President Donald Trump spent over an hour answering questions from reporters in Singapore on Tuesday after his historic handshake with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

But when it came to offering any sort of timeline for the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula — or anything else — he left himself plenty of exit chutes.


Kim will begin dismantling his nuclear arsenal “very quickly,” Trump said vaguely. Throughout the press conference, however, he even hedged when it came to offering any definition of his concepts of “quickly” or “long.”

Trump said he wants to withdraw American troops currently stationed in South Korea. When, exactly, will that be?

“At some point ... I want to get our soldiers out,” he said. “At some point, I hope it will be, but not right now.”

Trump expressed interest in traveling to North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang, to continue talks with Kim — but again demurred on a timeline. “At a certain time, I will,” he said. “I said that will be a day that I look very much forward to, at the appropriate time.”

Kim might also visit Washington — date also TBD. “I also will be inviting Chairman Kim, at the appropriate time, to the White House,” Trump said.

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What about the human rights violations of Kim, who since coming to power in 2011 has staged public executions and overseen forced labor and arbitrary detentions?

Trump promised that “ultimately, we’ll agree to something.”

But the main timeline that Trump hedged was the one concerning denuclearization. “It takes a long time,” he said. “Scientifically, you have to wait certain periods of time.”

At another point in the press conference, Trump actually disputed his own use of the words “long time.”

“I don’t know, when you say a long time,” Trump said, without offering any more sense of a schedule. “I think we will do it as fast as it can be done scientifically, as fast as it can be done mechanically.”

Longtime Trump associates said the president’s hesitation to commit to any timeline is part strategy, part due to the fact that he doesn’t spend a lot of his time thinking ahead — ever.

“He’s not going to talk about something that might or might not happen in six months,” said Jack O’Donnell, a former vice president of the Trump Plaza casino in Atlantic City, who has since become a critic of his former boss. “That’s just Trump. Whatever this deal is, it’s going to take a very long time, and a tremendous amount of verification. He doesn’t want to deal with that. He doesn’t think that far in advance. He’s in the moment, he’s about right now.”

Front of mind for Trump, political operatives said, was Tuesday's news cycle, which presented his meeting as historic. “I think he wanted The Moment,” said David Axelrod, a former top adviser to President Barack Obama. “Like telling the senators in front of cameras that they were ‘afraid of the NRA,’ or promising a ‘bill of love’ on DACA. It’s all part of a reality show that fades away when it collides with reality.”

Holding onto the glow of the moment, Trump dodged the details about the time and place of what comes next.

When it comes to potentially lifting economic sanctions on North Korea, Trump said, “I hope it’s going to be soon. At a certain point, I actually look forward to taking them off.”

And in multiple answers to reporters’ questions, he made clear he does not know how long denuclearization actually takes. “It’s not just like, ‘Oh, gee. Let’s get rid of the nukes,’” Trump explained. “It takes a period of time. But the main period of time that I’m talking is that first period, when you hit a certain point you can’t go back. It’s very hard to go back.”

How long will that take, a reporter asked as a follow-up.

“We don’t know,” Trump said, “but it will go pretty quickly.”

It wasn’t long before he hedged out of a commitment to “quickly.”

“I may be wrong,” he said. “I mean, I may stand before you in six months and say, ‘Hey, I was wrong.’ I don’t know that I’ll ever admit that, but I’ll find some kind of an excuse.”

