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Donald Trump said he’d like to take North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un to a baseball game as he boasted about their friendship at a Michigan rally on Saturday.
The former president said he “got along” great with Kim when he was in office.
“It’s a good thing to get along not a bad thing. I used to tell him, ‘why don’t you do something else?’ All he wants to do is buy nuclear weapons and make them,” Trump said of the North Korean leader. “I said, ‘just relax, chill.’ He got enough. He got so much nuclear weapons.”
“I said, ‘just relax, lets go to a baseball game, I’ll show you how to baseball.’ We’ll go watch the Yankees,” Trump continued.
The former president echoed similar rhetoric at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on Thursday.
“I get along with him, he’d like to see me back too,” Trump said during his keynote address. “I think he misses me, if you want to know.”
Trump held in-person meetings with the dictator during his time in the Oval Office. In 2019, Trump became the first sitting US president to visit North Korea.
North Korea is one of the most repressive countries in the world, according to Human Rights Watch. Under Kim’s leadership, “the government maintains fearful obedience by using threats of torture, executions, imprisonment, enforced disappearances, and forced labor,” Human Rights Watch reports.
And yet, Trump has praised Kim’s leadership.
“I may be wrong, but I believe that chairman Kim has a great and beautiful vision for his country, and only the United States, with me as president, can make that vision come true,” Trump said on X/Twitter in 2019.
But Trump is no stranger to rubbing elbows with dictators. He has a long-standing friendship with Viktor Orbán, the far-right ruler of Hungary who triggered a democratic backslide in the country.
Freedom House rates Hungary as only “partly free,” noting the country’s anti-immigration and anti-LGBTQ+ policies, as well as policies “that hamper the operations of opposition groups, journalists, universities, and nongovernmental organizations.”
Trump mentioned Orbán during the same Michigan rally, celebrating praise he claimed to have received from the authoritarian leader.
“Viktor Orbán... said when asked what happened with the world it’s falling to pieces, the wars all over, he said, ‘Bring back Trump. It’ll all end.’ It all ended,” Trump said.
The Hungarian leader has similarly praised Trump, calling the former president his “good friend” earlier this year when the duo met in Washington, DC.
Trump has also repeatedly praised Russia’s Vladimir Putin – even taking his side over that of US intelligence at a press conference in Helsinki in 2018 – and Xi Jinping of China.
