President Trump said Monday that he may meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during his trip to Asia next month, raising the prospect of the two leaders’ first face-to-face meeting in about seven years. Asked by a reporter at the White House whether he planned to meet Kim while in Asia, Trump answered: “I may. I may. That will be exciting, won’t it? But I get along with him.”
The trip takes Trump to the ASEAN summit in Manila on Nov. 16 and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shenzhen, China, in mid-November. Trump has said several times that he wants to meet Kim before the end of the year, and The Wall Street Journal reported in August that he had instructed aides to pursue a summit as early as this fall and had privately discussed a meeting on the sidelines of APEC — though formal summit preparations had not begun at the time.
“I may. I may. That will be exciting, won’t it? But I get along with him.”
Trump and Kim developed an unlikely rapport during his first term, meeting three times — in Singapore in 2018, in Hanoi, Vietnam, in 2019, and at Panmunjom in the demilitarized zone in June 2019, where Trump briefly stepped into North Korean territory, the first sitting U.S. president to do so. The meetings produced no denuclearization deal: the pair could not strike a bargain rolling back sanctions in exchange for Pyongyang scrapping its nuclear weapons, and North Korea has continued to grow its arsenal since. Trump recently appeared at events in Texas with former NBA star Dennis Rodman, who has served as an informal liaison to Kim because of the North Korean leader’s love of basketball.
For all the warmth, Kim has maintained his grip on the world’s most reclusive country and continues to test missiles — North Korea reportedly fired multiple ballistic missiles toward the East Sea this week — and Pyongyang has not agreed to any new meeting in the reporting so far. Nothing is scheduled. But if the two men do sit down in November, it would restart the most personal diplomacy of Trump’s first term, this time with a bigger North Korean arsenal on the table.
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