Tens of thousands of North Koreans gathered at Kim Il-Sung Square in Pyongyang to denounce US President Donald Trump, whom leader Kim Jong-un has branded a “dotard” in an escalating standoff between the two countries.

Students marched in white shirts and red ties, chanting slogans and holding up banners, one of which read, "Let us safeguard with our lives the central committee of the party headed by the great comrade Kim Jong-un."

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"I would like to put down my pen and take up arms again to perform my duty to defend the fatherland," Pyongyang Mechanical University student Ri Il Ung told AFP. "Trump is a warmonger and a backstreet gangster."

"It's quite ridiculous that such a person could become a politician."

Meanwhile, immense crowds of workers and other local residents listened and clapped as speakers echoed Kim Jong-un’s scathing rebuke of President Trump as a “mentally deranged dotard” earlier in the week.

"We fear nothing, we are not afraid because we have the greatest ever general, the respected Supreme Leader Comrade Kim Jong-un,” environmental protection ministry official Han Kwang Nam told AFP. "We will surely gain victory."

The tense standoff on the Korean Peninsula, with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) on one side, and the United States and its allies on the other, has been driven by bellicose rhetoric and provocative military actions by both parties. In his most recent remarks, President Trump tweeted on Friday that Kim Jong-un is a “madman who doesn't mind starving or killing his people” and “will be tested like never before.”