How Lee avoided Oval Office ambush

The summit opened under unexpected strain after US President Donald Trump criticized South Korea for raids on churches and American military bases, saying on social media it “Seems like a Purge or Revolution.”

South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, however, sidestepped confrontation by praising Trump’s past diplomacy with North Korea and commending the Oval Office’s “bright and beautiful” new design. Lee described Trump as a “peacemaker” who forged an unusual rapport with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, a remark that softened the atmosphere.

Unlike the tense encounters Trump has had with leaders such as Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy and South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa, the exchange ended without escalation. Lee’s calm explanation of recent events in South Korea prompted Trump to suggest the episode may have been a “misunderstanding.”

Lee told Trump that the ongoing searches by investigators in South Korea were part of fact-finding related to former President Yoon Suk Yeol’s declaration of martial law and that they did not directly target American forces. Instead, he said, the searches focused on how South Korean military control systems functioned inside the bases. Yoon was ousted by the Constitutional Court in April for attempting a self-coup. He is currently under arrest for allegedly instigating an insurrection through the first martial law declaration in South Korea since its democratization in 1987. Yoon is also facing corruption allegations, along with his wife, Kim Keon Hee.

“The special prosecutor is conducting a fact-finding investigation,” Lee said, noting the independent counsel operates under the authority of the National Assembly, not the presidency.

Trump posted on Truth Social on Monday, saying, “WHAT IS GOING ON IN SOUTH KOREA? Seems like a Purge or Revolution. We can't have that and do business there.”

He added, “I am seeing the new President today at the White House. Thank you for your attention to this matter!!!”

During his summit with Lee at the White House, Trump said, "I heard from intel that there was a raid on churches. ... That would be too bad if that's the case."

The South Korean special counsel raided facilities and offices of the Unification Church multiple times in the past month over allegations that a church official had solicited the Yoon administration's support for a church project in Cambodia. The sect is also suspected of having interfered in the then-ruling People Power Party's leadership election.

In July, a special counsel team investigating alleged corruption involving the former first lady raided the church's main compound in Gapyeong, Gyeonggi Province.

Also in July, another special counsel team looking into Yoon's alleged insurrection raided a radar facility at Osan Air Base, reportedly to look into suspicions that the Yoon administration covertly sent drones to Pyongyang and fabricated records to conceal it. The special counsel team has claimed that there was no intrusion into US facilities inside the base and that the seizure operation had been approved by the US commander.

After the summit with Trump, Lee said in an address to the Washington-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies that he was confident that Trump's remarks had their purposes.

When Trump's "threatening" remarks surfaced hours before the summit, Lee recalled that some among the South Korean delegation raised concern about a potential situation "similar to the Zelenskyy-Trump meeting."

"I already knew that wouldn't happen," Lee said. "The South Korea-US alliance is so important that I was confident that nothing would seriously damage it."

Sharing with the audience that Lee had read Trump's book, "Trump: The Art of the Deal," Lee said he knew that Trump would "come up with conditions that are difficult for the negotiation counterpart to accept, but would not ultimately lead to an unreasonable conclusion."

"He already wrote it in his book," Lee remarked.

Before the summit, Prime Minister Kim Min-seok said Monday that South Korea does not have to read too much into Trump's surprise remarks on his social media, asking for support for the South Korean delegation at a parliamentary meeting held hours before the summit between Presidents Lee and Trump.

"We are fully aware of President Trump's immensely diverse experience in negotiation and so forth. So it would be best for us to trust and support the Lee administration's negotiation team. I believe, at this point, we do not need to engage in excessive interpretation beyond that," Kim said, in response to an inquiry about Trump's remarks by Rep. Chun Ha-ram of the minor conservative Reform Party during a meeting on Monday of the National Assembly's Special Committee on Budget and Accounts.

In the same parliamentary session, Justice Minister Jung Sung-ho said, in response to Chun's question, that he "has long had the impression that Trump and officials in Washington had a very distorted view of Lee." He added that he has been working to dispel such views through various channels.