Trump Says He Will Meet Kim Jong Un This Year
The president confirmed plans for another face-to-face with North Korea's leader, whom he has met three times before.
President Donald Trump confirmed to reporters that he plans to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un this year, an unusual move for any American president but a familiar one for Trump himself.
Asked whether he expected to meet with Kim this year, Trump said, "Yeah, I will be."
The Wall Street Journal first reported that Trump was pushing for a meeting with Kim, whom he previously met three times, in 2018 and 2019. The United States does not have formal diplomatic relations with North Korea, and no other sitting U.S. president has met with the country's supreme leader. Former presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton traveled to North Korea, but only after leaving office.
Days earlier, Trump ordered the U.S. military to downsize joint exercises with South Korea, citing in part his "very good relationship" with Kim. "These exercises are not only costly, with much of these costs paid for by the United States of America (as usual!), but send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful," Trump wrote in a social media post. He also suggested South Korea's refusal to assist the U.S. in its conflict with Iran factored into the decision.
Trump, who has previously exchanged letters with Kim, declined to say whether the two are corresponding again. "I can't tell you that," he said, adding that he gets along with the North Korean leader. "And you know what? The fact that I get along with him, that's a good thing, not a bad thing. He has 57 very powerful nuclear weapons," Trump said. It was unclear how he arrived at that specific figure.
In 2019, Trump became the first sitting U.S. president to step inside North Korea, at the Demilitarized Zone, and earlier that year met Kim in Vietnam for a nuclear summit that produced no agreement. The two also met in Singapore in 2018.
North Korea's official news agency said Kim's sister, Kim Yo Jong, was not aware of any recent communication between her brother and Trump.
The announcement is the latest sign of Trump's administration pulling back from longtime allies, a departure from past Republican administrations' more internationalist approach, following his criticism of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and praise for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
This article was produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI), in accordance with our editorial policy.
