US president in sexist tweet furore
Trump’s broadside against TV host angers Republicans
AMERICAN President Donald Trump launched a crude Twitter attack on the brains, looks and temperament of a female TV personality on Thursday, drawing bipartisan howls of outrage and leaving fellow Republicans beseeching him: Stop, please just stop.
Trump’s tweets aimed at MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski revived concerns about his views of women in a city where civility is already in short supply and he’s struggling for any support he can get for his proposals on health care, immigration and other controversial issues.
“I heard poorly rated @ Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don’t watch any more),” Trump tweeted to his nearly 33 million followers on Thursday. “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 facelift. I said no!”
The tweets served to unite Democrats and Republicans for once in a chorus of protest that amounted to perhaps the loudest outcry since Trump took office.
“Obviously I don’t see that as an appropriate comment,” said Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi called Trump’s tweets “blatantly sexist”. The president, she added, “happens to disrespect women… it’s sad.”
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. Trump’s allies cast his outburst as positive, an example of his refusal to be bullied.
White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the president was “pushing back against people who have attacked him day after day”.
“The American people elected a fighter; they didn’t elect somebody to sit back and do nothing,” she added.
About two hours before his tweets, Brzezinski said on the show that “it’s not normal behaviour” 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 Trump did, “there would be concern that perhaps the person who runs the company is out of his mind”.
On Wednesday, she had mocked Trump after a story in The Washington Post said he had posted fake Time magazine covers of himself in some of his golf resorts.
Trump, who has a habit of throwing up distractions to deflect bad news, has been straining to advance his agenda lately, with the Senate this week coming up short in finding enough votes to begin debate on a bill to roll back president Barack Obama’s health care law.
His broadside against a woman raised new complaints among critics who have long accused him of sexism and inflaming tensions in a deeply polarised nation. Trump also has consistently stoked a feud with the press that has not hurt him with his base of roughly a third of the electorate. – ANA-AP