Justin Sullivan/Getty Images(PYONGYANG, North Korea) — President Donald Trump’s tweeted threat last fall that North Korea would be met with “fire and fury” became the title of a new book. The book became a blockbuster. And now the man whom Trump threatened, North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un, is using Michael Wolff’s bestseller to strike back.
The latest plot twist in what has been an epic war of words between Trump and Kim Jong Un came Thursday in the pages of North Korea’s main newspaper, which cited the popularity of Wolff’s book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, as evidence of “rapidly surging anti-Trump sentiments in the international community,” according to official reports.
While Kim has been on the receiving end of Trump’s most colorful intercontinental insults, which have ranged from “Little Rocket Man” to “sick puppy,” the Islamic Republic of Iran — a “murderous regime,” according to the president — is a close second.
Apparently, they’ve been reading Wolff’s work in Tehran too.
On Wednesday, the Islamic Republic News Agency, Iran’s state media, drew on Wolff’s work to make the case that Trump is unbalanced, and that the world should resist any U.S. effort to tear up the nuclear deal.
“The promises and attempts made by the U.S. president in the first year of his presidency have been increasingly encouraging the idea that he has some sort of mental problem,” the article read. “Trump’s pledge to rip up the July 2015 Iran nuclear deal is an example.”
To the White House, books like Fire and Fury, which press secretary Sarah Sanders called trash and “full of lies,” are damaging not only to the president, but also to America’s national interests.
No wonder then that Trump called for changes to U.S. libel laws.
“If somebody says something that’s totally false and knowingly false, the person that has been abused, defamed, libeled will have meaningful recourse,” Trump said Thursday. “Our current libel laws are a sham and a disgrace, and do not represent American values or American fairness, so we’re going to take a strong look at that. We want fairness.”
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