World News
Trump says he will meet Kim Jong Un this year and puts the North Korean arsenal at 57 weapons
By Staff Writer | 20 August 2026
The US president said on Wednesday that he intends to see the North Korean leader before the end of 2026, which would be their first meeting since 2019 and the fourth in all. He gave no date and no venue, and officials have looked at travel to Asia in November as the opening.
President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that he would meet the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un later this year. It would be the first encounter between the two men in his second term and the fourth in all. He was asked the question during a tour of a new helipad under construction on the South Lawn of the White House, and gave a one word answer.
Yeah, I will be
Donald Trump, President of the United States
He set out no date and named no venue. Officials have looked at travel to Asia for a leaders' summit in November as the opening for direct contact, according to a United States official, and the president is expected to be in China that month. An attempt to arrange a meeting during his Asia trip last year came to nothing, in part because of the difficulty of assembling one at short notice. He would not say on Wednesday whether he had exchanged any letters with Kim.
An unusually exact figure on the arsenal
In the same exchange the president put a number on North Korea's stock of nuclear weapons. A serving US president rarely gives one, because the figure is an intelligence assessment rather than a published count, and the number he gave was 57.
But he's got them. I get along with him very well. I can't let Iran have a nuclear weapon. And I know Kim Jong Un very well, and he's going to be fine.
Donald Trump, President of the United States
The contrast the president drew is his own. He is prosecuting a war against Iran that he has justified on the ground of stopping Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, while describing a nuclear armed North Korea as a country he can work with.
Two days of signals to Pyongyang
The announcement follows two days of gestures towards Pyongyang. On Monday the president ordered the United States to scale back military exercises with South Korea, which he called inappropriate and hostile, and cited his good relationship with the North Korean leader as his reason. He also posted a photograph of his 2019 meeting with Kim at the inter-Korean demilitarised zone.
Neither step was matched by any public response from Pyongyang. North Korea has not commented on the exercises, on the photograph or on the suggestion of a meeting, and no channel for arranging one has been described by either side.
What the three earlier meetings produced
Trump and Kim met three times during his first term, in Singapore in 2018, in Hanoi in 2019, and at the demilitarised zone later that year, when the president stepped briefly across the line into North Korean territory. The Hanoi meeting broke up without an agreement. Nothing signed at any of the three obliged North Korea to give up a single weapon, and its production of them has continued since.
That record is the reason a fourth meeting is being treated with more caution in Washington than the first was. What a further summit would achieve that the earlier ones did not has not been set out, by the president or by anyone around him.
For now there is an intention, a month that officials are looking at, and a number that came from the president rather than from any agency that publishes one.