Trump warns North Korea 'won't be around much longer' if threats continue to escalate

— -- President Donald Trump continued to escalate threats to North Korea late Saturday as he responded to their foreign minister with a warning "they won't be around much longer" if the country continues provocation.

Trump took to Twitter just after 11 p.m. to respond to statements made earlier Saturday by North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho, who said bombing the U.S. mainland was "inevitable."

Ri is currently in New York at the United Nations General Assembly and spoke on Saturday in a much-anticipated rebuttal to Trump's message delivered on Tuesday in which he said the U.S. would "totally destroy" North Korea if forced to defend itself or its allies.

"Due to his lacking of basic common knowledge and proper sentiment, he tried to insult the supreme dignity of my country by referring it to as a rocket," Ri said, referring to Trump's new penchant for referring to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un as "Rocket Man." "By doing so, however, he committed an irreversible mistake of making our rockets' visit to the entire U.S. mainland inevitable all the more."

Kim and Trump have spent the better part of the last few months hurling insults back and forth at each other. Trump tweeted early Friday morning that Kim was "obviously a madman who doesn't mind starving or killing his people."

Ri referred to the president as "a mentally deranged person full of megalomania and complacency" in Saturday's address.

The war of words has continued to escalate as North Korea advances its development of a nuclear weapon. The country has fired three intercontinental ballistic missiles over Japan and into the Pacific Ocean in the past month. They also conducted a nuclear test on Sept. 3, with U.S. officials saying the country exploded a hydrogen bomb at an underground facility.