President Donald Trump will speak at CPAC this year, American Conservative Union Chairman Matt Schlapp announced Monday.

Schlapp announced the news on Twitter as the president travels to Vietnam for a summit with Kim Jong-Un. The president’s speech is scheduled for Saturday at 11:30 EST.

CPAC was the site of one of Trump’s first big political speeches in 2011 as he previewed a run for president.

“I can tell you this if I run and if I win, this country will be respected again,” he said.</s>HANOI, Vietnam — The Latest on the summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and U.S. President Donald Trump (all times local):

President Donald Trump is calling the relationship between the U.S. and Vietnam an “example” of what can become of North Korea if it gives up its nuclear weapons.

Trump paid a courtesy call Wednesday to Vietnamese President Nguyen Phu Trong ahead of his second summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Hanoi.

Trump says, “We both felt very good about having this very important summit in Vietnam because you really are an example as to what can happen, with good thinking.”

The Vietnamese leader says his country has “been making all necessary preparations to ensure the best conditions for the success of this very special meeting.”

Trump is thanking Vietnam for hosting the summit and for agreeing to new trade deals with American companies, including Boeing.

U.S. President Donald Trump is meeting with his Vietnamese counterpart hours before he is set to sit down with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

Trump is greeting Vietnamese President Nguyen Phu Trong, whose country is hosting the second summit between the leaders of the two technically-warring nations.

The two leaders are set to sign a commercial trade agreement Wednesday before Trump is to meet with Vietnam’s prime minister.

Trump’s courtesy call to the host nation’s leadership is meant to provide Kim with a visualization of a potential future should he give up his country’s nuclear weapons in a deal with the U.S. After a decade of bloody conflict that ended more than four decades ago, the U.S. and Vietnam are now economic and strategic partners.

President Donald Trump’s eldest son is accusing Democrats of trying to distract his father during his summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

Donald Trump Jr. told Fox News on Tuesday that he believed the Democrats deliberately scheduled the congressional testimony of Michael Cohen, the president’s former fixer, opposite the summit in Hanoi, Vietnam.

Trump Jr. said that the Democrats were trying to “counterprogram the kind of progress” that could be achieved in the Vietnam gathering and that it was evidence of the “disdain” they hold for the president.

He also argued that it was proof the Democrats were more interested in scoring political points than in national security by attempting to “stymie” the denuclearization talks.

Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison for crimes including a campaign finance violation that he says was at the direction of the president.

President Donald Trump says Vietnam, the site of his second round of nuclear talks with Kim Jong Un, is thriving economically and that North Korea could, too, if it would give up its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Before sitting down with Kim later Wednesday in Hanoi, Trump tweeted that “North Korea would be the same, and very quickly, if it would denuclearize. The potential is AWESOME, a great opportunity, like almost none other in history, for my friend Kim Jong Un.”

In a second tweet, Trump took a shot at Democrats in Washington, saying they should stop telling him what to do with North Korea and “ask themselves instead why they didn’t do ‘it’ during eight years of the Obama Administration?”</s>North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and American president Donald Trump are meeting in Hanoi, Vietnam for their second summit together. But Mr Trump’s wife Melania is not joining her husband on the trip. Her spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham confirmed to Bustle the first lady would not be in Vietnam for the summit- although she did not reveal why the first lady is absent.

Ms Trump did not attend last year’s summit with Kim and her husband either. However, that summit did coincide with the first lady disappearing from the public eye when she was recovering from the kidney operation. Ms Trump had a five-day stay in hospital in mid-May when she was treated for a “benign” kidney condition. The condition also meant she did not attend the G7 summit, where it is usual for the spouses of world leaders to attend the summits.

Melania Trump made her international summit debut last year at the G7 meeting in Italy, following it up with a visit to the G20 forum in Germany later in the year. Her spokeswoman said she avoided making appearance during that time but did hold meetings and work on projects in private, her spokeswoman told CBS. The first lady tweeted she has recently been entertaining Nobel Peace Laureate Kailash Satyarthi and US fashion designer Rachel Roy at the White House. She wrote alongside four pictures of the meeting: “Beautiful to hear what @k_satyarthi and @rachelroy are doing to save children and give them a voice. Wishing you continued success.”

First ladies have taken different approaches to joining their husbands for international meetings. Antia McBride told the Washington Post Ms Obama was “very protective of her schedule” and “said she didn’t need to race away from home” and instead spent her time on domestic issues. In contrast, Laura Bush accompanied her husband on many international summits. McBride said: “Her view was that it was valuable and important for the American first lady to be there.”</s>"I wasn’t going to Vietnam," Cohen says the president told him during his campaign.

