After meeting with South Korean President Lee Jae-myung at the White House on Monday, President Donald Trump said he wants to meet with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un again.
Trump told reporters he has “very good relationships” with Kim and his regime.
“I mean, a lot of people would say, oh, that’s terrible. No, it’s good. In fact, someday I’ll see him. I look forward to seeing him. He was very good with me. We had two meetings – we had two summits. We got along great,” Trump said.
Trump actually had three meetings with Kim during his first term: In Singapore in June 2018, Hanoi in February 2019, and most famously on the demarcation line between North and South Korea in June 2019, when Trump stepped across the line at Kim’s invitation and became the first sitting U.S. president to walk on North Korean soil.
“Remember when I walked across the line and everyone went crazy?” Trump said on Monday.
“I know him better than you do. I know him better than anybody almost, other than his sister. His sister knows him pretty well,” he joked with the press.
“No, I know him well. And I got along with him. You know, I’m not supposed to say I really like him a lot because if I do that, I get killed in the fake news media. But I got along with him very well,” he said.
Trump recalled his meeting with Kim on the DMZ in 2019: “I saw more guns in that room than I’ve ever seen in my life. I looked at the other side and it was the same thing, and yet I felt safe. I felt safe because I have a great relationship with Kim Jong-un.”
Trump’s tumultuous relationship with Kim began with the U.S. president teasing the North Korean dictator as “Little Rocket Man” due to his illegal tests of ballistic missiles. By 2018, Trump was buying a copy of the Elton John album that includes the song “Rocket Man” for Kim as a gag gift.
Trump and Kim struck up an extremely cordial written correspondence, through which Kim expressed a desire for more diplomatic engagement. Trump’s critics upbraided him for being so friendly toward a monstrous dictator with nuclear weapons, while Trump and his supporters said the flourishing personal relationship between the two could lead to landmark progress on denuclearization.
There was remarkable progress at first, but it came to a halt at the Hanoi summit in February 2019, which Trump left early after Kim repeated his maximalist demand for all sanctions against North Korea to be lifted before denuclearization could be discussed.
“Sometimes you have to walk and this was just one of those times,” Trump told reporters as he departed from Hanoi. He added that he and Kim shook hands and parted on friendly terms and Kim promised not to conduct any further nuclear bomb tests.
North Korea’s last nuclear weapons test was in September 2017, so Kim seems to have kept that promise so far, although the damage to the terrain above the massive underground nuclear detonation might have been as much of a factor as his handshake deal with President Trump.
North Korea went through some very belligerent periods during the presidency of Joe Biden, continued to refine its weapons technology, and seemed on the verge of another provocative nuclear test a few times, but never proceeded with a detonation.
Kim has occasionally called for ramping up North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, supposedly because the threat of attack from South Korea and the United States was increasing. He most recently made such a call last week, proclaiming the annual joint summer military exercise between the United States and South Korea was an “obvious expression of their will to provoke war.”
Whether or not North Korea manufactures any more nuclear bombs, it has been working to improve its delivery systems. Security analysts fear Russia could be helping North Korea with missile technology as a reward for Kim supplying munitions and troops to the Russian war effort in Ukraine. North Korea is also working on a new class of destroyer that could potentially carry nuclear missiles.
Monday’s news conference with South Korean President Lee was not the first time Trump has talked about resuming his talks with Kim Jong-un. In April, he made similar comments about getting to know Kim “very well,” raising his opinion of the “very rough, very nasty, little rocket man.”
Trump said in April he now sees Kim as a “very smart guy,” and would like to do “something at some point” with him during his second term.
Lee also hopes to resume dialogue with North Korea after a period of tense relations under his predecessor Yoon Suk-yeol. Lee has made a few conciliatory gestures since his election in June, including ordering a halt to loudspeaker broadcasts along the DMZ. The South Korean military said North Korea has taken down some of its own loudspeakers, but that has been the only reciprocal gesture made by Pyongyang to date.
Kim Yo-jong, the above-mentioned sister to Kim Jong-un, claimed in mid-August that North Korea has not taken down any of its loudspeakers. She said South Korean reports to the contrary were “unfounded unilateral supposition and a red herring.
“We have clarified on several occasions that we have no will to improve relations,” she sneered, hinting that North Korea’s constitution would soon be rewritten to define South Korea as a permanently “hostile state.”
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