Trump has carelessly fuelled the North Korean fake news machine

“He tells me he didn’t know about it, and I will take him at his word.”

This was Donald Trump’s response when questioned about whether his discussion with Kim Jong-un touched on Otto Warmbier, an American student who was imprisoned in North Korea.

The headlines around the US President’s landmark second summit with the North Korean leader have understandably focused around denuclearisation, and the breakdown of talks yesterday without any agreement.

The self-proclaimed master dealmaker failed to make a deal, dashing hopes of the rogue state dismantling its nuclear programme.

But the Warmbier story is important in its own right. In 2016, the University of Virginia student was arrested in North Korea, accused of stealing a propaganda poster and undermining the regime, and sentenced to 15 years of hard labour.

After a year and a half, he was finally returned to the US. But he had suffered severe brain damage, having reportedly been beaten and tortured. He died soon after.

At the time, Trump appeared to grasp the seriousness of this human rights abuse. “Otto was tortured beyond belief by North Korea,” he tweeted, later using this tragic story of evidence that the Kim regime was “a menace that threatens our world”.

This week, his tune had changed somewhat. While he agreed that “what happened is horrible,” he quickly continued “I don’t think the top leadership knew about it… I don’t believe that he would have allowed that to happen”.

It’s a good week for Trump to take leaders at their word when they claim ignorance of wrongdoing.

On Wednesday, his own former lawyer Michael Cohen testified in front of the US Congress.

Trump, Cohen alleged, was working on a Moscow property deal as the 2016 presidential campaign was underway, even while declaring to the American electorate that he had no business interests in Russia.

He also claimed that Trump knew in advance that WikiLeaks had Hillary Clinton’s emails – which followers of the campaign will not find surprising, given that, in July 2016, Trump called on Russia to hack Clinton’s account.

Of course, the US President denies all this, and has accused Cohen of lying. He is, in effect, asking the American people to take his word for it – just as he has apparently swallowed Kim’s side of the Warmbier story.

It is true that, however unethical or potentially illegal Trump’s actions were, they in no way compare to the abuse and torture of a scapegoated student. Nonetheless, his refusal to contemplate anything beyond his own personal narrative shows why Trump is precisely the wrong leader to confront Pyongyang.

Kim Jong-un is not a normal dictator, and North Korea is not a normal dictatorship. The regime is oppressive even by the standards of totalitarian states.

This is a country of public executions, secret police, and labour camps (which are estimated to hold between 80,000 and 120,000 political prisoners), of draconian censorship and forced “re-education”.

While the west focuses on the nuclear threat, the regime’s greatest crimes are against its own citizens.

The famine in the nineties, overseen by Kim Jong-un’s father, killed off 2.5 per cent of the population, and while it no longer suffers mass starvation, malnutrition and shortages are rife. Meanwhile, an estimated 23 per cent of North Korean GDP goes towards its military – the highest in the world.

Trump appears to view Kim as a leader cast in his own image. From the way the pair have hurled childish insults at each other on Twitter, to the apparent camaraderie as they walked side by side at the summit this week, at a glance they seem well-matched.

This illusion is the very reason why US Presidents have refused in the past to sit down with Kim: one-to-one summits legitimise the regime and depict him as just another problematic leader, rather than a despot whose state-sanctioned violence against his own people is an affront to civilisation.

By publicly accepting Kim’s story on the Warmbier tragedy, Trump has perpetuated North Korean propaganda.

Perhaps he feels some solidarity with the supreme leader, believing them both to be misunderstood strongmen who deserve to have their proclamations of innocence believed by an unfairly hostile media.

Or perhaps he just wants to break more presidential norms by forming a relationship with democracy’s public enemy number one.

Either way, it’s a dangerous narrative to feed.