Japan wasn’t “willing for years to talk trade, and now they’re willing to talk trade,” Trump boasted, going on to cite his recently renegotiated trade deal with South Korea as further vindication of his approach. He expected China to follow suit, even though the Chinese government has shown no sign so far of backing down from the two countries’ multibillion-dollar trade war. Pointing to a recent television appearance by the China expert Michael Pillsbury, Trump noted that Pillsbury “was saying that China has total respect for Donald Trump and for Donald Trump’s very, very large brain.”

More critical than trade barriers, in Trump’s telling, were the singular intellect and negotiating skills of the man who enacted them. “A normal, regular political person that has no concept of what the hell he’s doing would let China continue to take $500 billion a year out of our country and rebuild their country,” he observed. (That figure is roughly the cost of Chinese imported goods to the United States.) But thankfully, this was no normal, regular president. He mentioned how he’d pressed Japan’s Shinzo Abe to fully reimburse the United States for helping defend his country—something Trump has been arguing for since the 1980s. “I was saying things that nobody in the room even understood, and I said them a long time ago, and I was right,” Trump recalled of his meeting earlier in the day with Abe. He urged the assembled journalists to watch a Fox News interview in which South Korean President Moon Jae In had praised Trump’s handling of nuclear talks with North Korea. “I can’t say [what Moon said], because you would say I’m braggadocious,” he explained. Then he proceeded to say it: “What he said about me last night was an unbelievable thing: ‘Couldn’t have happened without President Trump … and nobody else could do it.’”

The ‘compliment Trump’ doctrine

Rather than focusing on the steps North Korea has taken toward giving up its nuclear weapons—so far small, but not insignificant—Trump measured his success against the prospect of a catastrophic war on the Korean peninsula. And it’s true that, compared with this outcome, nearly a year without North Korean missile or nuclear tests is a positive development. But he ascribed the risk of such conflict to Barack Obama, while ignoring his own role in escalating that risk last year with serious planning for military strikes and threats of nuclear annihilation. These he downplayed as “rhetorical contests” with Kim Jong Un that they now “laugh” about.

It was all part of the deal making. Sure, he threatened to “totally destroy” the nation of North Korea at the UN General Assembly a year ago, which he now observed “was a little bit rough.” But the press had missed the strategy behind it all, he implied. “‘Oh, Trump is saying these horrible things. He’s going to get us into a war,’” Trump said in mockery of his critics. “If I wasn’t elected, you’d be in war … You know how close [Obama] was to pressing the trigger for war? Millions of people” would have died. There is no public indication that Obama was close to war with North Korea.