President Donald Trump is pictured with South Korean President Moon Jae-in. Trump was forced to abandon a planned trip to the demilitarized zone between North Korea and South Korea on Wednesday. | Andrew Harnik/AP Photo Trump forced to abandon secret trip to DMZ due to weather The White House denied plans for the visit were in the works before Trump left for Asia.

SEOUL, South Korea — The White House began plotting a secret trip to the demilitarized zone between North Korea and South Korea before President Donald Trump left Washington, throwing reporters off by saying there were no such plans in the works and keeping the visit off the official schedule.

Trump had been eager to visit the DMZ, as other presidents have, to show strength in the face of North Korea’s provocations, White House officials said, but was forced at the last minute to abandon the trip Wednesday because of inclement weather.


“This did not work out as planned,” said White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

She told reporters the president was disappointed not to make the trip, which others in his administration—including Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and, last month, Defense Secretary James Mattis—have been able to make.

“He’s actually pretty frustrated,” said Sanders. It was, she added, “something the president wanted to do.”

She said Trump was supposed to be joined by South Korean president Moon Jae-in, the first time an American and South Korean president had visited the DMZ together.

The administration has been secretly planning the excursion “for a little while,” Sanders said, even though White House aides previously said there were no plans to go. A senior official dismissed questions about whether Trump would make a DMZ stop as “a little bit of a cliché” while briefing reporters last week.

The trip to the DMZ was scheduled to occur on the one-year anniversary of Trump’s election. The president hinted on Tuesday that he had a surprise up his sleeve.

“We are going to have an exciting day tomorrow for many reasons that people will find out,” Trump said during a Tuesday event in Seoul without elaborating.

A small group of senior aides — including Tillerson, national security adviser H.R. McMaster, White House chief of staff John Kelly and senior policy adviser Stephen Miller — were slated to accompany Trump.

Trump and his team and a small group of reporters began the trek to the DMZ in a group of helicopters, but turned back about 25 minutes into the journey because of low visibility.

Sanders told reporters that the president had been within five minutes of landing when the decision was made to turn back. Moon, who was also diverted, was already waiting at another location near the DMZ when Trump turned around.

The president and his aides waited for nearly an hour to see if the weather would clear before finally deciding to scrap the trip altogether. Sanders said the decision was made in part to keep Trump on track for his speech to South Korea’s National Assembly, ahead of his departure for Beijing.

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The White House had asked journalists traveling with the president not to report on his movements until after he returned to Seoul for security reasons.

Aides took extra precautions to ensure the news of the trip didn’t leak. When briefing a small group of reporters in Seoul ahead of the trip, Sanders avoided saying the president’s destination aloud, instead holding up a piece of paper with the abbreviation “DMZ” scrawled on it.

“This is where we’re going,” she said, explaining that she was instructed to take extra security measures to keep the president’s movements under wraps.

Reporters in the travel pool received a cryptic email from the White House late Tuesday instructing them to meet early Wednesday for an unexplained stop that was not on the president’s schedule.

Sanders said Trump used the time spent waiting for the weather to turn to prepare for his speech.

After his speech to South Korean lawmakers, the president will depart for Beijing, where he’ll meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping and tour the Forbidden City.

Trump had called on China to do more to halt North Korea’s nuclear program. China has signed on to United Nations sanctions on Pyongyang, but it has cautioned against escalating the tension on the Korean Peninsula.

In speeches and tweets in the United States, Trump has threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea and pledged “fire and fury” if the country’s leader, Kim Jong Un, targeted the U.S. and other nations.

But Trump has moderated his tone since arriving in Asia over the weekend, calling for a global response to stop Pyongyang and publicly appealing to the North Korean dictator to shutter his nuclear weapons program.

