North Korea has launched a visceral diatribe against US Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, calling the former vice-president a "rabid dog"- while also borrowing the terminology of Donald Trump.
Pyongyang is renowned for its vitriol, but the verbal deluge was unusually ferocious even by its own standards.
Mr Biden "had the temerity to dare slander the dignity of the supreme leadership of the DPRK", the North's official KCNA news agency said late Thursday, referring to the country by its official name.
"Rabid dogs like Biden can hurt lots of people if they are allowed to run about," it went on.
"They must be beaten to death with a stick.
"Doing so will be beneficial for the US also.”
A cake depicting US President Donald Trump and North Korea leader Kim Jong-un on display during Cake International 2019. Source: Press Association
It was not immediately , but Mr Biden's campaign released an ad this week condemning Mr Trump's foreign policy, saying that "dictators and tyrants are praised, our allies pushed aside".
The voiceover says the word "tyrants" at the exact moment a picture appears of Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un shaking hands at their Singapore summit last year.
KCNA appeared to cite one of Mr Trump's favoured insults for the candidate - "Sleepy Joe" - when it said Americans called him "Biden not awakened from a sleep".
Mr Biden had shown "a sign of the final stage of dementia", KCNA added.
North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un. Source: AAP
"It seems time has come for him to depart his life."
KCNA misspelled the candidate's name as "Baiden" throughout, seemingly reflecting the spelling used in the Korean alphabet.
It is not the first time the North has condemned Biden. In May it called him an "imbecile" and a "fool of low IQ" days after he called Mr Kim a "dictator" and "tyrant".
The rhetoric underscores its "impatience" with any criticism of Mr Kim, said Cheong Seong-Chang, a senior researcher at the private Sejong Institute.
"Pyongyang has always loathed hearing its leadership labelled as tyrant or dictator by the outside world," he said.
The invective against Mr Biden was "pretty high on the scale", North Korean propaganda specialist Mason Richey of Hankuk University of Foreign Studies told AFP, highlighting the multiple repetitions of the "beating the dog" trope.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was branded a "tyrant" by Mr Biden. Source: AAP
Mr Trump himself has also been the target of Pyongyang's anger at times.
In 2017 the two leaders traded personal insults and threats of war before the diplomatic rapprochement that has seen them meet three times and the US president repeatedly proclaim their personal friendship, although nuclear negotiations remain deadlocked.
As tensions mounted, Mr Kim called Mr Trump a "mentally deranged US dotard" whom he would "tame with fire", while KCNA also branded him a "rabid dog".
Vice President Joe Biden with his son Hunter in Washington. Source: AP
KCNA used the same Korean word previously translated as "dotard" in its article Thursday, although the epithet did not appear in the official English version.
