Trump says ‘getting along’ with North Korea is a ‘good thing’

U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump defended his relationship with North Korea by saying that “getting along” with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is a “good thing.”

Trump’s remarks came after his Democratic rival Kamala Harris vowed not to “cozy up to” dictators like Kim.

“I got along with Kim Jong-un of North Korea. Remember I walked over ... the first person to ever walk over from this country,” Trump said, during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Friday, apparently referring to his visit to the inter-Korean border village of Panmunjom in June 2019, where he briefly crossed the Military Demarcation Line into the North.

Trump spearheaded an unprecedented diplomatic push on North Korea when he was president in an effort to get it to abandon its nuclear and missile programs. 

He met Kim three times but the effort brought no tangible progress and North Korea has been relentlessly building up its nuclear arsenal and developing the missiles with which to carry the bombs ever since.

“We also looked at his nuclear capability. It’s very substantial ... You know, getting along is a good thing. It's not a bad thing,” Trump added. 

In her nomination acceptance speech in Chicago in August, Harris took aim at Trump who has long boasted about his personal ties with Kim, saying that she will not “cozy up to tyrants and dictators like Kim Jong Un who are rooting for Trump.”

“They know he is easy to manipulate with flattery and favors. They know Trump won’t hold autocrats accountable because he wants to be an autocrat himself,” she said at that time. 

The two candidates’ remarks suggest their different visions for diplomacy toward North Korea, although there is an absence of references to the goal of denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in the policy platforms of both the U.S. Democratic and Republican parties as they prepare for November’s presidential election.

But U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said last week he reaffirmed a U.S. commitment to the “complete” denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in talks with top Chinese officials.

Edited by Mike Firn.