US President Donald Trump on Thursday launched a Twitter attack on the brains, looks and temperament of MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski, drawing bipartisan outrage.
“I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don’t watch anymore),” Trump tweeted. “Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!”
The tweets united Democrats and Republicans in a chorus of protest in perhaps the loudest outcry since Trump took office.
“Obviously I don’t see that as an appropriate comment,” Republican House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan said.
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi called the tweets “blatantly sexist,” adding that he “happens to disrespect women... It’s sad.”
“The president’s tweets today don’t help our political or national discourse and do not provide a positive role model for our national dialogue,” Republican Senator James Lankford said.
Brzezinski responded on Twitter by posting a photograph of a Cheerios box that said: “Made for little hands.”
Trump’s allies cast his outburst as positive — an example of his refusal to be bullied.
He was “pushing back against people who have attacked him day after day after day. Where is the outrage on that?” White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said.
First lady Melania Trump, who has vowed to fight cyberbullying while her husband is president, gave his tweets a pass.
“As the first lady has stated publicly in the past, when her husband gets attacked, he will punch back 10 times harder,” her communications director, Stephanie Grisham, said in a statement.
The White House has shown increasing irritation over harsh coverage of Donald Trump on Brzezinski and Scarborough’s Morning Joe, including commentary questioning his mental state.
About two hours before his tweets, Brzezinski said on the show that “it’s not normal behavior” for any leader to be tweeting about people’s appearances or to be bullying, lying, undermining managers and throwing people under the bus.
She said that if any business executive behaved the way Donald Trump does, “there would be concern that perhaps the person who runs the company is out of his mind.”
She on Wednesday had mocked Donald Trump after a story in the Washington Post said he had posted fake Time magazine covers of himself in some of his golf resorts, saying: “Nothing makes a man feel better than making a fake cover of a magazine about himself, lying every day and destroying the country.”
One expert rejected the idea that the tweets amounted to a calculated push-back against the media.
“It’s not a critique of the press. It’s a diatribe. It’s a rant,” Stanford University mass media expert Theodore Glasser said.
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