US President Donald Trump said Monday he hoped to meet again with North Korea's Kim Jong Un, possibly this year, as he held White House talks with South Korea's dovish new leader that got off awkwardly.
Hours before President Lee Jae Myung arrived for his long-planned first visit to the White House, Trump took to social media to denounce what he said was a "Purge or Revolution" in South Korea, apparently over raids that involved churches.
Forty minutes into an Oval Office meeting in which Lee profusely praised Trump, the US leader dismissed his own sharply worded rebuke, saying, "I'm sure it's a misunderstanding" as "there is a rumor going around."
Trump said he believed he was on the same page on North Korea as Lee, a progressive who supports diplomacy over confrontation.
Trump, who met Kim Jong Un three times in his first term, hailed his relationship with the young totalitarian and said he knew him "better than anybody, almost, other than his sister."
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Trump once said that he and Kim "fell in love" during their meetings, which reduced tensions but failed to produce a lasting agreement.
ReplyDeleteUS President Donald Trump has described his relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as excellent and expressed confidence in the "tremendous potential" of the DPRK.
ReplyDelete"I think he has a country of great potential, tremendous potential," Trump told reporters at the White House, commenting on the prospects for further cooperation with the North Korean leader.
"I have a great relationship with Kim Jong Un. I hope it stays that way. I think it will," he said at the beginning of a meeting with South Korean President Lee Jae-Myung. "I spent a lot of free time with him, talking about things that we probably aren't supposed to talk about," Trump added, referring to his meetings with Kim Jong Un during his first tenure as head of the US administration (in 2017-2021).