The art of the bluff: Trump claims Lee said, 'No thanks.' Seoul says no call.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s unconventional brand of bluffing has now put both Koreas in the spotlight.

Trump recently claimed that he communicated with both South Korean President Lee Jae Myung and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, but both governments have pushed back on his accounts.

Analysts view it as one of Trump’s familiar negotiating maneuvers playing out once again: Establish grounds for pressure with disputed conversations or inflated figures, then use them as leverage to extract concessions.

It started with a post on Truth Social on Aug. 16, in which Trump wrote that he recently asked Lee whether South Korea would be willing to participate in efforts to denuclearize Iran, only for Lee to respond, “No thanks!”

In the same post, Trump cited his “very good relationship” with Kim and said that he had instructed U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to scale back South Korea-U.S. military exercises. The remarks effectively linked what Trump saw as South Korea’s lack of contribution to the Iran war with cuts to joint military exercises, a key alliance security issue.

Trump went a step further the next day and re-enacted his alleged conversation with Lee before reporters at the White House.

“I called him, and I said, ‘Would you like to give us a little hand [with Iran]?’ and he said, ‘No thanks,’” he said.

Trump also said that he confronted Lee over South Korea’s refusal.

“We have 39,000 soldiers over there, guarding you from Kim Jong-un, your next-door neighbor, and you’re not going to help us on a very easy military operation in Iran?” Trump said.

In reality, however, the number of U.S. troops stationed in South Korea has remained at around 28,500 for the past 18 years since an agreement between the two countries’ presidents in 2008.

Trump also claimed that he had communicated with North Korea. Asked whether Kim had responded to his offer for talks, Trump said, “Yes,” and described relations between Washington and Pyongyang as “very positive.”

But Seoul and Pyongyang both say otherwise.

“As far as we know, there was no such phone call [between Lee and Trump],” a South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs official told reporters on Tuesday.

The last phone call between Lee and Trump disclosed by the Blue House took place on May 17, shortly after the U.S.-China summit.

North Korea followed with its own denial of Trump's communication with leader Kim.

Kim Yo-jong, the sister of Kim Jong-un, argued that she “knows nothing about” the reports that the North Korean and U.S. leaders had recently communicated, according to the state-run Korean Central News Agency on Wednesday.

Disputes over Trump’s accounts of conversations with foreign leaders are nothing new.

At the height of the U.S.-China tariff war in April 2025, Trump claimed that Chinese President Xi Jinping had called him and that the two countries were discussing a tariff agreement. China’s foreign ministry pushed back and said that there had been no recent phone call between the two leaders and that tariff negotiations were not underway.

The same pattern played out during the war in the Middle East.

On March 23, Trump said the United States had held productive talks with Iran. Tehran, however, said no such negotiations had taken place.

Trump again said the two countries were in the middle of negotiations on Aug. 3. Iran’s foreign ministry responded that no negotiations were underway and no talks were scheduled.

Trump’s tendency to seek out numbers and evidence that support the conclusion he wants is mentioned in a book written by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan that draws on roughly 1,000 interviews about the inner workings of Trump’s second White House.

“Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” published in June, describes what happened ahead of the announcement of reciprocal tariffs on March 26, 2025. U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick presented Trump with tariff rates for various countries based on data from the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

Trump, unhappy with the numbers, turned to Natalie Harp — a special assistant he reportedly described to people as loving him as much as his "wife and children" — and told her to search online for the "real numbers," according to the book.

Harp frantically searched for the answers on her laptop, but could not find the numbers Trump wanted that differed from those Lutnick had presented.

Swan later described the episode in an interview as an example of Harp serving as a conduit for information that confirmed what Trump already believed. Rather than drawing a conclusion from the facts, Trump appeared to be searching for facts that fit a conclusion he had already reached.

The same pattern has surfaced in Trump’s dealings with South Korea.

In March and April, as he pressed Seoul to deploy forces to the Strait of Hormuz, Trump repeatedly put the number of U.S. troops stationed in South Korea at “45,000” — well above the actual figure of around 28,500.

His reasoning effectively rested on a false premise — that the United States had far more troops defending South Korea than it actually did — and from there, he argued that Seoul owed Washington reciprocal help in the Iran war.

Diplomatic circles are now watching whether such arguments could lay the groundwork for even greater demands.

Frustration has also been mounting in the United States over what it sees as slow progress on South Korea’s pledged $350 billion investment in the country. After linking Seoul’s contribution to the Iran war with joint military exercises, concerns are emerging that Trump could put investment and tariffs on the same negotiating table and press South Korea for further concessions.

“Under Trump, we live in a strange world where enemies become negotiating partners and allies get the bill,” an unnamed diplomatic source said.

BY YOON JI-WON [[email protected]]