Donald Trump shrugs off killings by Kim Jong Un's brutal North Korean regime as 'tough'

Donald Trump shrugs off killings by Kim Jong Un's brutal North Korean regime as 'tough'

 By Okorie Chioma -June 14 208

Donald Trump has shrugged off the human rights record of Kim Jong Un’s brutal North Korean regime as “tough”.

Reminded by Fox News reporter Bret Baier that the North Korean dictator is a “killer. He’s executing people” during an interview on Air Force One, the President of the United states praised Kim as a “tough guy.”

He added: “Hey, when you take over a country, tough country, with tough people, and you take it over from your father, I don’t care who you are, what you are, how much of an advantage you have – if you can do that at 27 years old, that’s one in 10,000 could do that.”

When Baier pressed him on the “really bad things” Kim and his regime had done, Trump replied: “Yeah, but so have a lot of other people done some really bad things. I could go through a lot of nations where a lot of bad things were done.”

The President showered the despot with praise, using similar language to the words he used to describe Russian leader Vladimir Putin .

Defending Putin in an interview with then-Fox News host Bill O’Reilly last February, Trump said: “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?”

In the interview, broadcast last night, Trump went on to make an unlikely claim about parents of Korean War dead asking him to bring their bodies back to the US.

He claimed "so many" parents had approached him during the 2016 campaign, and asked him: “When you can, we'd love our son to be brought back home -- you know, the remains.”

He went on to claim he had raised the issue during his meeting with Kim, asking the despot to “do me a favour.”

Mr Trump’s claim is mathematically implausible.

The Korean War ended 63 years before the 2016 campaign, in 1953.

Even if an 18 year old serviceman had died at the end of the war, and his parents had been 18 years old when he was born, those parents would have been 98 or 99 years old during the 2016 campaign.

Among the brutal killings ordered by Kim Jong Un was the 2015 execution using anti-aircraft guns of a military chief for showing “disrespect.”

He ordered the death by machine gun firing squad of his former political mentor - and his aunt’s husband - Jang Song Thaek in 2013 for treason, corruption and “living a decadent lifestyle.”

Jang was later digitally removed from images of other Korean leaders.

Jang’s wife - Kim’s aunt - was allegedly poisoned after complaining about his execution. Kim also reportedly ordered around seven members of her family to be put to death.

The architects and engineers of a building that collapsed in Pyongyang, killing 500 people, were rounded up and shot.

Deputy Public Security minister O Sang-hon, another student of Jang, was burned to death by flamethrower for following his mentor’s instructions and turning his government department “into a protection racket”.

And in 2015, it’s claimed around 80 people were executed by firing squad in a single month, many of them for watching smuggled South Korean TV programmes.