President Donald Trump said Tuesday he believes North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will move immediately on steps toward denuclearization and that the process is moving rapidly, according to an interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity.
"I just think that we are now going to start the process of denuclearization of North Korea. I believe that he's going back and will start it virtually immediately," Trump said in excerpts of the interview broadcast on Fox after the U.S.-North Korea summit in Singapore. "And he's already indicated that."
"It's a process and it's really moving rapidly," he added.
Trump sounded optimistic, telling Hannity that he and Kim "got along from the beginning" and that Kim understood the need to dismantle his nuclear program.
"His country has to be de-nuked and he understood that, he fully understood that, he didn't fight it," Trump said.
The summit outcome stands in contrast to the war of words between the two men in the past, which included tough rhetoric from Trump warning the North Korean leader he would face "fire and fury."
Trump told Fox News that "without the rhetoric we wouldn't have been here. So I think the rhetoric, I hated to do it, sometimes I felt foolish doing it, but we had no choice."
© 2025 Thomson/Reuters. All rights reserved.