North Korean leader Kim PudgeJong-un
...the overweight, pouty-looking hereditary potentate of North Korea. Pudge appears to believe in his own divinity, but has yet to produce any loaves and fishes, so his subjects remain malnourished...
Well, on Wednesday, Trump did ‐ after a fashion.
The U.S. president directly addressed his 33-year-old nemesis in a speech to South Korea’s National Assembly. This time, Trump did not call Kim "Little Rocket Man" or use the kinds of rhetorical flourishes that play so well on Twitter.
But the words that Trump did use cut deeper, because they struck at the very heart of the Kim regime.
If there is one thing that Kim has shown he cannot tolerate, it is personal criticism.
"North Korea is not the paradise your grandfather envisioned," Trump said to Kim, who, if he was in Pyongyang, was just 120 miles away. "It is a hell that no person deserves."
Kim Il Sung, who is revered like a god in North Korean propaganda, established the country in 1948 as a "socialist paradise" of free housing, health care and education where people would want for nothing. Grandson Kim Jong-un claims his legitimacy as North Korea’s supreme leader by virtue of being a direct descendant of this quasi-deity.
Trump devoted a large part of his address to detailing the human rights
...not to be confused with
individual rights,mind you...
abuses that the Kims have committed in North Korea, filling his speech with words such as "twisted," "sinister," "tyrant," "fascism
...a political system developed in Italy symbolized by the Roman fasces-- thin reeds, each flimsy in itself but unbreakable when bound into a bundle. The word is nowadays thrown around by all sorts of people who have no idea what they're talking about...
" and "cult."
"I wanted to stand up from my seat and shout ’Yahoo!’ " said Lee Hyeon-seo, an escapee from North Korea who was sitting in the assembly hall during Trump’s address. "We just don’t hear people talking about North Korea in this way in South Korea, so I was very emotional during the speech. I was very impressed."
In front of a National Assembly ruled by a left-wing party that favors engagement with North Korea and seeks to avoid antagonizing the regime, Trump noted the slave-like conditions North Korean workers face, the malnutrition among children, the suppression of religion and the forced-labor prison camps where he said North Koreans endure "torture, starvation, rape and murder on a constant basis."