President Donald Trump touched down in Tokyo Monday, where he’ll meet the country’s new prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, before jetting off to South Korea for his high-stakes meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The two leaders are expected to get along well, as Takaichi is the protégé of the late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, a friend of Trump’s who was assassinated in 2022. Takaichi is the first woman to hold the position in Japanese history.
Japanese media said Takaichi was poised to gift Trump gold-leaf golf balls, as well as golf clubs used by Abe. ‘I look forward to meeting the new prime minister. She was a great ally and friend of Abe, who was my friend,’ Trump told reporters on board Air Force One flying Monday between Malaysia and Japan. ‘He was one of the best. I know they were very close and I think philosophically they were close, which is very good,’ the president added, as both Abe and Takaichi are politically conservative. In the same breath, Trump signaled he was still angry over a Canadian ad campaign critical of his tariff policy, suggesting he would snub Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney at the APEC summit when he arrives in South Korea, his next stop.
He also kept the door open for another face-to-face meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un , a relationship that has soured since the first Trump administration. ‘I haven’t mentioned it, I haven’t said anything, but I’d love to meet with him if he’d like to meet,’ Trump said. ‘If he wants to meet, I’ll be in South Korea.’ The president even said he’d extend his trip to Asia, which is supposed to conclude Thursday, if Kim agreed to a gathering. ‘Well, I haven’t thought of it … I think the answer would be yeah,’ Trump answered. ‘It is our last stop, so it’s pretty easy to do. I would meet with him.’
Trump famously stepped into North Korea when he met Kim in the DMZ in June 2019. ‘If he’d like to meet, I’m around. I’ll be in South Korea, so I can be right over there,’ Trump said. As of now, though, Trump’s most important meeting during his Asia trip will be with Xi. Officials from the U.S. and China signaled over the weekend that a possible end to the trade war was in sight, with a potential deal that would keep the dangerous fentanyl supply from coming into the U.S. Beijing would also buy a ‘substantial’ amount of U.S. soybeans and other agricultural products while lowering barriers for the U.S. to access rare earth minerals. On board Air Force One, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said ‘we had a very good meeting.’ ‘But nothing has been agreed to yet,’ Trump cautioned. ‘But we feel good.’
The meeting with Xi is expected to take place on Thursday, directly before the president returns to the United States. The president also teased that they ‘might’ finalize the TikTok deal during his meeting with the Chinese leader. ‘I mean, we got an original approval from President Xi. I expect we have an approval, but I’d rather wait a couple of days to let you know,’ he said. The president kicked off his three-country tour of Asia Sunday morning with Trumpian flair, doing his trademark fist-pump dance alongside native dancers as he arrived in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur. He traditionally does those moves to the song YMCA by the Village People. Trump allies applauded that video of the president dancing, shot by his longtime aide Margo Martin, had gone viral.
At the ASEAN summit, Trump announced the finalization of trade deals with Malaysia and Cambodia and said progress was made in completing two more, with Vietnam and Thailand. Trump also put on his peacemaker hat, attending a signing ceremony for an enhanced ceasefire agreement between Thailand and Cambodia, after the countries engaged in a brief border conflict in July. On the sidelines of the summit, Trump also met with Brazil’s leader, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said the talks had gone well and expressed confidence that the U.S. and Brazil could also ink a trade deal. The president had threatened to hike tariffs on Brazil over the country’s prosecution of a Trump political ally, former President Jair Bolsonaro, who was sentenced to prison for plotting a coup.
On board Air Force One en route to Tokyo, Trump said his meeting with Lula was ‘very good’ but added ‘I don’t know if anything’s gonna happen, but we’ll see.’ He also wished the Brazilian leader a happy birthday. ‘I want to wish the president happy birthday, OK? It’s his birthday today. He’s a very vigorous guy, actually, and it was very impressive, but today’s his birthday, so happy birthday,’ Trump said. Trump had harsher words for Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who will also be traveling to South Korea for the APEC conference. ‘I don’t want to meet with him, no. I’m not going to be meeting with him for a while,’ Trump told reporters en route to Tokyo.
The president was enraged over an ad campaign spearheaded by Ontario Premier Doug Ford, which quoted the late Republican Ronald Reagan’s warning about tariffs. ‘Ronald Reagan loved tariffs. He used them sparingly, which he probably made a mistake in that, and again, I was the biggest fan of Ronald Reagan, but on finance, on trade, it wasn’t his strong suit,’ Trump said. ‘But he liked tariffs and they totally changed that to say that he didn’t.’ The president also claimed that ‘Canada has been ripping us off for a long time.’ Trump’s trip to Asia marks his sixth trip abroad since he returned to the White House.
He traveled to Rome with First Lady Melania Trump in April for the funeral of Pope Francis and hit up three countries in the Middle East – Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates several weeks later. Trump traveled to Canada for the G7 in June – cutting that trip short to deal with the brief war between Israel and Iran. He and the first lady then took part in a historic second royal state visit to the United Kingdom in September, being feted by King Charles in the historic Windsor Castle. Earlier this month, he flew to Israel and Egypt to ink a peace deal to try and bring an end to the war in Gaza.
