Story highlights Lawmakers say Trump's national security team gave a sober assessment of North Korea

Democrats said Wednesday's briefing was starkly different than Trump's rhetoric

Washington (CNN) President Donald Trump's top national security advisers detailed the administration's strategy for dealing with North Korea in back-to-back classified briefings on Capitol Hill Wednesday, which lawmakers described as a sober assessment of the diplomatic and military approach to the North Korean threat.

There was bipartisan consensus that Trump's national security team outlined a sensible strategy for dealing with a problem that has no good solution and has now stymied the United States for decades, but Democrats said their assessment -- in both tone and strategy -- was at odds with the commander in chief.

"There's no bluster in there," New York Rep. Eliot Engel, the top Democrat on the House foreign affairs committee, told reporters after leaving the briefing. "There's bluster we hear from the President from time to time about cutting off trade with countries like China or cutting off the trade agreement with countries like South Korea. That doesn't make much sense to me."

Democrats have taken issue with Trump's tweets -- including his suggestion that the US might cut off trade with China and pull out of the South Korean trade agreement -- as well as his "fire and fury" rhetoric that seemed to favor military action.

Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, said the briefing that touted a diplomacy-first strategy was "directly contradictory to everything the President says."

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