Conservatives back tough talk toward N. Korea

AUGUSTA, GA. — “Fire and fury”? Eugene Yu could not have said it better himself.

Yu, 62, who emigrated here from South Korea, is a U.S. citizen, a U.S. Army veteran and a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump. Like many conservatives in and around this midsize Southern city — home to the Masters golf tournament and an important National Security Agency cryptology center — he was not scared, but rather thrilled this week when Trump used those words to threaten the North Korean government.

That, Yu said, is the only kind of language a dictatorship understands.

“All of these North Korean experts in Washington — if they are so expert on the North Korean issue, we would have never been dealing with this today,” Yu said Thursday fromhis table at a busy Golden Corral cafeteria. “We should have been dealing with this 10 years ago. They’re still saying, ‘We’ve got to have six-party talks, we’ve got to give this, we’ve got to have that.’ We’ve had enough.”

Criticism of Trump’s emphatic rhetoric came this week from foreign leaders, policy experts, some Washington Republicans, including Sen. John McCain of Arizona, andothers, who called it a break with decades of carefully measured U.S. diplomatic language in dealing with the volatile situation on the Korean Peninsula. However, what many grass-roots U.S. conservatives heard was not a brash provocation, but abrave and unequivocal calling out of a bully.

That feeling was widespread among dozens of Republicans encountered this week. Many said they were pleased that Trump was sticking to the kind of blunt, bracing talk that they had heard on the campaign trail.

Most of them said they did not relish the idea of armed confrontation with North Korea, although a few said they felt protected by the vastness of the United States.

“It doesn’t concern me,” said Zach Lozier, who was tucking into a barbecue dinner with his family Thursday at the Morgan County Fair in Brush, Colo. “We live in the safest part of the whole country.”

But for many, the fact that North Korea has developed a missile that might be able to hit the mainland United States only underscored their contention that Trump was right in confronting the Asian nation with tough talk now. And many said they did not think Trump’s language was necessarily moving the United States any closer to a nuclear confrontation in Asia: The North Korean president, Kim Jong Un, they said, seemed to be doing a fine job of that on his own.

“I believe that this idiot over there is trying tomake a name for himself,” said Yu’s friend Ralph Bar bee, Jr .,76, a Vietnam veteran and former host of a local fishing show who arrived at the Golden Corral in an SUV adorned with stars, stripes and a massive photo of Trump on the hood. “I believe if he fifires one more missile, that’s the end for them.”

Some Republicans did express fear over any escalation of threats. At a home-design store in Burlington, Wis., theowner, Mark Starzyk, 71, had been reading the headlines of his local paper, the Kenosha News, with alarm, torn between cheering Trump’s rhetoric — “Sometimes you’ve got to talk tough,” he said — and wondering where this is all going.

“I’ m non confrontation al ,” Starzyk said. “I hope this ends in a peaceful resolution. There are no winners in a nuclear war. There’s so much collateral damage, no matter what, and the North Koreans have enough conventional weapons to light up Seoul.”

North Korea was also on the minds of people in Martinez, Ga., an Augusta suburb, where the Columbia County Republican Women were holding a meeting in the back of a Chinese restaurant on Thursday night. In an opening prayer, a woman asked God to help make America great again. Attendees were encouraged to take one of the postcards pre-addressed to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and write encouraging notes to the president.