifically mentioning Kelly, but just noting more generally that Kim’s guards seemed formidable.

A North Korean government video released Thursday shows Trump returning the salute of a North Korean general, drawing criticism from those who saw it as feeding Pyongyang’s propaganda.

Retired Navy Rear Adm. John Kirby, a former spokesman for both the Defense and State departments, called the image “striking.” Kirby told CNN it was “inappropriate from a protocol perspective,” and “you most certainly don’t do it with the leaders of foreign militaries of an adversary nation.” After exchanging salutes, the two men shook hands.

Behind the scenes before the summit, other dynamics were also unfolding.

The language in the agreement that Trump announced with Kim, for instance, was almost entirely prewritten before Trump arrived in Singapore – a standard diplomatic practice for leaders’ meetings, which are normally preceded by extensive negotiations and discussions between lower-level officials.

Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

But Trump repeatedly asserted that the final agreement was based on his ability to size up Kim in person and build a working relationship with him. “We got to know each other well in a very confined period of time,” the president told reporters on Tuesday. “I know when somebody wants to deal and I know when somebody doesn’t.”

While some negotiations did continue once on the ground in Singapore, nearly all of the terms – including North Korea’s vague commitment to denuclearize – were part of scripted talking points the leaders could cite as agreement. At least three of the four pledges listed in the Kim-Trump statement were agreed to before Trump’s arrival, according to a person familiar with the negotiations: to jointly work toward denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula; toward a peaceful and stable bilateral relationship; and toward a lasting and stable peace on the peninsula.

Trump appeared to allude to that process in his news conference Tuesday. The 1 1/2-page joint statement, he said, was “not something that just happened to be put together. This was done over months.” Yet at the same time, the president said, there was “much, much more” that was agreed upon but not included in the final document because “we didn’t have time.”

Based on Trump’s comments to the media, it was difficult to tell what had been agreed to ahead of time, what was on the agenda for the summit and what had not been agreed to at all. Earlier negotiations between North Korean officials and Pompeo included discussions of Pyongyang’s long-standing insistence that the United States dial back or cancel its annual military exercises with South Korea. Although that was not mentioned in the signed document, Trump announced that he had agreed to it.