North Korea responded to President Trump’s latest “Rocket Man” jab and obliteration threats this week at the United Nations General Assembly by vowing to “surely and definitely tame the mentally deranged U.S. dotard with fire.”
The slur quickly trended on Twitter, and Merriam-Webster chimed in with a definition: dotard is a person in “a state or period of senile decay marked by decline of mental poise and alertness.”
Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency released a statement from Kim Jong-un today, two days after Trump declared that if the U.S. “is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea — Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.”
Kim said that Trump “made unprecedented rude nonsense one has never heard from any of his predecessors” and “a frightened dog barks louder.”
“The mentally deranged behavior of the U.S. president openly expressing on the UN arena the unethical will to ‘totally destroy’ a sovereign state, beyond the boundary of threats of regime change or overturn of social system, makes even those with normal thinking faculty think about discretion and composure,” he said. “His remarks remind me of such words as ‘political layman’ and ‘political heretic’ which were in vogue in reference to Trump during his presidential election campaign.”
The dictator called Trump “surely a rogue and a gangster fond of playing with fire, rather than a politician.”
“Now that Trump has denied the existence of and insulted me and my country in front of the eyes of the world and made the most ferocious declaration of a war in history that he would destroy the DPRK, we will consider with seriousness exercising of a corresponding, highest level of hard-line countermeasure in history,” the Kim statement continued. “Action is the best option in treating the dotard who, hard of hearing, is uttering only what he wants to say.”
As to what that action could be, Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho told reporters in New York, “It could be the most powerful detonation of an H-bomb in the Pacific. We have no idea about what actions could be taken as it will be ordered by leader Kim Jong-un.”
Trump has not yet tweeted a response.
UN Ambassador Nikki Haley told reporters today that the new round of sanctions against North Korea announced by Trump earlier will sting because “North Korea is already feeling it.”
“You can already hear of the lines at the gas stations that they have, and the fact that they are having a severe reduction in revenues is the sanctions are working,” she said. :What this does is take it a step further. This says: Anyone that deals with North Korea, any financial institution that deals with North Korea is going to be punished. And so I think it’s important. And it’s like Secretary Mnuchin said: If you’re going to support North Korea, then you have to be prepared to be sanctioned as well.”
Haley explained that “the goal of the sanctions was always intended to be is to cut the revenue so they could do less of their reckless behavior.”
“If they don’t have the funding for the ballistic missiles, for the nuclear production, then they can do less of it. That’s the goal of the sanctions. It doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily going to change Kim’s attitude or his belief on what he wants to do, but it will slow down the production of the nuclear process going forward,” she said. “…We don’t want war. That’s the last thing anyone wants. We don’t want loss of life. That’s the last thing anyone wants.”
“But at the same time, we’re not going to run scared. If for any reason North Korea attacks the United States or our allies, the U.S. will respond, period. That’s what’s going to happen. What you’re seeing now is we continue to go through diplomatic measures; we continue to exhaust everything we have.”
This story was updated at 10:40 p.m. EST
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