North Korea Hates Trump But Loves to Insult Him
Say what you will about North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, but the man has a great vocabulary.
Kim fired back at U.S. President Donald Trump in a strongly worded, first-person statement on Thursday after Trump gave a United Nations speech vowing to destroy Pyongyang. In his remarks, Kim called Trump a "mentally deranged dotard," using a term for a person in "a state or period of senile decay marked by decline of mental poise and alertness."
Merriam-Webster lookups for "dotard" skyrocketed immediately after Kim's statement, and the hashtag #DotardTrump was still trending on Twitter Friday morning. Ouch.
Related: What Is A Dotard? Kim Jong-Un's Latest Trump Burn Explained
It's not the first time North Korea has come up with a nasty insult for a world leader. In 2014, in the middle of a disagreement over the James Franco/Seth Rogen movie The Interview, an official in Pyongyang railed against Barack Obama for being "reckless in words and deeds like a monkey in a tropical forest." Earlier this month, a North Korean statement said UN Ambassador Nikki Haley was a "political prostitute."
Kim's favorite target in recent months, however, has been Trump. Here's a quick rundown of some of North Korea's greatest attacks on the U.S. president:
• In Thursday's statement, Kim said Trump is "surely a rogue and a gangster fond of playing with fire, rather than a politician."
• He also said "a frightened dog barks louder" than Trump spoke in his UN speech.
• After Trump began calling Kim "Rocket Man," Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho told reporters that he felt sorry for the president's aides.
• In August, after the tycoon threatened North Korea with "fire, fury and frankly power the likes of which the world has never seen before," General Kim Rak Gyom made fun of Trump's frequent golf trips and intelligence. The general said the president, "on the golf links," was "failing to grasp the ongoing grave situation."
• In the same statement, the general also said Trump was "a guy bereft of reason."
• The state-run Korean Central News Agency, or KCNA, wrote last month that Trump shares "weird articles of his ego-driven thoughts in his Twitter" and "spouts rubbish to make his assistants have a hard time."
• The ruling party's newspaper, the Rodong Sinmun, condemned "that mad guy Trump’s unrestrained war-inciting tongue-lashing."
• In June, after American hostage Otto Warmbier died after being released from North Korea, the same outlet warned that "following psychopath Trump ... will only lead to disaster."
• In May, after Trump said he would consider meeting with Kim, government mouthpiece the Minju Choson said the Trump administration's knowledge about North Korea "is only at the elementary student level."
Don't feel too bad for Trump—the mocking isn't one-sided. In addition to his new "Rocket Man" nickname for Kim, the president once described the dictator as "a total nutjob."
Sticks and stones, guys, sticks and stones.
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