President Donald Trump on Monday said he wants to rekindle his friendship with the millennial dictator who has illegally assembled a nuclear arsenal while his own country remains starving and isolated under decades of economic sanctions and self-inflicted problems.
Trump told South Korean president Lee Jae Myung he would like to meet with North Korean dictator Kim Jung Un after the South Korean leader noted that North Korea had “developed further its nuclear and missile capabilities” during the four years Trump was out of office after having lost the 2020 election.
After Lee said he hoped Trump would “usher in a new era of peace on the Korean peninsula,” the American president replied: “I will do that, and we’ll have talks. He’d like to meet with me.”
“He didn’t want to meet with Biden because he had no respect for Biden, but we look forward to meeting with him, and we’ll make relations better,” he said.
“Kim Jong Un and I had a very great relationship… and still do,” Trump added.
The president also suggested that he would be attending this year’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Seoul and said he could “sneak away” to “do something” to aid relations between North and South Korea, which have remained in a technical state of war since the 1950s.
“I get along great with Kim Jong Un and whatever I can do, having to do with South Korea and getting people together,” he said.
Kim, 41, has led the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea since the death of his father, Kim Jong Il, in 2011.
During his time as the country’s supreme leader, he has pushed to increase North Korea’s illicit nuclear program and ballistic missile program with the aim of gaining the ability to attack western nations such as the United States.
He has persisted in doing so despite multiple United Nations Security Council resolutions calling for denuclearization of the entire Korea Peninsula.
Trump became the first sitting U.S. president to meet with a North Korean leader when he met with Kim in Singapore in June of 2018. The two leaders met a for a second summit in Hanoi in March 2019, and in June 2019 Trump made history when he met with Kim for a short period at the Demilitarized Zone that separates North and South Korea.
The American leader became the first U.S. president to set foot in the DPRK when he briefly crossed the border separating the two Korean nations at Kim’s invitation.
At the time, Trump invited Kim to visit the U.S. “when the time is right” but since then there has been very little in the way of talks between Washington and Pyongyang.
