Trump repeats overture to Kim Jong-un, reposts drill-reduction message with tense changes

US President Donald Trump reposted a social media message — originally published nine days earlier — in which he directed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to sharply scale back joint US-South Korea military exercises, changing only the verb tenses.

Trump posted the message on Truth Social on Tuesday morning (local time), saying he had ordered Hegseth to significantly reduce the joint drills because he disapproved of them. The content was nearly identical to a post he had published on Truth Social nine days earlier, on Aug. 16.

However, some present-tense constructions in the original were changed to the past tense. For instance, the phrase "it is too late to cancel" became "it was too late to cancel."

A sentence from the earlier post — "Given that Chairman Kim Jong-un of North Korea and I have a very good relationship, I don't like the fact that the United States has long agreed to participate in joint military exercises with South Korea" — was similarly adjusted, with "I don't like" changed to "I didn't like."

The repost appears to have been deliberate, with the substance left intact and only the verb tenses adjusted.

The post highlights Trump's positive relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and frames the joint exercises as sending an inappropriate and hostile signal to Pyongyang. His statement that it was too late to cancel the drills — and that he therefore ordered a major reduction — can be read as implying he would have canceled them outright had circumstances allowed. That is a detail North Korea is likely to watch closely as the exercises proceed.

North Korea has publicly shown little interest in the reduction of the joint drills, but some analysts say Pyongyang is probing the extent of the concessions Trump may be willing to offer, using the drill reduction as a starting point.

Trump posted several other messages attacking Canada in the more than 30 minutes after publishing the tense-adjusted post Tuesday, but he did not delete the Kim-directed message. Trump has been known to correct typos in his posts after the fact and to delete them when controversy grows. Some analysts say his decision to repost the lightly revised message and leave it up signals a renewed push to resume US-North Korea dialogue and amounts to another courtship message directed at Kim.

Trump also posted on Truth Social on Tuesday photos appearing to show him with Kim at their first summit in 2018 and at the Panmunjom meeting in 2019, sending another signal of his desire to restart talks.