Trump invites Kim to meet him at ‘demilitarised zone’

Bloomberg

Donald Trump said he’d cross into North Korea at the country’s border to meet Kim Jong-un this weekend as the US president looks to restart stalled nuclear talks.
“I will be in South Korea — I let him know,” Trump told reporters in Osaka, Japan, after a tweet in which he invited Kim for a handshake. “We’ll see. If he’s there we’ll see each other for two minutes. That’s all we can, but that will be fine.”
Asked at a news conference later whether he’d step into North Korea at the border to meet Kim, Trump said ‘sure I would’, and that he’d have “no problem’” with it.
Trump is planning to visit the demilitarised zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea on Sunday. If Trump crosses the border, he’d be the first American president to ever step foot into the country.
North Korean foreign ministry official Choe Son Hui said Trump’s invitation was “a very interesting suggestion, but we have not received an official proposal in this regard.”
“I am of the view that if the DPRK-US summit meetings take place on the division line, as is intended by President Trump, it would serve as another meaningful occasion in further deepening the personal relations between the two leaders and advancing the bilateral relations,” Choe said, as quoted by the official Korean Central News Agency.
If a meeting takes place, it would be the third between the two leaders since they began easing long-standing tensions that risked sparking a military conflict. A summit in Vietnam earlier this year collapsed without a deal, and discussions have gone nowhere since.
Back home, the snap invitation helped Trump draw attention from Democrats seeking to replace him.
Their debates drew two days of prime-time television coverage while he was out of the country.
But Trump’s tweet took government officials in South Korea and the US by surprise, forcing them to scramble to plan for a meeting that — if it happens — would likely produce little more than publicity for the American president.
Trump visited Seoul on Saturday for an overnight stay and meetings with President Moon Jae-in. At the G-20, Trump approached Moon ahead of one of the joint sessions and asked “Did you see my tweet?,” Yonhap News reported, citing a Blue House official. When Moon said he had, Trump gave him a thumbs up and said “let’s work together,” the report said.
North Korea’s state media reported that Kim had received a letter from Trump with “excellent content,” without providing more details. A Trump-Kim encounter on Sunday hadn’t been confirmed, Ko Min-jung, a spokeswoman for South Korea’s presidential office, said.
“Certainly we seem to get along very well,” Trump said of Kim during the start of a breakfast meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the Group of 20 summit. “For the stupid people that say ‘Oh he gets along,’ no, it’s good to get along. It’s good to get along. Because, frankly, if I didn’t become president you’d be right now in a war with North Korea.”
Trump said he thought of sending the tweet inviting Kim to meet him at the border. “I just put out a feeler because I don’t know where he is right now,” the president said. “He may not be in North Korea but I said if Chairman Kim would want to meet I’ll be at the border.”