AUGUSTA, Ga. — “Fire and fury”? Eugene Yu could not have said it better himself.

Mr. Yu, 62, who emigrated here from South Korea, is an American citizen, a United States Army veteran and a staunch supporter of President Trump. Like many conservatives in and around this midsize Southern city – home to the Masters golf tournament and an important National Security Agency cryptology center — he was not scared, but rather thrilled this week when President Trump used those exact words to threaten the North Korean government.

That, Mr. Yu said, is the only kind of language a dictatorship understands.

“All of these North Korean experts in Washington — if they are so expert on the North Korean issue, we would have never been dealing with this today,” Mr. Yu said Thursday from his table at a busy Golden Corral cafeteria. “We should have been dealing with this 10 years ago. They’re still saying, ‘We’ve got to have six-party talks, we’ve got to give this, we’ve got to have that.’ We’ve had enough.”

Criticism of Mr. Trump’s emphatic rhetoric came this week from foreign leaders, policy experts, some Washington Republicans, including Senator John McCain of Arizona, and others, who called it a break with decades of carefully measured American diplomatic language in dealing with the volatile situation on the Korean Peninsula. However, what many grass-roots American conservatives heard was not a brash provocation, but a brave and unequivocal calling out of a bully.

That feeling was widespread among dozens of Republicans encountered this week. Many said they were pleased that Mr. Trump was sticking to the kind of blunt, bracing talk that they heard on the campaign trail.