“I don’t know whose national security interests Trump is either pursuing or will actually try to defend,” Hillary Clinton alleged. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images Foreign Policy Clinton predicts Trump's North Korea deal will be like putting 'lipstick on a pig'

Hillary Clinton said this week that she has little faith in President Donald Trump’s ability to negotiate for North Korean denuclearization, and speculated that any claims of victory will be like putting “lipstick on a pig.”

The former secretary of State told journalist Tina Brown in a podcast episode released Tuesday that ahead of Trump’s summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, “I have serious doubts that whatever [Trump] claims will be actually achieved.”


She called Trump’s vision of complete denuclearization a “fantasy” and suggested Trump was in it only for the vast media attention he has drawn.

“All the intelligence, which Trump dismisses, suggests that it’s unlikely but not impossible that Kim Jong Un will give up his nuclear weapons capacity,” she said.

“I don't see a deal there that is a verifiable, enforceable deal,” Clinton argued, but “I don’t know what Trump will claim.”

Trump is under pressure to elicit verifiable progress from this week’s summit in Vietnam, after facing criticism that not enough was made following last summer’s historic meeting between the two leaders.

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Both Trump and the White House have sought to tamp down expectations for the talks, with Trump saying before he left for Hanoi that he wouldn’t rush denuclearization and that he was satisfied as long as Kim agreed to halt missile testing, which he has done thus far.

The pressure has led some in the White House to worry whether Trump will be outmaneuvered in negotiations and whether, in his eagerness to strike any kind of deal, he will make too many concessions.

To underscore her argument, Clinton compared Trump’s diplomatic deal-making prowess with stories she’d heard of Trump’s time as a New York real estate mogul.

“I’ve had so many guys who did business with him in real estate say, ‘You know, he’d have a $15 million dollar profit from a real estate deal which he would call $150 million, and then he would call everybody and beg them not to contradict the press because he was going to tell them it was $150 million not $15 million,” she said.

“So if he can put lipstick on a pig and he can say ‘OK, this is what we're going to do with North Korea’ and he keeps saying it over and over again and Fox News says it over and over again and other outlets say it over and over again, and the so-called mainstream media does their both sides-ism … he wins the news cycle. And that’s really what he lives for,” she concluded.

Clinton also cast doubt on whose interests Trump is working for, in light of questions about whether the president has been compromised by Russia, an allegation being investigated by special counsel Robert Mueller.

Trump has denied the allegations, but he often faces them when he breaks with historic U.S. policy.

The former senator and first lady noted that withdrawing U.S. troops from the Korean Peninsula, one of North Korea’s asks, would also benefit countries like China and Russia.

“I don’t know whose national security interests Trump is either pursuing or will actually try to defend,” she alleged.

