Donald Trump Sparks Mockery After North Korea Gaffe

Donald Trump is being ridiculed online due to his remarks about North Korea in which he got the country's population size wrong, by some margin.

During a campaign stop in Hialeah, Florida, on November 8, the former president—who is running for the 2024 Republican nomination—praised North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

"The press hates it when I say they're (Vladimir Putin and Kim) smart," the 77-year-old said. "Well what am I supposed to say? They're stupid people?"

"Kim Jong Un leads 1.4 billion people and there's no doubt about who the boss is, and they want me to say, 'He's not an intelligent man.'

"They get very personal when I say that, because they're fake news, that's why."

Newsweek has reached out to Trump for comment via email.

After footage of Trump's comments was shared to X—the social network formerly known as Twitter—users noticed the flaw in the figures.

"The population of North Korea is 25 million," commented Ron Shillman.

"Let's set aside the ongoing valorization of a maniacal homicidal totalitarian dictator by Trump; there is also the demographic inaccuracy," said @HawaiiDeliah. "Either he's lying or a dolt."

"What is he talking about? There are more people in Texas than in North Korea," said @liberalgenxvet.

TSP suggested that Trump was getting North Korea confused with China, with the latter having a population of 1.4 billion.

"Scary to think that, three years ago, he was the Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful nuclear arsenal in the world... that he's running for it again... and that he just mixed up China and North Korea," said Scott Seymour.

"Apparently real estate isn't the only thing he overvalues by ridiculous amounts," wrote Marmel, referencing Trump's ongoing civil fraud trial in New York, where the real estate mogul is facing allegations of overvaluing business assets to secure loans and insurance deals. Trump has denied all charges.

LauraWalkerKC also referenced the case, writing: "Trump inflating North Korea like he's trying to get a loan from Deutsche Bank."

"The real problem here isn't the mental slip on the countries it's his unabashed admiration of an authoritative style of government," said @ordinary_guy, while Tony joked: "Make Arithmetic Great Again."

Despite the rocky relationship between North Korea and the U.S., Trump and Kim struck up a friendship during his presidency.

According to journalist Maggie Haberman—author of Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America—the former president and Kim are still in touch, with representatives from the National Archives and Records Administration reportedly retrieving letters between the pair from Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate, along with other classified documents taken in an FBI raid in 2022.

"I think it's not necessarily unusual for a former president to maintain some kind of contact with other foreign leaders, former foreign leaders," she told CNN in 2021.

"This would obviously be unusual because this is the only one, to my knowledge, that he is saying he is still in touch with. As we know, he had a fixation on this relationship."