(Bloomberg) -- Donald Trump spoke admiringly of the Korean Peninsula's demilitarized zone on Saturday, making an implicit comparison with his own struggles to meet his top campaign promise and construct a wall on the U.S. southern border.
The remarks came as Trump discussed his plans to visit the DMZ on Sunday, where he hopes to briefly meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Shortly after Trump spoke, a U.S. district judge blocked Trump from reallocating about $2.5 billion in the federal budget for construction of his border wall.
“We may go to the DMZ, or the border, as they call it,” he told reporters at the Group of 20 summit in Osaka, Japan. “That, by the way -- when you talk about a wall, when you talk about a border, that's what you call a border. Nobody goes through that border. Just about nobody. That's called a real border.”
The DMZ, a strip of land about 155 miles long (250 km) and 2.5 miles wide (4 km), is one of the most heavily fortified borders in the world. It is defended around the clock by fences, minefields, sensors and thousands of soldiers on each side.
Trump promised in his campaign to build a wall the length of the U.S. border with Mexico in order to stop Latin American migrants from entering the country. But Congress has so far denied him sufficient money for the project. After the longest partial government shutdown in U.S. history earlier this year over the dispute, Trump sparked a legal fight with House Democrats by shifting billions of dollars from the Pentagon for wall construction.
To contact the reporter on this story: Margaret Talev in Osaka, Japan at mtalev@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alex Wayne at awayne3@bloomberg.net, Daniel Ten Kate, John Harney
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