Since Dennis Rodman stopped playing in the NBA, he’s gotten himself into the spotlight for his regular trips to North Korea.
He told Stephen Colbert on the “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” Wednesday, Dec. 13, that while he’s friends with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, he’s not so buddy-buddy that they can discuss politics.
“We talk about basketball,” Rodman said. “He can say anything with me, but the deal is that I don’t discuss politics because that’s not my job. My job is to be a human being, to try to connect us with him.
“I don’t want people to sit there and look at me and say, ‘You betrayed America.’ No, I didn’t. I just went over there to try to solve things.”
Despite boasting about how much Kim Jong Un trusts him (he previously said he was able to hold the dictator’s newborn baby), he did acknowledge in a contradictory statement that his friend might be a “madman.” However, that wasn’t his experience of him, he said.
“I don’t really judge people, you know, by their color,” Rodman said. “I don’t judge where they come from. I just judge people where, you know, we’re all human beings. You know, throughout the day, we’re all human beings.
“It’s funny, though, that I don’t see how people can sit there and say that this person is a ‘madman.’ He probably is, but I didn’t see that. But he probably is.”
He also called him a “kid” who doesn’t want nuclear war, to which Colbert replied: “He’s a kid, but he’s a kid with nuclear weapons.”
“Well, hey, I know that right,” Rodman responded.
Rodman came out wearing a shirt with a picture of him between President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un with “unite” written underneath.
He gave Colbert his own shirt—with the same picture and language except that Colbert was stuck in there between Trump and Rodman.
“You must be high,” Colbert responded.
“If I can go back over there, you’ll see me talking to him, and sitting down and having dinner, a glass of wine, laughing and doing my thing,” he added. “I guess things will settle down a bit and everybody can rest at ease,” he said.
Rodman also said he wants to organize a basketball game between Guam, a U.S. territory, and North Korea. Pyongyang has threatened in recent months to strike Guam, even threatening to send “a salvo of missiles into waters near the US territory of Guam” if the United States threatens it.
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