Former President Donald Trump responded to reports that he wants to provide accommodations to North Korea if he’s reelected next year, saying they’re “fake news.”
The report claimed that regarding the communist country, President Trump’s top priority is making a deal. “He knows he wants a deal,” the alleged source told Politico. “What type of deal? I don’t think he has thought that through.”
But President Trump refuted the claims soon after they were published by the outlet.
“A Fake News article in Politico, through anonymous sources (as usual!), states that my views on Nuclear Weapons in North Korea have softened,” President Trump wrote on Truth Social Wednesday.
During his term in office, President Trump became the first American president to set foot in North Korea and met in person with Kim Jong Un multiple times. He previously attempted to broker a deal with the regime to stop carrying out nuclear testing and test-firing ballistic missiles into the ocean.
Since he left office, the country has continued to carry out both missile and nuclear tests, a breach of United Nations’ resolutions.
Earlier this year, President Trump told lawyers during his ongoing New York civil fraud case that he was “very busy” during his time as president and said that it was “most important job in the world, saving millions of lives.”
“I think you would have nuclear holocaust, if I didn’t deal with North Korea,” the former president stated, according to a transcript of the deposition. “I think you would have a nuclear war, if I weren’t elected. And I think you might have a nuclear war now, if you want to know the truth.”
In the deposition, which was earlier this year, the former commander-in-chief said he “was interested in solving the problem with North Korea, which was ready to blow up, and solving the problems we had with China, who was just ripping us off left and right, and making sure that Russia never went into Ukraine.”
“There were a lot of things that were happening in the world, as you probably know,” he added “And I did a very good job. I got rid of those problems. Today those problems are very prevalent.”
During an interview earlier this year, the former president told Fox News that his relationship with Pyongyang “started off rough,” noting that he called Mr. Kim “little rocket man” on Twitter. According to President Trump, Kim “was saying ‘I’ve got a red button on my desk, and I’m willing to use it.”
“And then all of a sudden we get a call—they want to meet,” he said. “We would have had that whole situation straightened out shortly after the beginning of my second term.”
Meanwhile, North Korea has rarely been mentioned during the 2024 presidential election cycle. Foreign policy debates have generally focused on Israel–Hamas, China, and Ukraine, although President Trump’s meeting with Mr. Kim was mentioned by GOP candidate Nikki Haley several months ago in a statement that criticized both he and President Joe Biden.
“The Kim-Putin partnership is another sign that the dictators of the world are united ... the tyrants who lead China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea hate America and our values. We must take their threats seriously,” Ms. Haley said in September.
Her statement added that “neither Joe Biden’s weakness nor Donald Trump’s friendliness to Kim have changed North Korea’s direction for the better. These dictators only understand strength.” Notably, Ms. Haley was one of President Trump’s top diplomats while he was in office, serving as the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
The reports come as the North Korean state-controlled media recently said it is a duty of women to halt a fall in the country’s births in order to strengthen national power, as the regime steps up the call for the people to have more children.
“Stopping the decline in birthrates and providing good child care and education are all our family affairs that we should solve together with our mothers,” Mr. Kim said in his opening speech. His latest appeal for women to have more children was made Sunday during the country’s National Mothers Meeting, the first of its kind in 11 years.
