CLAIM: Vice President Kamala Harris claimed during her Democratic National Convention (DNC) speech on Thursday that communist North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un is “rooting for” her opponent, former President Donald Trump, in the 2024 presidential election.
VERDICT: False. The Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), the flagship state propaganda service of the Kim regime, said explicitly of the results of the 2024 election: “we do not care about this.” Kim Jong-un himself, while meeting with Trump on several occasions, later accused him of negotiating with Pyongyang in “bad faith.”
Harris’s speech — the first during the four-day Democratic National Convention (DNC) to address her proposed foreign policy if elected — accused Trump of, among other disreputable actions, adopting a foreign policy favorable to Russia and antagonizing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The vice president then claimed that, despite her administration’s storied history of concessions to the Islamist theocracy of Iran, she would “never hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to defend our forces and our interests against Iran and Iran-backed terrorists.”
“And I will not cozy up to tyrants and dictators like Kim Jong-un, who are rooting for Trump,” Harris claimed. “Because they know he is easy to manipulate with flattery and favors. They know Trump won’t hold autocrats accountable — because he wants to be an autocrat.”
Harris’s remark about Kim appeared to be a reference to a joke that Trump made during his own speech accepting the nomination of the Republican Party at its own national convention. Trump recalled that he “got along very well with Kim” during his first term in office and added of Kim, “When we get back, I get along with him. He’d like to see me back too. I think he misses me.”
Kim did not address the remark directly as he rarely makes public statements on American politics. KCNA did respond to Trump’s comment, however — by confirming that Kim is not rooting for him.
“Even if any administration takes office in the U.S., the political climate, which is confused by the infighting of the two parties, does not change and, accordingly, we do not care about this,” KCNA asserted, vowing that North Korea would continue its decades of outrageous nuclear threats against the United States and its allies.
The same state media commentary also refuted the idea that Trump’s meetings with Kim benefitted the North Korean regime in any way.
“It is true that Trump, when he was president, tried to reflect the special personal relations between the heads of states in the relations between states,” the state outlet continued, “but he did not bring about any substantial positive change.”
In late July, Trump surfaced in a North Korean propaganda video identified as a “U.S. imperialist” enemy of Pyongyang.
North Korean state media had for years referred to Trump with a variety of epithets, including “old lunatic” with a “nasty smell” who needed to “urgently be sent to a lunatic asylum.”
Long before the latest round of Democrat speculation that Trump had clinched Kim’s support, Kim himself personally dismissed Trump as a “bad faith” actor who was not beneficial to his ruthless communist regime. During a meeting with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin in 2019, Kim whined that meetings with Trump did not help the regime strengthen its stranglehold on power.
“Kim Jong Un said that the situation on the Korean peninsula and the region is now at a standstill and has reached a critical point where it may return to its original state as the U.S. took a unilateral attitude in bad faith at the recent second DPRK-U.S. summit talks,” the North Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, “and added that peace and security on the Korean peninsula will entirely depend on the U.S. future attitude, and the DPRK will gird itself for every possible situation.”
The Biden administration has largely maintained Trump’s North Korea policy by virtue of doing little to address the Korean peninsula at all. Harris herself has a limited record on North Korea, save for a visit to the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in September 2022. in which she inaccurately claimed that the United States has a “strong alliance” with the “Republic of North Korea.”
“Denuclearizing the Korean peninsula” disappeared from the Democratic Party’s platform shortly before the DNC this week, reportedly alarming observers in South Korea.