During his historic testimony trashing President Donald Trump on Wednesday, Michael Cohen referred to the late Arizona Sen. John McCain to illustrate what he suggested was Trump's disdain for those fought in Vietnam.

Cohen's opening statement to the House Oversight and Reform Committee mentioned the 2015 comment Trump made in which he said he didn't think McCain was a hero because he preferred people who weren't captured in war.

Cohen brought up the comment, which escalated the high-profile feud between McCain and Trump, to note that Trump could not produce evidence of treatment for the bone spur for which Trump received a deferment to keep him out of the war.

It was intended as another sign of the serial lying by Trump in Cohen's view, but it also included a comment he attributed to Trump that would seem an insult to all veterans of the Vietnam War.

“"You think I’m stupid, I wasn’t going to Vietnam,'” Cohen said Trump told him when they discussed the deferment issue.

"I find it ironic, President Trump, that you are in Vietnam right now," Cohen continued, referring to the president's negotiations with North Korea in Vietnam.

McCain began clashing with Trump shortly after Trump's presidential campaign rollout, in which Trump suggested many Mexican immigrants to the U.S. were "rapists" and "criminals."

McCain disagreed, and their feud was underway.

Here is Cohen's complete statement on McCain and the deferment issue:

"During the campaign, Mr. Trump said he did not consider Vietnam Veteran, and Prisoner of War, Senator John McCain to be 'a hero' because he likes people who weren’t captured. At the same time, Mr. Trump tasked me to handle the negative press surrounding his medical deferment from the Vietnam draft.

TWEET BY TWEET: John McCain and Donald Trump feuded for years

"Mr. Trump claimed it was because of a bone spur, but when I asked for medical records, he gave me none and said there was no surgery. He told me not to answer the specific questions by reporters but rather offer simply the fact that he received a medical deferment.

MORE: Meghan McCain to Trump: 'Have you taken a trip to the Hanoi Hilton?'

"He finished the conversation with the following comment.

“'You think I’m stupid, I wasn’t going to Vietnam.'"</s>The highly publicized meeting between President Donald Trump of the United States and leader Kim Jong-un of North Korea, in Hanoi, Vietnam, this week is significant for reasons of history and policy.

In November 2017, Trump made an extensive trip through East Asia, including China, Japan, South Korea and Vietnam. Stops included the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit, held in Danang, Vietnam.

The traditional spelling of this third largest city in the nation is Da Nang, just as the traditional spelling of Vietnam is Viet Nam.

Americans do not like empty spaces. We turn unused real estate into productive enterprises. Getting rid of spaces between words speeds up pronunciation. After all, time is money – preferably dollars.

The fast-moving, fast-talking technocrats who dominated policy during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations brought precisely that perspective to decisions. One result was the vast, destructive Vietnam War.

Unfortunately, quantitative measures of dead bodies, enemy weapons and weight of documents captured were not reliable indicators of progress. Given the enormous scale of American firepower, increasing totals meant mainly that the enemy was growing more numerous.

Where quantitative measures are central is in the tough and quite tangible world of commerce, trade and investment. APEC is today perhaps the most important intergovernmental network in East Asia to promote those activities.

President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker deserve great credit for making APEC a firm reality. Australia Prime Minister Bob Hawke conceived the organization.

Australia over the decades has moved in the direction of free markets, and a much more explicit national commitment to tolerance, directly reflected in official policy toward indigenous populations. The Obama administration decision to station a U.S. Marine contingent in Australia underscored the strong bilateral ties between the two nations, dating back to World War II.

Vietnam was host of the 2006 APEC summit. That gathering provided a useful opportunity to highlight that nation’s economic growth and the wider commitment to multilateralism.

That nation for understandable reasons was long a special case. For years after Hanoi’s military victory in 1975, the newly unified country was unable to turn the corner from political revolution to economic development. Vietnam did not join the Association of Southeast Asian Nations until 1995, nearly three decades after the creation of the development organization.

In recent years, we have witnessed escalation of maritime conflicts across the Pacific. For example, in April 2014 China authorities impounded the Baosteel Emotion, a freighter of Japan’s Mitsui O.S.K. Lines. The move was part of commercial claims resulting from World War II. The two nations also both claim the Senkaku Islands.

China and Vietnam are traditional enemies, a reality masked by their ideological alliance as communist partners during the long Vietnam War. Maritime conflicts and occasional violent clashes between these nations continue.

