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Trump Participates in a Bilateral Meeting with the President of the Republic of Korea, Aug. 25, 2025

August 25, 2025 · The White House · 0:53:38

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

President Donald Trump held a bilateral meeting with President Lee Jae Myung of the Republic of Korea in the Oval Office on August 25, 2025, carried in full on the White House channel. “It’s an honor to be with President Lee of South Korea. We’ve known each other and gotten along very well,” the President opened. “We have some additional trade because I hear they want to renegotiate the deal, but that’s okay. I don’t mind that. That doesn’t mean they’re going to get anything, but I don’t mind. But we’re going to have some very serious discussions about different things, including trade, where we do a lot of trade with South Korea.”

Shipbuilding led the agenda as the President presented it: South Korea builds ships “very well,” Korean firms are “thinking about coming to our country with some shipyards to start us on the process of building ships again,” and the United States will both buy Korean-built ships and have ships made in America with American workers. “At World War II, we’d build a ship a day, and today we don’t build ships anymore, which is ridiculous. We’re going to start that again.” He also cited South Korea as “a big purchaser of our military equipment,” praising the B-2 bomber’s performance in the recent operation he described — 36 hours, every bomb on target, 52 tankers in support — and congratulated President Lee on his election.

Why it matters

The Lee meeting pairs the Korea trade renegotiation with the administration’s shipbuilding revival — Korean yard investment in the United States as the near-term path back into an industry the President says America abandoned. The commitments described here, on shipyards and equipment purchases, are the checkable core of the visit.

Scoreboard watch

This meeting is a scoreboard reference point: the shipbuilding cooperation described by the President — Korean shipyard investment in the United States and U.S. purchases of Korean-built ships — and the trade discussions with South Korea, as stated by the President, to be checked against the agreements as they are published.

Sources: The White House, “President Trump Participates in a Bilateral Meeting with the President of the Republic of Korea” (official upload, embedded above). All characterizations as stated by the President at the meeting. Alternate IDs recorded: u7-ikaAWp2k and wzZ3nOHhDVQ (White House greeting/welcome clips of the same visit).