Donald Trump went to Asia hunting for a headline reunion, and came home with a snub. The president, who once boasted that he and Kim Jong Un “fell in love,” was left disappointed after North Korea showed no interest in arranging a face-to-face during his weeklong swing through the region, according to The Washington Post. “He wrote me beautiful letters, and they’re great letters. We fell in love,” Trump famously said in 2018, a line that has come to define his unusual courtship of the North Korean dictator.
The Post reported that Trump repeatedly signaled he wanted to see his “old friend,” pitching an encounter that would rekindle the “good relationship” he claimed from his first term. But, as the paper noted, “the feelings did not appear to be mutual,” with Pyongyang “showing no interest” and instead deepening its alignment with Moscow. The missed meeting became “a singular disappointment on a trip that largely conformed to the U.S. president’s desire to be celebrated.”
That cooling of their relationship did not happen suddenly. Kim has been busy tightening bonds with Vladimir Putin, trading photo ops and pledges for deeper military and economic ties. Recent reports detail a mutual defense pact and stepped-up cooperation, the kind of embrace that leaves little space for Washington. North Korean statements have vowed that ties with Russia will “advance non-stop,” while both nations have touted expanded military collaboration.
Trump still stacked up friendly optics elsewhere during his trip to Asia. In Tokyo, Japan’s new prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, rolled out the red carpet, praising Trump’s leadership and reportedly telling him she would nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize. She billed a “golden age” in U.S.–Japan relations, a flourish that fed the president’s appetite for adulation. For Trump’s team, the Japan stop was a marquee moment, a contrast to the silence from Pyongyang.
Still, nothing would have crowned the tour like a sit-down with North Korea’s dictator. An encounter would have let Trump reprise the pageantry of Singapore and the DMZ, scenes he often cites as proof of his singular brand of diplomacy. Instead, the image that lingered was absence, a door not opened, a call not returned. Analysts have argued that it is not 2019 anymore, and that Kim now sees more upside in the anti-West axis of Moscow and Beijing than in risky gestures toward normalization with Washington.
For Trump, the optics sting because they cut at the heart of his persona. He has long sold the idea that personal chemistry can smooth over nuclear standoffs, that his “face-to-face instincts” succeed where conventional diplomacy fails. The Post framed his pursuit of Kim as exactly that, a personality-driven bid to see an “old friend” again. This time, that friend chose another partner. In the symbolism-rich world of geopolitics, the message was unmistakable, and it did not flatter the president.
Kim is moving from any relationship with the US right into the arms of Putin, not with the man who once said they “fell in love.” Trump got ceremonies and pledges in allied capitals, but from Pyongyang he got something else entirely, the cold shoulder.