There are military security aspects to APEC summits, though the focus is economics. In the 2008 summit held in Peru, Americans and Russians discussed differences over Moscow’s invasion of Georgia, and missile developments in Europe and Korea.

In 2006, Hanoi honored U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with a parade. Poignantly, American flags were prominent. The realities of economics challenge communist control in Vietnam as well as China, and now even in North Korea.

Yet, to succeed in today’s commercial Pacific, we must respect basic cultural differences. French journalist Bernard Fall brilliantly analyzed French and American Indochina wars.

In 1967, a landmine killed him in Vietnam. Read his book “The Two Viet Nams.”</s>WASHINGTON (WFSB) - President Donald Trump took to Twitter while in Vietnam to criticize Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal.

Trump is in Vietnam for a visit with North Korea leader Kim Jong Un.

"I have now spent more time in Vietnam than Da Nang Dick Blumenthal, the third rate senator from Connecticut (how is Connecticut doing?) His war stories of his heroism in Vietnam were a total fraud. He was never even there. We talked about it today with Vietnamese leaders!"

In 2010, Blumenthal made inaccurate claims that he served in Vietnam.

He apologized for it afterward and admitted he was never overseas during his military service.

It wasn't the first time Trump and Blumenthal were involved in social media sparring.

Trump has brought up the matter multiple times on social media, particularly whenever Blumenthal mentioned the investigation into potential collusion with Russia or the former FBI director James Comey investigation.

Channel 3 received a response from Blumenthal's office later in the morning on Wednesday.

"We generally decline to waste time engaging with Trump’s brazen lies about Senator Blumenthal," the statement read. "Nothing new here. But the American people should be concerned about the President of the United States squandering time and energy during sensitive negotiations with a serious nuclear threat peddling falsehoods about a political critic."</s>William Temple led the calls for a walkout in 2016 when candidate Donald Trump was scheduled to address the Conservative Political Action Conference and claimed victory when Mr. Trump bailed on his speech over a dispute with CPAC organizers.

He was by no means alone.

Mr. Trump, who made some less-than-memorable CPAC appearances earlier this decade and earned a measly 3.5 percent support in the 2015 CPAC presidential straw poll, was by 2016 the mother of all lightning rods, with the conservative activists gathered in suburban Maryland desperately searching for an alternative presidential candidate.

Three years later, all is forgiven. CPAC thrives off its connections to Mr. Trump, with White House and administration guests peppering the speaker’s list. The president’s appearances serve as the anchor of the three-day gathering.

Mr. Temple now talks of Mr. Trump in terms of comparisons to Winston Churchill and Gen. George Patton.

“I love the guy,” said Mr. Temple, who is Washington-famous for being a CPAC mainstay, attending in Colonial garb.

“I think, ‘Who do I know has this much energy? Who has accomplished this many of his promises in less than two years?’ I’m saying, ‘Why would we ever elect a professional politician to anything?’” Mr. Temple told The Washington Times.

What is most stunning is the quick turnaround.

While some never-Trumpers remain, and perhaps some have faded away, most have been converted and show the zeal that comes with such conversions.

His supporters now say Republicans need to bend to Mr. Trump’s brand of populist-nationalism or get left in the dust.

“If you’re a never-Trumper, then the spectacle of Trump’s CPAC is going to convince you that your forlorn party of wars, open borders, big donors and Wall Street has finally come to an end,” said radio host John Fredericks, who was Virginia chairman for Mr. Trump’s campaign in 2016. “This is the new CPAC, and this is the new Republican Party, and it’s America First, and we’re never going back.”

CPAC-goers say part of their reticence in those days was based on the president’s past, with proclamations of support for gun control and abortion rights, coupled with a brash businessman’s personality and a scorched-earth approach to politics.

When Mr. Trump turned against conservative favorites such as Sen. Ted Cruz, his chief rival for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, his approach enraged activists. Now that it is trained on liberals, they are thrilled.

“I love Ted Cruz, and I have always been behind Ted Cruz — he is a conservative giant,” Ann Eubank said. “He would not have been able to do what Donald Trump has done simply because Ted Cruz would not have acted that way.”

Ms. Eubank was a Cruz delegate to the 2016 Republican National Convention. She said Mr. Trump worried her as an “unknown entity,” that his positions during the primaries were often sketchy “and his personality kind of rubbed the Cruz people the wrong way.”

But she said Mr. Trump has “popped” the Washington bubble and dived into issues that other Republicans have avoided or failed to make headway on, such as immigration.

“I’ve met him three times now … and what you see on TV is not what you see in person,” she said.

