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Donald Trump said he would like to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un this year as South Korea’s leftwing President Lee Jae Myung visited the White House against a backdrop of tensions between Washington and Seoul.
Speaking in the Oval Office alongside Lee on Monday, Trump touted his “great relationship” with Kim, who he met for a high-profile if largely inconclusive summit in Singapore during his first term in office.
“I look forward to meeting with Kim Jong Un in the appropriate future,” the US president said. When asked about the timing of a possible summit with Kim, Trump answered: “I’m meeting a lot of people . . . it’s hard to say that, but I’d like to meet him this year.”
His desire for a meeting with Kim was blessed by the South Korean president who said he asked for the US president to play a role “in establishing peace on the Korean peninsula”.
“I look forward to your meeting with chairman, Kim Jong Un and the construction of a Trump Tower in North Korea and playing golf at that place,” Lee quipped.
The talks between Trump and Lee unfolded amid friction between the two countries on issues ranging from trade to the US military presence in the Asian nation and the rule of law.
In a Truth Social post hours before the meeting, Trump referenced the political turmoil that has enveloped South Korea over the past year, including the impeachment and arrest of former president Yoon Suk Yeol for trying to impose martial law in late 2024.
“WHAT IS GOING ON IN SOUTH KOREA? Seems like a Purge or Revolution. We can’t have that and do business there. I am seeing the new President today at the White House. Thank you for your attention to this matter!!!” Trump wrote.
Speaking to reporters before meeting Lee, Trump said he had heard about “very vicious raids on churches by the new government in South Korea” that “even went into our military base and got information”.
In the Oval Office alongside the South Korean president, Trump said he had heard about the matter from US intelligence.
“It didn’t sound to me like South Korea,” he said. Lee responded that there was a “fact finding investigation” being conducted about the actions of the former president — to which Trump interjected by asking, jokingly, if the special prosecutor’s name was Jack Smith, who brought charges against him during the 2024 campaign for the White House.
On trade, the countries agreed last month that Seoul would invest $350bn in the US in return for a 15 per cent tariff on South Korean imports, down from the 25 per cent levy Trump had threatened.
“We’re going to get along great because we really sort of need each other,” Trump said in the Oval Office with Lee.
But it was unclear how much of the underlying friction was resolved. Neither country released an official factsheet outlining the terms of the July 30 agreement and officials from the two governments have offered markedly different interpretations of what was agreed.
On the military front, the Trump administration wants to refocus its assets in South Korea on China, leaving Seoul to take on more of the burden of deterring North Korea.
South Korea’s national security adviser Wi Sung-lac said last week that his country was willing to increase its defence spending, while Lee has also declared his intention for wartime operational control of joint forces on the peninsula to be transferred from the US to South Korea by 2030.
Trump would not say on Monday whether he supported a reduction of American troops in South Korea, but he did add that he would like the US to have ownership over its main military base there rather than have it leased.
“We spent a lot of money building a fort, and there was a contribution made by South Korea. But I would like to see if we could get rid of the lease and get ownership of the land where we have a massive military base,” Trump said.
Despite the attempt by Trump and Lee to patch over their differences, the US president’s decision to chide Lee on the domestic political environment ahead of their meeting highlighted the hurdles they still need to overcome.
Yoon, the former South Korean president, was impeached and suspended from office in December after he declared martial law and dispatched troops to storm the national assembly following a budgetary stand-off with leftwing parties. He was removed from office in April following a unanimous decision by the country’s constitutional court.
Yoon is in solitary confinement as he stands trial on criminal charges of sedition. But his hardline supporters have long maintained that his martial law gambit was designed to prevent election meddling by leftist forces aligned with North Korea and the Chinese Communist party.
Many have protested with US flags and English-language “Stop the Steal” signs — an allusion to Trump’s allegations of fraud in the 2020 US election that preceded the storming of the US Capitol by his supporters on January 6 2021 — in a bid to win the US president’s support for their cause.
