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| Trump’s deeply personal reaction to North Korean insults is a break with tradition |
In a string of tweets fired off on Sunday
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.
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”.
Whether this instinct to hit back
could help his self-described efforts toward becoming Kim’s friend in the
future — or harm them — is unclear.
The North Korean message that
aggrieved Trump was released by the country’s foreign ministry on Saturday and
described Trump’s 12-day tour of Asia as “a warmonger’s trip for confrontation
with our country, trying to remove our self-defensive nuclear deterrent”. The
statement also criticized the “reckless remarks by an old lunatic like Trump
will never scare us or stop our advance”.
The North Korean government has
insulted Trump personally numerous times. Its state-run media has run a number
of unflattering descriptions of Trump, including the memorable use of the word
“dotard” in September. It has frequently referred to Trump as “old” and accused
him of being a “war maniac” and a “lunatic”.
These insults come at a time of
heightened tension between Washington and Pyongyang. North Korea has pushed
ahead with its weapons programme over the past few months, conducting a number
of long-range missile tests, plus a nuclear bomb test, since Trump took office.
However, the insults also fit into a
long tradition of insulting American leaders. In 2014, the US government criticized
a lengthy racist screed published by North Korea’s state-run Korean Central
News Agency that had referred to President Barack Obama as a “dirty fellow”,
among other things.
In recent years, North Korea has
also insulted former secretaries of state John F Kerry (“hideous lantern jaw”)
and Hillary Clinton (both a “schoolgirl” and a “pensioner”), while the entire
administration of President George W Bush was referred to as “a bunch of tricksters
and political imbeciles”. The Americans have not responded with their own
public insults, though Bush did privately call Kim’s father, Kim Jong-il, a
“pygmy” in 2002.
Trump’s descriptions of North
Korea’s current leader have varied, and he has even been positive at times —
describing him as a “pretty smart cookie” in April. But as tensions with North
Korea have escalated, so too has the harshness of the American president’s
rhetoric, with Trump dismissively referring to Kim as “little rocket man” and
warning of “fire and fury” if North Korean threats continued — a statement
which perhaps inadvertently echoed North Korean propaganda.
Some had worried that Trump would
use similarly personal and angry language while in South Korea last week and
run the risk of inciting the North. However, though his speech to South Korea’s
National Assembly was deeply critical of North Korea, it was less bombastic and
more measured than his previous statements.
That speech was drawn up carefully
with the input of others in Trump’s administration. Trump, however, is a
famously impulsive tweeter.
Worse still, for both sides the
insults may pick on sensitive spots. Trump is the oldest first-term president
in US history and more than twice the age of the North Korean leader. Meanwhile,
Kim’s height is estimated to be five-foot-seven-inch, and he is rumored to
suffer health problems due to his weight.
