Son-in-law told Trump N Korea issue may fetch Nobel: Book

Through the fall of 2017, Jared Corey Kushner urged his father-in-law Donald Trump to take a different view of the North Korea issue, telling him that if he made peace, he could win the Nobel Peace Prize just like his predecessor Barack Obama did, claims a new book. The American president indeed changed his approach. In the summer of 2017, all but unaware of the issues involved in the long stalemate with North Korea, Trump had threatened imminent war. A year later, hardly better informed, he offered the North Korean leader one of the most fawning and peculiar embraces in diplomatic history, the book says.

In "Siege: Trump Under Fire", Michael Wolff, author of "Fire And Fury", once again takes readers inside the Trump presidency to "reveal a White House under siege". In "Fire and Fury", Wolff wrote about the first phase of the Trump administration and now, in "Siege", he talks about a presidency, which he says, is "under fire from almost every side".

According to Wolff, Kushner saw himself as a problem solver. "Without illusions about his father-in-law's lack of interest in foreign policy matters, Kushner saw himself as the wiser and more focused adviser to a less sophisticated president," Kushner told Trump that he should completely rethink his approach to North Korea.

"Kushner sketched out the favorable consequences: not only would he change the world opinion of his presidency, but he could also rub the noses of so many Trump haters in his accomplishment," the book, published by Hachette imprint Little, Brown, says. "Kushner quietly urged his father-in-law to take a different view of the North Korea issue. He told Trump that if he made peace, he could win the Nobel Prize, just like Obama," it says. Then came the famous Singapore Summit on June 12, 2018.

"Trump had buttered Kim up and, in return, Kim had buttered Trump up. And even if nothing else changed, the temper changed. Public hostility became public accommodation, even tenderness - albeit yet with nukes," Wolff writes. "This was not a summit in which the relationship between two nations would turn on the fine print of any ultimate agreement. Instead, this meeting marked the beginning of the new inverted relationship between two men, neither of whom spoke the other's language," he says.

"Prior to the summit, they were hardcore enemies; afterward, they would become sincerely respectful friends. Any substantive policy decision, even among aides, was largely dispensed with. Both men merely wanted to ratify their new relationship and their status as ultimate leaders," he writes. Wolff's account begins in February 2018.

The author says he had several goals in writing the book - to create a readable and intuitive narrative; to talk of the near equivalent of a real-time history of this extraordinary moment; and finally pure portraiture: Donald Trump as an extreme, almost hallucinatory, and certainly cautionary, American character. "My strategy is to try to show and not tell, to describe the broadest context, to communicate the experience, to make it real enough for a reader to evaluate where Donald Trump falls on a vertiginous sliding scale of human behavior," Wolff says.