Part of the friction between Mr. Trump and CPAC in 2016 was his penchant for writing his own rulebook. The other candidates who appeared agreed to answer questions on stage. Mr. Trump’s campaign said that was a no-go.

“I think their point was, it’s time to just let us do our thing — come out and give a big rally speech,” said Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, which hosts the annual event. “I said I can’t really do that. … I can’t do that with any integrity after I’ve told everybody else.”

But Mr. Schlapp said he never raised the issue personally to Mr. Trump and that everyone moved past it almost immediately.

“For whatever reason, we had never gotten into a situation where there’s crossed words, and of course since that point now he’s the president of the United States,” he said. “I’m complimented that he considers me someone he can rely on as an outside ally.”

At first, Mr. Trump and the grassroots were wedded in something of a shotgun marriage, with a common opponent in Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

Yet conservatives are now past the point of simply tolerating Mr. Trump in order to see him appoint friendly Supreme Court justices.

“Trump has a 93 percent job approval rating with these folks now,” said pollster Jim McLaughlin, who has helped conduct the annual CPAC straw poll. “It’s his party now. He owns the Republican Party, he owns the conservative movement.”

He said the big change has been success. Conservatives credit Mr. Trump for fighting on issues important to them such as taxes, border security and terrorism — and he said they don’t blame him for shortcomings such as Congress’ failure to repeal Obamacare.

“They blame the Republicans in Congress. … They’ll blame John McCain — they actually remember that,” Mr. McLaughlin said of the late senator’s scuttling of the Obamacare repeal. “What [the president] has done is he’s kept true to the principles and the issues that mattered most to conservatives, and they’re rewarding him for it.”

The love CPAC shows Mr. Trump tops anything the Bush presidents ever received and rivals the affection shown for conservative movement demigod Ronald Reagan.

“It may have been a marriage of convenience, but it was a marriage that worked,” said Charlie Gerow, the ACU’s first vice chairman. “There are still some conservatives like myself that have concerns or misgivings over trade policy and tariffs, but everything else is firing on all four cylinders and working out well for America.”

Mr. Trump is slated to speak to CPAC on Saturday, and his address will be the highlight for most attendees.

That was decidedly not the case in 2011, when he made his first appearance, earning a mix of boos and cheers from the crowd after informing them that then-Rep. Ron Paul, a favorite of the libertarian-leaning crowd and a regular straw poll winner, had “zero” chance of being elected president.

Plans for that initial appearance, which partly helped launch Mr. Trump’s foray into politics, were hatched by a group of pro-gay conservatives who were looking to make a splash at the event, said Chris Barron, a former top executive with the group GOProud.

Some social conservatives boycotted CPAC in 2010 after organizers allowed GOProud to be a co-sponsor of the event, and the tension lingered into 2011.

“It had been pretty nasty and divisive, and we were sitting around GOProud offices trying to come up with an idea for something for CPAC that would be fun, that would get people excited — something to kind of put the ugliness of the months-before fight behind us,” Mr. Barron said.

He said that unlike the left, which boasts a deep roster of celebrity supporters from Hollywood, there were comparatively fewer such big names on the right.

“And then I said, well, I mean we’ve got Trump. And I was talking to [GOProud co-founder] Jimmy LaSalvia at the time and I said, ‘Why don’t we invite Trump?’ And Jimmy’s like, ‘OK sure, why not?’” he recalled. “Trump was an unquestioned superstar. Everybody knew who Donald Trump was. And this was also at the height of the popularity of ‘The Apprentice.’”

Mr. Barron said when he arrived, the scene was an absolute Trumpian spectacle.

“It was like Michael Jackson landed at an airport in Tokyo,” he said. “I mean, just throngs and throngs of people hooting and hollering and pictures and people trying to get a glimpse of Trump.”

Still, Mr. Barron also recalled that the bombastic businessman was nervous and “a little tightly wound” before his speech.

He ended up reveling in the back-and-forth with the crowd.

“You could tell he was loving it,” Mr. Barron said. “Little did I know at the time — that’s just Trump, you know? We’ve seen it so often now on the campaign trail that we take it for granted, but it was a political speech unlike any political speech I had seen before.”

Five years later, heading into the 2016 campaign, Mr. Barron was initially a supporter of Sen. Rand Paul, Ron Paul’s son. After Mr. Trump’s flirtation with a run in 2012, Mr. Barron was convinced he would sit it out again.

“Obviously, I was incredibly wrong about that,” he said. “He ended up being the candidate who caused conservatives to question the way we’ve always done things, to question the orthodoxy. … In a way, Trump let all the monkeys out of the zoo.”

