Trump got played: North Korea building missiles to reach US

Just over a month after Trump declared that North Korea is no longer a nuclear threat, U.S. intelligence agencies have revealed that the rogue nation is building new missiles aimed at reaching America.

According to The Washington Post, recent satellite photos show at least one, potentially two, liquid-fueled intercontinental ballistic missiles are being constructed at a facility outside Pyongyang.

The facility is the same one where North Korea built its first intercontinental ballistic missiles that could hit the U.S., officials told The Post.

“We see them going to work, just as before,” one official told the paper.

Independent experts told The Post that they are seeing the same activity.

“The facility is “not dead, by any stretch of the imagination,” said Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. “It’s active. We see shipping containers and vehicles coming and going.”

The revelation that North Korea is aggressively pursuing the construction of missiles capable of reaching the U.S. comes just six weeks after the nuclear summit between Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

During the summit, Trump and Kim signed a vague joint statement agreeing to pursue peace on the Korean peninsula.

While experts warned that Trump was unprepared for the meeting and was overestimating the likelihood of a successful outcome, Trump emerged from the meeting and bragged that he had gotten North Korea to agree to give up its nuclear weapons.

North Korea didn’t give up anything during the summit, but Trump made major concessions — including an offer to stop military exercises with South Korea, which is a longtime ally of the U.S.

Trump also said he was confident that North Korea would pursue complete denuclearization in the near future, even though no such promise was made.

Taking things a step further, Trump declared — with no evidence — that the rogue nation was “no longer a nuclear threat.”

“[E]verybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office. There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea. Meeting with Kim Jong Un was an interesting and very positive experience,” Trump tweeted in June. “North Korea has great potential for the future!”

But later that month, U.S. intelligence agencies contradicted Trump’s claims, saying that North Korea had actually increased its creation of fuel for nuclear weapons.

Going into the summit last month, Trump was desperate to show that he’s not as incompetent as he looks. He wanted to come away with a great deal and say that he had achieved something that no other U.S. president could do.

And in a way, he succeeded at that last goal — no other U.S. president has ever been so thoroughly humiliated by the North Korean dictator. So there’s that.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.