Trump told reporters at the White House this week that Kim Jong Un had responded to his outreach for a conversation, doubling down when reporters pushed back. He later called the state of their interactions “very positive.”
In a Wednesday evening statement carried by North Korean state media, Kim Yo Jong — Kim Jong Un’s sister and a senior Workers’ Party official —said she was “completely unaware” of any such contact, but noted that her brother’s personal relationship with Trump remains warm. A research fellow at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses, Yu Ji-hoon, called this distinction likely deliberate, possibly an attempt to separate Trump personally from broader US policy toward Pyongyang.
On the joint US-South Korea military exercises Trump ordered scaled back, North Korea has “no interest in it at all,” Kim Yo Jong said, adding that the drills’ provocative and aggressive character doesn’t change just because their length and size were cut. She said that South Korea’s pursuit of nuclear-powered submarines as fresh evidence of what she called Seoul’s hostile posture.
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Related: South Korea’s Lee Reaffirms Push to Reclaim Wartime Command After Trump Cuts Drills
Ulchi Freedom Shield began Monday, originally set to run 11 days through August 27. It will now wrap up Friday instead, a six-day cut ordered after Trump told Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the weekend to “substantially reduce” the drills, which he called “totally inappropriate and hostile” toward a North Korea he described as “unthreatening and respectful.”
Read: Trump Touts ‘Very Good Relationship’ With Kim Jong Un After South Korea Balks on Iran
Later on the same day, when a CNN reporter followed up by asking whether Kim had requested the cutback, he told her repeatedly to be quiet, then said, “You’re a fake reporter.”
Touring a newly built White House helipad, he was asked whether he was exchanging letters with Kim; he demurred, then pivoted to praising their personal rapport. “He has 57 very powerful nuclear weapons,” he said, adding that past US leaders should never have let the arsenal develop.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump is pushing aides to arrange that meeting as soon as this fall, possibly around a November trip to China for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shenzhen. Any such meeting would need to clear a standing hurdle — Kim has previously said he won’t return to talks unless Washington drops denuclearization as a precondition for dialogue, a demand the Trump administration has so far kept in place.
