‘Old’ Trump tweets back to ‘short and fat’ Kim
In a string of tweets fired off yesterday morning from Hanoi, Vietnam, President Donald Trump responded with sarcastic insults to a recent message from the North Korean government that had referred to him as “old.”
“Why would Kim Jong-un insult me by calling me ‘old,’ when I would NEVER call him ‘short and fat?’” Trump wrote in his tweet, referring to the leader of North Korea’s ruling dynasty. “Oh well, I try so hard to be his friend — and maybe someday that will happen!”
The message marks an unusually personal escalation of the tensions between the United States and North Korea over Pyongyang’s weapons programme. It is also another sign of the change in rhetoric used to address North Korea since Trump took office: Though North Korea has long been known for hurling bellicose insults at world leaders, rarely have those world leaders responded in kind.
Aggrieved
Of course, Trump is a not your average world leader. The current president is a pugnacious social media user often willing to respond with his own harsh words when he feels wronged. As a spokeswoman for his wife, Melania Trump, put it earlier this year, when Trump is attacked “he will punch back 10 times harder.”
The North Korean message that aggrieved Trump was released by the country’s foreign ministry on Saturday and described Trump’s 12day tour of Asia as “a warmonger’s trip for confrontation with our country, trying to remove our self-defensive nuclear deterrent.” It also criticised the “reckless remarks by an old lunatic like Trump will never scare us or stop our advance.”