Tag: Live television

Kim Hak-song, an agricultural professor at the same university, who hoped to ease North Korea’s chronic food shortages and malnutrition, was arrested two weeks later and was also accused of trying to topple the regime. Calling the freed captives “incredible people,” Trump said, “Frankly, we didn’t think this was going to happen, and it did.” After answering reporters’ questions, the President joked that the event had just broken “the all-time-in-history television rating for three o’clock in the morning.” Later that day, the White House released a press release with the heading, “WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE PRESIDENT’S VICTORY FOR THE WORLD BY FREEING THREE BRAVE AMERICANS.” Trump’s decision to journey to Andrews in the middle of the night to greet the three men was unusual; previous Presidents have welcomed returning captives and prisoners, but usually at the White House or in private meetings. Since Trump took office, White House officials have told me that the President is personally and passionately committed to freeing Americans held overseas. I asked former captives and the family members of former hostages this week for their reactions to Trump’s early-morning welcome of the prisoners from North Korea. “Hostage cases are usually more complicated than that.” Another former hostage told me, “I thought, What a show-off, but I understood. It was good politics, taking credit for bringing the hostages home. In April of 2017, Trump invited Aya Hijazi, a thirty-year-old American aid worker, to the Oval Office, after Administration officials had helped broker her release, along with that of her husband and four other aid workers, from Egypt. (The same Taliban faction held me captive for seven months, in 2008 and 2009.) In other cases, Trump has proved temperamental. Foley also said that she felt that the Trump Administration is more willing to take risks, or to bargain, for the return of hostages than the Obama Administration was: “I think they see the return of Americans detained abroad as a win.” What drives Trump to so publicly celebrate the return of captives is difficult to know.