Trump Says South Korea Tariff Deal Will Stay, Despite Lee’s Push

(Bloomberg) — President Donald Trump refused to change the terms of South Korea’s tariff agreement, despite a lobbying effort from President Lee Jae Myung during their first in-person meeting.

Trump and Lee on Monday expressed optimism for close cooperation on North Korea, collective security and shipbuilding, yet the deal setting a 15% tariff on South Korean goods will remain unchanged, according to the US president.

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“We stuck to our guns,” the president told reporters Monday after the meeting. “They’re going to make the deal that they agreed to make.”

The sit-down looked like it had the potential to be derailed earlier Monday after Trump posted on social media that political turmoil could make it impossible to deal with Seoul. Tensions were barely evident during the meeting, however, and Trump praised Lee as a “very good representative for South Korea.”

“We can do big progress with North Korea,” Trump said earlier in the Oval Office alongside Lee.

The South Korean leader launched a charm offensive on Trump, praising stock-market gains, the gold finishes he added to the Oval Office and his peacekeeping efforts, and asked him to focus on ending tensions on the Korean peninsula. Lee even suggested that Trump could construct an eponymous tower in North Korea if peace is made.

Trump said he’d like to have another meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and that the two had become “very friendly” over the course of two summits during his first term in office.

Trump also congratulated Lee on his election and said “we’re with you 100%,” despite comments earlier Monday that questioned political stability in South Korea and further exacerbated tensions with the decades-old ally.

Both leaders nodded to a burgeoning shipbuilding agreement, with Trump pledging to purchase ships from South Korea and Lee acknowledging Trump’s desire to have Korean shipbuilding in the US employing American workers. Lee’s government is expected to unveil about $150 billion in US investment plans from private companies.

US President Donald Trump, left, greets Lee Jae Myung, South Korea’s president, outside the West Wing of the White House in Washington on Monday. Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg

The exchange of pleasantries in the Oval Office nonetheless took place against the backdrop of lingering tensions over trade.

The two sides reached a last-minute trade deal at the end of July that capped tariffs on US imports from South Korea, allowing Seoul to avoid the 25% rate that Trump had threatened to impose. But Trump administration officials had since signaled dissatisfaction over the terms and have been eager to pin down South Korea on the specifics of the $350 billion it pledged to invest in the US as part of the deal.

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Monday’s meeting was also expected to touch on other thorny issues, including reaching an agreement on defense cooperation, which Seoul initially tried to make part of the tariff deal.

Trump earlier on Monday blasted South Korea for political instability on social media and elaborated on those comments during a signing of executive orders that stretched more than an hour, keeping Lee waiting past the leaders’ scheduled meeting time.

Trump mused on Truth Social that it seemed “like a Purge or Revolution” in South Korea, and later told reporters in the Oval Office that he’d heard “there were raids on churches over the last few days, very vicious raids on churches by the new government in South Korea, that they even went into our military base and got information.”

The ratcheting up of pressure on Lee followed remarks the South Korean president made before landing in Washington, warning that US officials viewed the tariff deal they struck in July as too favorable to Seoul.

“Some in Washington think the agreement benefits Korea too much, and different departments are surfacing calls to change it,” Lee told reporters aboard the presidential aircraft. “We can’t simply accept unilateral attempts to reopen what both presidents have already approved.”

Trump’s social media post highlighted a vulnerability that has haunted Lee in South Korea since he took office after a democratic election in June. His predecessor Yoon Suk Yeol’s decision to invoke martial law last December shocked the world, spooked markets and triggered the nation’s worst constitutional crisis in decades.

Yoon’s removal from office in April by a South Korean court and his party’s loss in the June election triggered crowds of his conservative supporters who waved “Stop the Steal” signs in references to Trump backers’ protests of his 2020 election loss.

The US president quizzed his counterpart at the start of their meeting about the raids, but after Lee explained that the reports were an outgrowth of the political turmoil that predated the South Korean’s young presidency, Trump said, “I am sure it’s a misunderstanding.”

It was a sign that Lee’s efforts to charm Trump, honed in weeks of preparation for the meeting, had helped keep the talks on track.

—With assistance from Paul Jackson, Meghashyam Mali and Brian Fowler.

Trump Says South Korea Tariff Deal Will Stay, Despite Lee’s Push

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