U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colorado) has drawn the ire of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un after calling the volatile leader a “whack job” in a TV interview last week.

Last week on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Gardner said “most people agree” that Kim is a “whack job.”

“This is a crazed maniac at the helm of one of the world’s nuclear regimes, trying to become a nuclear regime,” he said. “We shouldn’t be in the position of flattery.”

Days later, Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency responded, saying the Republican senator had “perpetrated wicked blasphemy” against Kim, according to a translation by UPI.

“For a psychopath like the [expletive] Gardner, to hurl evil accusations at our highest dignity, is a serious problem…That a man mixed in with human dirt like Gardner, who has lost basic judgment and body hair, could only spell misfortune for the United States.”

But Gardner responded again Monday, digging his heels in and calling Kim a “madman.”

Congress is in the midst of approving new sanctions against North Korea that target the country’s shipping industry and workforce amid heightened tensions over North Korea’s ballistic missile and nuclear programs.

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