The appreciation of Mr. Trump is not universal.

Some frustrated Republicans have taken a look at this year’s CPAC lineup, which includes online personalities such as Diamond and Silk and TV host Judge Jeanine Pirro, and decided to steer clear.

One of them, Heath Mayo, has taken the lead in organizing a rival set of gatherings dubbed “#PrinciplesFirst,” where activists hope to spark a debate about where the conservative movement is headed.

“This all started out as a small meet-up over drinks with some of my buddies who were frustrated with the fact that personalities and hot rhetoric had sort of drowned out the conservative principles that used to be the focus of the conference,” Mr. Mayo said in an email.

Mr. Mayo attended CPAC throughout college and as recently as 2015, “but it’s morphed into something that a lot of conservatives don’t really recognize anymore,” he said.

Mr. Barron said he is not sure what anti-Trump conservatives are talking about when they long for the former days of CPAC.

“The good old days of CPAC involved gay conservative groups getting banned from participating,” he said. “They involved a completely and totally top-down Republican Party that was completely unresponsive to its own base.”

Mr. Schlapp said CPAC isn’t simply about “owning the libs” or serving as a cheerleading squad for Mr. Trump.

“It’s usually conversational debates, some disagreements, interesting perspectives — it’s much more conversational than it is fiery rhetoric from the podium,” he said. “That’s intentional to try to engage the country in a conversation about what these principles are.”

As far as Mr. Trump goes, he said, conservatives writ large who might have been on the fence have liked what they have seen from the president.

“My view was, as a group I thought we could influence him, to encourage him to do what we thought was the right thing and get his buy-in,” said Mr. Schlapp, who is married to White House communications adviser Mercedes Schlapp. “I’m not saying we’re the ones who did that, but if we had a small role in making him realize that when he does the right things we’ll have his back, we’ll defend him, fight to the death for these things, then we did the right thing.”</s>North Korean state media on Wednesday reported that after the country's leader will hold a state visit in Vietnam later this week after his summit with United States President Donald Trump.

The Korean Central News Agency KCNA and the newspaper of the ruling Workers Party, the Rodong Sinmun provided in-depth coverage of Kim Jong-un's trip to Vietnam and as well as new details on his agenda, which had not been previously disclosed.</s>An advocacy group asking members of Congress to support impeachment of President Trump has landed its first two recruits: Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.).

The group, which bills itself as By the People, announced Tuesday that the freshmen lawmakers — both of whom have been at the center of controversies during their short tenure on Capitol Hill — are the “brave first” members of Congress to sign its pledge.

There has been little doubt about Tlaib’s position on the issue since her first day on the job, when she famously proclaimed at a reception her desire to “impeach the motherf-----.”

After several days of national attention for her profane description of the president, Tlaib said she was sorry to have created a distraction but would never apologize for being “passionate and upset.”

[Lawmaker who profanely called for impeaching Trump says she’s sorry for the distraction — but not for her passion]

In a statement released by By the People on Tuesday, Tlaib referred to Trump as “Individual 1,” referencing his moniker in a federal indictment of his former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, for campaign finance violations, among other crimes.

“It’s my pleasure to support this pledge to impeach Donald Trump,” Tlaib said in the statement, which her office authenticated. “I can’t wait for us to show people, especially families in my district, that they are being put first — and that we’re going to hold everyone accountable to the law, including the President of the United States.”

A spokesman for Omar also confirmed her signing of the pledge.

Omar made national headlines this month following her suggestion on Twitter that Israel’s allies in U.S. politics were motivated by money rather than principle. She later apologized.

Democratic House leaders have cautioned against calling for Trump’s impeachment before special counsel Robert S. Mueller III submits a report on his investigation into possible coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign during the 2016 presidential election. Mueller is also examining whether Trump sought to obstruct the probe.

Alexandra Flores-Quilty, a spokeswoman for By the People, said the group plans to continue asking members of Congress “to show moral leadership” by the signing its pledge.

“We can let the Trump administration continue to corrupt our government and endanger our lives — or we can join together to remove Trump from office and make our government work for all of us,” Flores-Quilty said in a statement. “We the people have the power and the responsibility to impeach Trump. And now everyone who calls this country home can track where their members of Congress stand.”</s>HANOI, Vietnam (AP) — US President Trump, NKorea’s Kim Jong Un begin 2nd day of nuclear summit talks in Vietnam amid hopeful talk, skepticism.
U.S. President Donald Trump lands in Vietnam's capital for the summit.