President Donald Trump is reportedly trying to reconnect with his old pen pal Kim Jong Un—but he’s being bluntly rejected.
North Korean diplomats have refused to accept a letter Trump wrote to the North Korean despot in hopes of reviving the bizarre rapport they had during his first term, NK News reported, citing a high-level source.
The president famously said in 2018 that the two leaders “fell in love” through their letter exchanges.
“We went back and forth, then we fell in love,” he said at the time. “No, really! He wrote me beautiful letters. And they are great letters.”
The White House has attempted to hand-deliver Trump’s latest letter multiple times, but North Korean diplomats at the U.N. headquarters in New York have repeatedly rejected it, according to NK News.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt addressed the report during Wednesday’s briefing, saying Trump “remains receptive to correspondence” with Kim, but added, “As for specific correspondence, I’ll leave that for the president to answer.”
In April, Trump claimed the U.S. was in “communication” with the nuclear-armed country and said his administration would “probably do something at some point.”
Leavitt said Trump hopes to build on his June 2018 meeting with Kim in Singapore, where he became the only U.S. president to meet with a sitting North Korean leader.
Following that first date, Trump met with the dictator twice more, making history again by becoming the first U.S. president inside the isolated country by taking 20 steps at the border between North and South Korea in June 2019.
Their bromance, however, failed to deliver a hoped-for deal requiring North Korea to halt or dismantle its nuclear weapons program in return for sanctions relief, and Kim has continued to launch ballistic missile tests.
In fact, Kim may have less incentive to thaw relations with the U.S., as North Korea has grown closer to traditional American adversaries. It’s struggling economy is supported by China, while Russia has also provided economic aid in exchange for thousands of North Korean troops deployed to back Russian forces in Ukraine.
