President Donald Trump is facing sharp criticism from both the left and the right after reducing U.S. military drills with South Korea while boasting about his "very good relationship" with North Korea's communist leader, Kim Jong Un. Trump said he is negotiating with Jong Un and suggested he may meet with him in 2027. But according to Daily Beast reporter Will Neal, Trump's "attempt to curry favor with Kim Jong Un received an embarrassing response from Pyongyang."

Neal noted that Jong Un's sister, Kim Yo Jong, in an official statement, "dismissed outright any talk of correspondence." Yo Jong, a senior official in North Korea's ruling party and one of her brother's closest advisers, has long served as the regime's most prominent public voice on relations with Washington.

Yo Jong said, "As for reports coming out of Washington that there has recently been communication between the leaders of North Korea and the United States, I know absolutely nothing about it. And it would probably be the only matter related to our supreme leadership's foreign policy of which I am unaware."

She added that reports of a Trump-Jong Un meeting are "not even worth commenting on" and argued that cutting U.S. military drills in South Korea does not make the exercises any less "provocative and aggressive."

"If the U.S. side calculates that it can portray the measures it has recently taken as some kind of 'goodwill gesture,'" Yo Jong said in her statement, "it will not get the response it wants."

Neal reported that the situation escalated hours later when Pyongyang launched around 10 short-range ballistic missiles into the sea, according to South Korea's military on Thursday. The launch was the latest in a long series of North Korean weapons tests conducted in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions banning its ballistic missile activity. Trump is seeking to revive talks with North Korea after meeting with Kim Jong Un three times during his first term in an effort to denuclearize the country. Those summits — in Singapore in 2018, in Hanoi in early 2019, and at the inter-Korean border that June — ended without an agreement, and North Korea has since continued testing and expanding its weapons programs.

Neal wrote that Trump's need for a diplomatic win has become more urgent as the president approaches midterm elections overshadowed by his ongoing war with Iran over its nuclear program. Trump pledged that conflict would last a "few weeks" when he launched it in February. Nearly six months later, there is still no end in sight, and the president has privately admitted he may have to drop his demands on Tehran's nuclear capabilities altogether.

Neal also said Trump's latest overtures to the Kim regime have included canceling two major annual joint military exercises with South Korea. He said on Monday that continuing the drills, which North Korea has long denounced as practice runs for an invasion, would have been "inappropriate and hostile." The decision echoes Trump's first term, when he suspended large-scale joint exercises after the 2018 Singapore summit, a step critics at the time warned would erode allied readiness. The annual maneuvers are a long-standing pillar of the U.S.-South Korea alliance, and Washington and Seoul have consistently described them as defensive in nature.

The exercises remain underway but are now set to end by Friday, six days ahead of schedule.