The tweet came before Donald Trump's arrival for the U.N. General Assembly
President Donald Trump is calling Kim Jong Un names -- the "Rocket Man."
The president stuck the moniker on the North Korea dictator in a Sunday morning tweet ahead of Trump's scheduled arrival here in Sunday evening for the U.N. General Assembly, the annual gathering of more than 120 world leaders.
"I spoke with President Moon of South Korea last night. Asked him how Rocket Man is doing. Long gas lines forming in North Korea. Too bad!" - Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 17, 2017
Trump, who has spent two nights at his golf resort in Bedminster, N.J., also revealed that he spoke with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who will join Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for a trilateral dinner this week in New York to collaborate on addressing North Korea's growing nuclear and ballistic missile threats. The White House said Trump and Moon discussed North Korea's continued defiance of the international community and "committed to continuing to take steps to strengthen deterrence and defense capabilities and to maximize economic and diplomatic pressure."
The president's Twitter snark came two weeks after Kim's regime undertook its biggest nuclear test to date, an explosion that analysts estimate at 250 kilotons, nearly 17 times the size of the atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima in 1945. Radar satellite images show that the test was powerful enough to sink a roughly 85-acre area on the peak of a mountain above the tunnels where the test is thought to have taken place.
Asked about the test on Thursday, Trump said he's working with China to continue to exert more pressure on Pyongyang, but he declined to elaborate.
"We are working on different things. I can't tell you, obviously, what I'm working on. But believe me, the people of this country will be very, very safe," Trump told reporters. "I think that a lot of effort is being put into this. We're looking at what's going on. As we speak, we are literally at it right now, and you will be seeing what we'll be doing."
North Korea's growing ability to potentially reach the continental United States with a ballistic missile, which could be mounted with a miniature nuclear device, has increased the urgency for the Trump administration. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, pointed to the world body's two recent votes to impose more severe economic sanctions on the North as signs that the international community is united in its condemnation.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)