President Trump says he will make a “major” announcement on North Korea and the outcome of his week-long trade negotiations across East Asia when he returns to Washington later this week.
“It will be a very complete statement as to trade, as to North Korea as to a lot of other things,” Trump said at a meeting with Australian Prime Minister Malcom Turnbull and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
The president said he would make the statement from the White House on Wednesday.
“We’ve made some very big steps with respect to trade, far bigger than anything you know, in addition to about $300 billion in sales to various companies, including China,” he said. “We have deficits with almost everybody. Those deficits are going to be cut very quickly and very substantially.”
Earlier in the week, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Trump would announce at the “end of the trip” his decision on whether or not to officially re-list North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism.
An administration official said Monday that a recommendation had been formally presented to the president and he was considering it.
“This has been a very fruitful trip for us, and also in all fairness, for a lot of other nations,” Trump said. “The way they’re treated us — the respect that Japan and China and South Korea, in particular, because we went there, treated us — has been really a great respect to our country, to the people of the United States.”
Trump spoke on the margins of the ASEAN summit, the final stop of his marathon 13-day trip to Asia that has been the longest regional tour by an American president in more than two decades.
With stops in five countries, the president was feted with three official state visits and attended two major economic summits.
“Red carpet like I think probably nobody has ever received,” Trump said of how he was welcomed. “That really is a sense of respect, perhaps for me a little bit, but really for our country, and I’m very proud of that.”
