Trump draws fire over crude tweets
President says Brzezinski of MSNBC is ‘crazy,’ had a ‘face-lift’
President Donald Trump lashes out about the appearance and intellect of Mika Brzezinski, a co-host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” drawing condemnation from fellow Republicans and reigniting the controversy over his attitudes toward women.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump lashed out Thursday at the appearance and intellect of Mika Brzezinski, a co-host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” drawing condemnation from his fellow Republicans and reigniting the controversy over his attitudes toward women that nearly derailed his candidacy last year.
Trump’s invective threatened to further erode his support from Republican women and independents, both among voters and on Capitol Hill, where he needs negotiating leverage for the stalled Senate health care bill.
The president described Brzezinski as “low I.Q. Crazy Mika” and claimed in a series of Twitter posts that she had been “bleeding badly from a face-lift” during a social gathering at Trump’s resort in Florida around New Year’s Eve. The White House did not explain what had prompted the outburst, but a spokeswoman said Brzezinski deserved a rebuke because of her show’s harsh stance on Trump.
The tweets reintroduced a political vulnerability: his history of demeaning women for their age, appear- ance and mental capacity.
“My first reaction was that this just has to stop, and I was disheartened because I had hoped the personal, ad hominem attacks had been left behind, that we were past that,” Sen. Susan Collins, a moderate Republican from Maine who is a crucial holdout on the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, said in an interview.
“I don’t think it directly affects the negotiation on the health care bill, but it is undignified — it’s beneath a president of the United States and just so contrary to the way we expect a president to act,” she said. “I see it as embarrassing to our country.”
Twitter responses
A slew of Republicans echoed her sentiments. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who, like Collins, holds a pivotal and undecided vote on the health care bill, tweeted: “Stop it! The Presidential platform should be used for more than bringing people down.”
Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., who opposed Trump’s nomination during the presidential primaries, also implored him to stop, writing on Twitter that making such comments “isn’t normal and it’s beneath the dignity of your office.”
Brzezinski responded by posting on Twitter a photograph of a box of Cheerios with the words “Made for Little Hands,” a reference to a long-standing insult about the size of the president’s hands. MSNBC said in a statement, “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.”
Trump’s attack injected even more negativity into a capital marinating in partisanship and reminded weary Republicans of a political fact they would rather forget: Trump has a problem with the half of the population more likely to vote.
Derogatory words
Christine Matthews, a Republican pollster who specializes in the views of female voters, said the president’s use of Twitter to target a prominent woman was particularly striking, noting he had used only one derogatory word — “psycho” — to describe the show’s other cohost, Joe Scarborough, and the remainder of his limited characters to hit upon damaging stereotypes of women. “He included dumb, crazy, old, unattractive and desperate,” Matthews said.
A spokeswoman for the president, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, urged the media to move on, arguing during the daily White House briefing that Trump was “fighting fire with fire” by attacking a longtime critic.
Brzezinski had called the president “a liar” and suggested he was “mentally ill,” added Sanders, who defended Trump’s tweets as appropriate.
Current and former aides say Donald Trump was chastened by the furor over the “Access Hollywood” tape that emerged in October, which showed him bragging about forcing himself on women, and that he had exhibited selfrestraint during the first few months of his administration. But in the past week, the sense that he had become the victim of a liberal media conspiracy against him loosened those tethers.
And his fiercest, most savage responses have almost always been to what he has seen on television.
“Morning Joe,” once a friendly bastion on leftleaning MSNBC, has become a forum for fiery criticism of Trump. One adviser to the president accused the hosts of trying to “destroy” the administration over several months.
After lashing out at Scarborough and Brzezinski at one point last summer, Trump told an adviser, “It felt good.”