(CNSNews.com) - Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) told host Fox Business host Dagen McDowell on Thursday that President Donald Trump’s handling of North Korea “is nothing short of a miracle.”
Inhofe pointed to the president’s handling of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un as the catalyst that made the North Korean leader change his tune on participating in the Winter Olympics, seeking a meeting with Trump, denuclearization, and releasing the three American detainees.
As CNSNews.com reported, Trump welcomed home Kim Dong Chul, Tony Kim, and Kim Hak Song at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland on Thursday.
“We’ve been looking at this and waiting for this moment for a long time, and by the way, I happened to be in South Korea back when Kim Jong-Un demonstrated - that’s November 28th – that he could hit an American city, and you remember the response that we had from our president,” Inhofe said on “Mornings with Maria Bartiromo.”
“It wasn’t the mushy response we would have gotten from Obama. He said, yeah, and we’ve got a button too. Ours is bigger than theirs. Ours works. Theirs doesn’t. If they try that, we’ll blow them out of the sky. Words to that effect,” Inhofe added.
“But what happened right after that, in a matter of hours, Kim Jong-Un called South Korea and told them, we’ve changed our mind. We’re gonna send athletes down to the Winter Olympics, and it’s been going better every day since then. I honestly believe this president is doing something that is nothing short of a miracle, and it’s really topped off at 2 o’clock this morning when the --- when the folks came back in,” the senator said.
“I want to pick back on with that. You’re looking at the president’s tweeting as a strength. Most people, or a lot of people in the media kind of portray it as a weakness. I don’t really expect the Georgetown School of Foreign Service to start teaching people how to write taunts about foreign leaders, but you’re saying this is actually key to setting the table to negotiate here,” Wall Street Journal reporter James Freeman said.
Inhofe said the Wall Street Journal has been very fair to the president, but the rest of the media hasn’t been, so Trump uses Twitter to communicate to the American people.
“He doesn’t trust the media to accurately portray what he’s trying to do. Now you stop and think of what he’s accomplished just yesterday with the lowest unemployment rate in memory. All of these things are happening right he’s doing, he’s accomplishing, but he can’t get that out in all fairness to him,” Inhofe said.
“He’s got to figure out a way – I know the media doesn’t like it. They don’t like the idea that someone can go – even the president of the United States – can go straight to the people and tell them what he’s doing. Frankly, I like the idea,” the senator said.
McDowell pointed out that people on both sides of the political spectrum are skeptical about North Korea and Kim Jong-Un “based on past agreements.”
“What -- eight times we’ve had agreements that didn’t lead to denuclearization, and here we are facing an even more aggressive North Korea,” she said.
“Yeah, and I chair the committee that we had our intelligence in - Dan Coats and the rest of our intelligence groups. I have great respect for him, but I said at the time, I want you to write it down. This guy is communicating to Kim Jong-Un in a different way than we ever have before, and if you look at the results that are coming in from him and things that you would not expect to happen, this hasn’t happened before,” the senator said.
Inhofe said Trump “knows how to talk to terrorists.”
“He doesn’t back down, and he has reestablished America in my opinion as the leader of the free world over there. It doesn’t go unnoticed,” Inhofe said.
McDowell pointed out that Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) is stepping up her calls for Trump to be impeached, citing his decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal to try to negotiate a better deal.
“Trump, further isolating the United States, thinks he knows better than our negotiators and all of our global allies who agreed to the Iran deal. How long do we have to suffer his gigantic ego and narcissistic behavior? Impeachment is the only answer,” Waters tweeted.
“Senator, I will just point out one thing: this was not a treaty, because President Obama could not get people in Congress to vote for it, that it’s not binding by law, and I would like her to speak to the families of the victims of Iranian terrorism while we’re sending them north of a billion in cash in the middle of the night,” McDowell said.
Inhofe said he was with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in October the first time that Trump said he would pull out of the Iran deal.
“Now of course I was opposed, very much opposed to getting in in the first place, but I was there, and I’ve never seen Netanyahu rejoicing as much and as he clearly said then and he said again last week,” Inhofe said.
“He said they agree to do certain things - to stop the inspection of the non-declared sights, to stop the advance of centrifuges, remove all the sunset provisions - all these things that they said, that Iran said they would do, they haven’t done it. And I think that you have to stand up and say, you agreed to this. You didn’t do it. This is the alternative,” Inhofe added. “I think they did the right thing.”
Inhofe added that if all of Trump’s achievements - “rebuilding the military, doing away with the regulations that are putting America out of business, all of these things” is grounds for impeachment, he’s glad Waters is not a majority.
“And by the way, I don’t very often agree with Pelosi. In this case I do, and she said, all this talk of impeachment is a distraction. Good for you, Nancy,” Inhofe said.