WASHINGTON (AFP) — United States President Donald Trump said Monday he hoped to meet again with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, possibly this year, as he held White House talks with South Korea’s dovish new leader that got off awkwardly.

Hours before President Lee Jae Myung arrived for his long-planned first visit to the White House, Trump took to social media to denounce what he said was a “Purge or Revolution” in South Korea, apparently over raids that involved churches.

Forty minutes into an Oval Office meeting in which Lee profusely praised Trump, the US leader dismissed his own sharply worded rebuke, saying, “I’m sure it’s a misunderstanding” as “there is a rumor going around.”

Trump said he believed he was on the same page on North Korea as Lee, a progressive who supports diplomacy over confrontation.

Trump, who met Kim Jong Un three times in his first term, hailed his relationship with the young totalitarian and said he knew him “better than anybody, almost, other than his sister.”

“Someday I’ll see him. I look forward to seeing him. He was very good with me,” Trump told reporters, saying he hoped the talks would take place this year.

Trump once said that he and Kim “fell in love” during their meetings, which reduced tensions but failed to produce a lasting agreement.

But Kim has since been emboldened by the war in Ukraine, securing critical support from Russia after sending thousands of North Korean troops to fight.

North Korea has dug in and refused any talk of ending its nuclear weapons program.

Lee, a former labor rights lawyer who has criticized the US military in the past, immediately flattered his host and said Trump has made the United States “not a keeper of peace, but a maker of peace.”

“I look forward to your meeting with Chairman Kim Jong Un and construction of Trump Tower in North Korea and playing golf” there, Lee told him.

He even cited propaganda from North Korea that denounced South Korea by noting that Pyongyang said the relationship with Trump was better.

Kim will be waiting for you,” Lee told him.

In a speech after his meeting, Lee warned that North Korea could soon produce 10 to 20 nuclear weapons per year as well as a missile that can hit the United States — despite pressure and sanctions.