North Korea likens Trump to Hitler

SEOUL, South Korea: North Korea compared US President Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler on Tuesday in its latest diatribe, amid high tensions over Pyongyang’s military ambitions and ahead of a visit to Washington by South Korea’s new leader.

The latest attack came a week after nuclear-armed Pyongyang called Trump a “lunatic” as tensions rose following the death of US student Otto Warmbier, who was detained for 18 months in the North and then sent home in a coma.

An editorial on the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) dialed the hostile rhetoric up higher, slamming Trump’s key policies as being akin to “Nazism in the 21st century.”

Trump declared at his inauguration in January that, “From this moment on, it’s going to be America first.”

KCNA said: “The ‘AmericanFirst principle’... advocates the world domination by recourse to military means just as was the case with Hitler’s concept of world occupation.”

Trump was “following Hitler’s dictatorial politics” to divide others into two categories, “friends and foes” to justify “suppression,” it added.

The North habitually denounces its enemies in colorful terms in its propaganda, but comparisons to the instigator of World War II and architect of the Holocaust are unusual even by its own standards.

A notable exception was the hawkish former president George W. Bush, who included the North in his “axis of evil” along with Iran and Iraq and called then-leader Kim Jong-Il a “tyrant.”

Pyongyang responded by calling Bush a “tyrant that puts Hitler in the shade” and a “political imbecile bereft of even elementary morality.”