Trump Today: After signing nine-paragraph pact, president says North Korea no longer poses nuclear threat

This column provides a daily update on key presidential actions as well as comments, whether spoken aloud or on Twitter, by President Trump. Like the stock market, the deadline for Trump Today action is 4 p.m. Eastern time, even as we acknowledge that substantive news can and does occur after hours.

President Donald Trump said Wednesday that North Korea no longer poses a nuclear threat, as he repeated a charge that oil prices are “too high” and congratulated winners of Tuesday’s primaries.

NUCLEAR THREAT NO MORE

Trump arrived back in Washington from his historic summit with Kim Jong Un, and tweeted, “there is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.” His statement came in for quick criticism from George Mitchell, a former U.S. special envoy for Middle East peace, who told CNN, “I think it’s unwise and premature to make that kind of declaration at this stage in the process.” North Korea is believed to have as many as 60 nuclear weapons, and denuclearization could take up to a decade, according to a report released last month from Stanford University experts.

Trump also tweeted that the U.S. will “save a fortune” by not conducting what he called “war games” with South Korea, but attached no dollar figure. The White House said Tuesday that the U.S. military would keep training with South Korean counterparts and conduct military drills, but not large-scale, joint exercises.

Abraham Denmark, director of the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, told MarketWatch in an email that the U.S. won’t actually save any money by canceling exercises. “The funds have already been appropriated by Congress to the Department of Defense,” he said. “If the exercises are cancelled, the funds will just go back to the services and the joint staff to be spent elsewhere.”

NEW SLAP AT OPEC

In a fresh slap at the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, Trump said on Twitter: “Oil prices are too high, OPEC is at it again. Not good!”

The president is renewing his fight with the cartel after attacking it in April. The group meets next on June 22, a gathering that likely will feature discussion on the outlook for production cuts. On Wednesday, U.S. crude futures   were trading up slightly at about $66 a barrel.

CONGRATULATIONS FOR WINNERS

Trump congratulated Corey Stewart for winning Virginia’s Republican Senate primary, and cheered Katie Arrington for her primary victory over Rep. Mark Sanford in South Carolina.

Stewart, a Trump loyalist and defender of Confederate symbolism, will take on Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine in the fall. Trump called Kaine — Hillary Clinton’s vice presidential running mate in 2016 — a “total stiff” in his tweet.

Sanford is a vocal Trump critic. The president said his “political representatives” didn’t want him to get involved in the primary, but he decided “Sanford was so bad, I had to give it a shot.”