Former NBA star Dennis Rodman said he believes that if Hillary Clinton won last year's presidential election, her approach to US relations with North Korea would be "more open-minded" than the Trump administration's.
Rodman stopped by BuzzFeed News' AM to DM morning show Thursday to discuss, among several topics, his five trips to North Korea.
"They really respect me," he said of North Koreans, adding that he doesn't talk about politics while there, keeping his conversation topics with leader Kim Jong Un and other officials to sports and music.
When asked whether he thinks US relations with North Korea would be better or worse if Clinton had been elected president last year, Rodman leaned toward better, saying it didn't seem like "she's going to try to go there and try to control" the relationship.
Rodman said that both she and Bill Clinton have gone through a lot of difficulties, adding that the former president "had a tendency to know how to easy his way into difficult situations, to try to smooth it out."
Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump and Kim's regime have been in a war of insults. The US president has disparagingly called Kim "Rocket Man" multiple times and said the US would "totally destroy" North Korea.
"Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime," Trump said at the United Nations in September.
Kim fired back at the time by calling Trump a mentally deranged "dotard."
Rodman, who was a contestant on the same season of The Celebrity Apprentice as Omarosa Manigault-Newman, said he was responsible for Trump firing her from the show when asked about her recent departure from the White House on Wednesday.
While the official line from the White House was that Manigault-Newman resigned, sources told BuzzFeed News that she was fired and escorted out of the White House Tuesday night.
"She got fired!" Rodman said on AM to DM of her recent departure from the White House. He went on to detail how during the reality television series, which aired in 2013, he called Manigault-Newman out for her "crocodile tears," which led to Trump firing her from the competition.