Trump’s Republican opponents tear into him over Kim Jong Un comments

The mystical spell protecting Donald Trump from being criticized by his opponents in the race for the Republican nomination seems to have been broken after absurd comments congratulating North Korea’s Kim Jong Un drew the ire of his presidential adversaries. 

It didn’t take much for the former president’s opponents to finally take a hint and turn on the old coot. All Trump did was congratulate Kim Jong Un on Truth Social when one of the dictator's officials was elected to the board of the World Health Organization. 

But saying congratulations and letting the world know that the North Korean Minister of Public Health Dr. Jong Min Pak had been given an executive seat on the World Health Organization was more than enough to spur his Republican adversaries into action. 

Former Vice President Mike Pence tore into his two-time running mate on Fox News to let the country know that nobody should be thanking a man that helped Russia launch its war in Ukraine, using the conflict to hopefully garner him more conservative support. 

“No one should be praising the dictator in North Korea or praising the leader of Russia who has launched an unprovoked war of aggression in Ukraine,” Pence told Fox News while in Iowa on May 3rd according to The Hill. 

“This is a time when we ought to make it clear to the world that we stand for freedom and we stand with those who stand for freedom,” Pence added. But that was nothing when compared with what former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley said.

Haley attacked the whole election of a North Korean official to an important international body in a CNN town hall with Jake Tapper and explained to the assembled audience one should never congratulate a thug, especially a thug as terrible as Kim Jong Un. 

“I mean Kim Jong Un is a thug, and if you see what he has done to his own people in North Korea — when money went to North Korea, it didn’t go to feed their people, it went to feed their nuclear program,” Haley said according to a report from HuffPost. 

“Congratulate our friends,” the former governor added. “Don’t congratulate our enemies. It emboldens them when we do that,” she said in a pointed rebuke to Trump. However, Haley’s comments, just like Pence’s, were nothing compared to Ron DeSantis’ backhanded remarks.

Trump and DeSantis have been at loggerheads ever since the former president caught wind of the Florida Governor's ambitions for the highest office in the land and DeSantis has become the butt of nearly every Trump attack for the last several months. 

So it must have felt good when DeSantis announced that he wasn’t going to be pulling any punches against the former president while they were on the campaign trail, and the Florida Governor's promised “counterpunches” really got rolling with Kim Jong Un. 

“I was surprised to see that. I mean, one, Kim Jong-un is a murderous dictator,” the Florida Governor said during a campaign event in Iowa according to The Independent. 

DeSantis went on to called the WHO a “bankrupt organization,” and criticized its decision to empower North Korea as well as the former president's willingness to congratulate the achievement. 

“Like, Kim Jong-un is bad but joining that, we need to be getting out of that, and rejecting the WHO lockdown treaty and not congratulating about being involved in the WHO,” DeSantis said. 

Trump and Kim had a rocky start to their relationship but affection eventually grew between the two according to the former president, who said in 2018 that the pair fell in love with one another.

“I was really being tough - and so was he. And we would go back and forth,” Trump told a rally in West Virginia according to Reuters. “And then we fell in love, okay? No, really - he wrote me beautiful letters, and they’re great letters.”