President Donald Trump on Wednesday said that joint U.S.-South Korea military exercises are an insult to North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un.
Trump’s comments came after the Department of Defense confirmed that the ongoing exercises — initially scheduled to last through Aug. 27 — will be shortened by a week and conclude on Friday instead.
Trump said Wednesday that he will meet with North Korean dictator later this year, but wouldn’t say if he has been exchanging letters with him.
In this June 30, 2019, file photo, President Donald Trump and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un walk on North Korean soil toward South Korea in the Demilitarized Zone, in Panmunjom, Korea.
Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images, FILE
Trump indicated earlier this week that he and Kim had been in touch after he ordered the exercises to be scaled back.
North Korea said Wednesday it still sees the drills as “provocative,” and the decision to shorten them changes nothing in the relationship between the two countries.
“We think it’s not worth making comments on that and we have no interest in it at all,” Kim Yo Jong, Kim Jong Un’s sister, said in a statement carried by state media. “The provocative, aggressive nature of the drills won’t change even though their duration and size were reduced.”
North Korea is widely believed to be aiding U.S. adversaries, including sending arms to Iran and troops to bolster Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Pressed by reporters about whether he is still trying to pursue a denuclearization agenda against North Korea after implying earlier on Wednesday that it had 57 nuclear weapons, Trump said he didn’t want to get into it.
“Well, I don’t want to talk about that. But I do have a good relationship with Kim Jong Un,” he said, going on to remark that other presidents did not have the relationship he had with Kim.
“But he likes me, and I like — I, you know, I just got along with him very good,” he added.
“We had — we had great meetings. We speak, and I think our nation and I think other nations, frankly, whether it’s Japan or South Korea, they’re a lot safer if I’m president than if somebody else is president,” Trump said, referring to meetings between the two men during his first term.
A Republic of Korea Army soldier drives a K808 wheeled armored vehicle onto the shore during an amphibious offloading demonstration for distinguished visitor (DV) day as part of the Combined Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore 2026 (CJLOTS 2026) exercise at Pohang Port, South Korea, July 16, 2026.
Pfc. Yunseong Jang/U.S. Army
Trump met with Kim three times during his first term, including two summits, but those meetings failed to produce an agreement on his goal of denuclearization.
“Now, I didn’t like the fact that we’re doing these massive military exercises really against North Korea,” Trump added, before going on to criticize South Korea for not assisting the U.S. with the Iran war.
“I felt that to do a massive — we were doing a massive war exercise. I thought that was very insulting to somebody that, frankly, has been, during my term at least, very well-behaved.”
North Korea has engaged in several ballistic missile tests so far this year, including two in August ahead of the U.A.-South Korea joint exercise. The most recent launch last Wednesday was detected by South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff and Japan’s Defense Ministry.
ABC News’ Karen Travers and Isabella Murray contributed to this report.