It’s no secret that President Donald Trump dislikes North Korea’s brutal, restrictive and secretive regime, with the commander-in-chief strategically hitting back at the East Asian country in his State of the Union address last week.
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Trump called North Korea a “cruel dictatorship” that is “reckless” when it comes to its nuclear ambitions as well as the treatment of its own citizens.
“No regime has oppressed its own citizens more totally or brutally than the cruel dictatorship in North Korea,” he said. “North Korea’s reckless pursuit of nuclear missiles could very soon threaten our homeland.”
But a North Korean official hit back on Sunday, warning that Trump’s views are putting the U.S. at risk, the Daily Mail reported.
“If Trump does not get rid of his anachronistic and dogmatic way of thinking, it will only bring about the consequence of further endangering security and future of the United States,” the foreign ministry official told the Korean Central News Agency, the country’s government-run outlet.
The official went on to say that North Korea’s “nuclear force” will keep Trump at bay.
“[Our] self-reliant defense capability with the nuclear force as its backbone will, however, completely deter Trump and his lackeys from showing off on the Korean peninsula,” the individual said.
Trump continues to step up pressure on North Korea, with the president hosting a White House meeting on Friday with around a half-dozen North Korean defectors.
During the State of the Union, Trump also held little back and invited one of those defectors to publicly appear at the event. Then, he shared Ji Seong-ho’s harrowing story of struggle and survival at the hands of an ever-brutal regime.
Trump, who said that Seong-ho is a first-hand witness to North Korea’s “ominous nature,” explained that the man was a starving youth in North Korea back in 1996 when he was so desperate for food that he attempted to steal coal from a railroad car in an effort to find something that he could barter for scraps.
Exhausted and with no nourishment, Seong-ho passed out on train tracks only to wake up as a locomotive was running him over. What happened next is even more unimaginable, as Seong-ho underwent unthinkable surgeries without anything to temper the pain.