Update | ‘Bleeding badly from facelift’: Trump disgusts with Twitter attack on TV host Mika Brzezinski
Trump called MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ host ‘low IQ crazy Mika’, and dubbed her fiance and co-host Joe Scarborough ’Psycho Joe’
US President Donald Trump assailed a woman TV news host in highly personal terms on Thursday, describing her as “crazy” and having been bleeding at one point from a facelift, in a Twitter attack that united Republicans and Democrats in disgust.
Trump, who often decries what he calls “fake news” in the American media and who this week attacked CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post, took aim on Thursday at the hosts of the MSNBC programme Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski.
He called Brzezinski, a journalist and daughter of former White House national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, “low I.Q. Crazy Mika” and said she was “bleeding badly from a facelift” when she visited one his Mar-a-Lago resort around New Year’s Eve.
He referred to former Republican US congressman Scarborough, who is engaged to Brzezinski, as “Psycho Joe.”
Trump, whose wife Melania says she will campaign against cyberbullying, is known for his prolific Twitter habit, which includes attacking critics and rivals. But his tweets on Thursday drew a particularly strong response.
“It’s a sad day for America when the president spends his time bullying, lying and spewing petty personal attacks instead of doing his job,” MSNBC’s communications office said on Twitter.
Morning Joe takes sometimes strong views on Trump and the president has often criticised its hosts in the past. Comcast Corp owns NBCUniversal, MSNBC’s parent company.
Republican lawmakers and others sharply rebuked Trump.
Senator Lindsey Graham was particularly harsh, telling Trump his attack was “beneath the office [of president] and represents what is wrong with American politics”.
Another Republican senator, Ben Sasse, tweeted that Trump’s attack wasn’t “normal”.
Democrats also seized on the remarks as an example of what they view as Trump’s sexism.
“Trump’s bullying tweets are an attack on women everywhere,” Democratic National Committee spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said in a statement. “From his Twitter slurs to his policies, we have a president who continues to show us he has no regard for women and whose comments demean the office he holds.”
The president’s tweets created a new distraction as senators in his own party struggled to bridge their differences and agree on major health care legislation.
But White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended his tweets as simply a question of responding to criticism.
“I don’t think that the president has ever been someone that gets attacked and doesn’t push back,” she told Fox News Channel.
“People on that show have personally attacked him many times,” she added. “This is a president who fights fire with fire and certainly will not be allowed to be bullied by liberal media and the liberal elites within the media, or Hollywood or anywhere else.”
First lady Melania Trump gave her husband’s 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.
On Trump’s level of insult-trading, Brzezinski responded on Twitter by posting a photograph of a Cheerios box that included the phrase “made for little hands.” People looking to get under the president’s skin have long suggested that his hands appear small for his frame.
Early in the 2016 campaign the “Morning Joe” hosts were accused of being too friendly with Trump, a frequent guest on air.
The relationship however soured last August, when Trump tweeted: “Some day, when things calm down, I’ll tell the real story of @JoeNBC and his very insecure long-time girlfriend, @morningmika. Two clowns!”
Additional reporting by Associated Press and Agence France-Presse
