WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump said he believes he has developed a positive relationship with North Korea’s leader despite their mutual public insults, suggesting he is open to diplomacy after months of escalating tensions over Pyongyang’s nuclear-weapons program.

“I probably have a very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, ” Mr. Trump said in an interview Thursday with The Wall Street Journal. “I have relationships with people. I think you people are surprised.”

Asked if he has spoken with Mr. Kim, Mr. Trump said: “I don’t want to comment on it. I’m not saying I have or haven’t. I just don’t want to comment.”

Mr. Trump’s remarks on North Korea, with which the U.S. has no formal diplomatic relations, came in a wide-ranging, 45-minute interview in the Oval Office about the first year of his presidency.

As with North Korea, Mr. Trump offered some optimistic words about his efforts to remake the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada.

“We’ve made a lot of headway. We’re moving along nicely,” Mr. Trump said of the Nafta negotiations. That was a more positive portrayal than has previously been offered by his chief trade negotiator, who has regularly criticized the other countries for responding to U.S. demands with what he considers intransigence.


While negotiators have officially set a March deadline to rewrite the continental pact, Mr. Trump said he didn’t have any timetable and was “a little flexible,” taking into account Mexico’s July 1 presidential and legislative elections.

Mr. Trump did repeat, in the interview, his longstanding threat to pull out of the pact if he wasn’t happy with the results of the talks, saying: “If we don’t make the right deal, I will terminate Nafta, OK.”

And after repeatedly calling for Mexico to pay for a border wall, Mr. Trump said for the first time that the Nafta talks might yield, in effect, the funding for construction of the wall.

“They can pay for it indirectly through Nafta,” he said. “We make a good deal on Nafta, and, say, I’m going to take a small percentage of that money and it’s going toward the wall. Guess what? Mexico’s paying.”


Mr. Trump also accused former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon of betrayal after Mr. Bannon’s extensive contributions to “Fire and Fury,” Michael Wolff’s new book that paints an unflattering picture of Mr. Trump. He declined to say whether his relationship with Mr. Bannon is broken beyond repair, however: “I don’t know what the word permanent means,” he said.

Mr. Wolff’s book, which focuses on the early months of the Trump administration, offers a harsh view of Mr. Trump’s family and of a White House riven with infighting. Mr. Bannon saw his relationship with Mr. Trump, as well as billionaire benefactors Robert Mercer and Rebekah Mercer, unravel last week because of his quotes in the book, including questioning daughter Ivanka Trump’s intelligence and calling a 2016 meeting held by son Donald Trump Jr. with Russian officials “treasonous.”

On legislative priorities following last month’s passage of the Republican tax overhaul, Mr. Trump identified plans for new infrastructure spending as the top item on the White House’s legislative to-do list. He said finding a federal government investment of $200 billion to jump-start spending on new roads and bridges should be easy, but declined to elaborate on specific sources.

Mr. Trump claimed that his firing last year of then-Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey should have elicited grateful applause from across Washington. His dismissal of Mr. Comey prompted the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller, who has been investigating alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and any collusion by the Trump team with Russia. Mr. Trump denies any collusion and Russia has denied meddling.


Mr. Trump also said that messages traded between a pair of FBI employees who had been involved in the Mueller investigation amounted to treason. Agent Peter Strzok was removed from his post by Mr. Mueller last year after the disclosure that Mr. Strzok had sent text messages in the summer of 2016 critical of Mr. Trump to FBI lawyer Lisa Page, who also worked temporarily for the special counsel. The texts surfaced as part of an internal Justice Department investigation. The department didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Trump offered an unsolicited rebuttal to “Fire and Fury,” saying it showed the need for new libel laws. But he acknowledged that was unlikely to happen, saying the Republican-controlled Congress doesn’t have the “guts” for that debate.

Libel claims are a matter of state rather than federal law, buttressed by constitutional protections.

President Trump and his onetime chief strategist Steve Bannon are feuding over revelations from a new book in which Mr. Bannon is quoted as saying that a 2016 meeting in Trump Tower between Donald Trump Jr. and some Russian representatives was "treasonous." WSJ's Gerald F. Seib explains the implications of the rift. Photo: Getty

On North Korea, Mr. Trump has called the nation’s leader a “maniac,” a “bad dude,” mocked him as “short and fat,” and referred to him repeatedly as “rocket man.” For his part, Mr. Kim has warned that he would “tame the mentally deranged U.S. dotard with fire,” referring to Mr. Trump.


Mr. Trump framed his own comments as part of a broader strategy.

“You’ll see that a lot with me,” he said about his combative tweets, “and then all of the sudden somebody’s my best friend. I could give you 20 examples. You could give me 30. I’m a very flexible person.”

It has been a decade since the U.S. engaged in formal talks with North Koreas. Those “six-party talks” over Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions, which included South Korea, Japan, China and Russia, stalled in 2009 over disputes about North Korea’s nuclear and missile activities.

Since then, diplomats say, there have been messages transmitted back and forth through unofficial channels, including “Track 2” talks in which former U.S. officials and Korea experts have met informally with North Korean officials. But those talks don’t amount to official diplomatic communications. In October, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said, without elaborating, that “we have lines of communication to Pyongyang—we’re not in a dark situation, a blackout.”

Mr. Trump has vacillated between seeming open to—and even eager for—diplomacy with North Korea, and dismissing the need or value for it. Soon after taking office, he said in a Bloomberg News interview last May that he would be “honored” to meet with Mr. Kim. One top former U.S. official said afterward that Mr. Trump’s statement came in response to pleas from China that he open the door to diplomacy with the young North Korean leader.

But since then, Mr. Trump has also seemed to dismiss the value of direct talks with North Korea and its leader. In October, he appeared to undercut Mr. Tillerson when the secretary referred to lines of communication to North Korea and said the administration was “probing” for diplomatic openings. In response, Mr. Trump said on Twitter that Mr. Tillerson is “wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man.”

In the interview, Mr. Trump praised China for its help in trying to pressure North Korea to end its nuclear program, while adding “they can do much more.” Some U.S. and allied officials have feared that the recent North Korean opening to talks with South Korea, and the resulting talks that began this week, were designed to drive a wedge between the U.S. and South Korea by opening a diplomatic channel that precluded Washington.

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That step, some thought, might have been designed to lower tensions with South Korea in hopes the government in Seoul would, in turn, close the door to any potential military moves against its nuclear and missile facilities by the U.S.

South Korea and the U.S. recently agreed to postpone additional military exercises until after the Olympics next month in Seoul, a move that Mr. Trump said “sends a good message to North Korea.”

Mr. Trump encouraged North Korea’s participation in those games, and acknowledged that Pyongyang might be trying to separate Washington and Seoul. “If I were them, I would try,” he said. “The difference is I’m president, other people aren’t,” Mr. Trump said. “And I know more about wedges than any human being that’s lived.”

Write to Michael C. Bender at Mike.Bender@wsj.com, Louise Radnofsky at louise.radnofsky@wsj.com, Peter Nicholas at peter.nicholas@wsj.com and Rebecca Ballhaus at Rebecca.Ballhaus@wsj.com