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Trump Mocks Mika Brzezinski; Says She Was ‘Bleeding Badly From a Face-Lift’ Trump Mocks Mika Brzezinski; Says She Was ‘Bleeding Badly From a Face-Lift’
(about 7 hours later)
President Trump faced a swift and bipartisan backlash on Thursday after he assailed the television host Mika Brzezinski in unusually personal and crude terms, the latest of a string of escalating attacks by the president on the national news media. WASHINGTON — President 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.
Shortly before 9 a.m., as Ms. Brzezinski’s MSNBC show “Morning Joe” was ending, Mr. Trump used Twitter to taunt Ms. Brzezinski and her co-host, Joe Scarborough, referring to them as “low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe” and describing a meeting with Ms. Brzezinski in which, he said, “she was bleeding badly from a face-lift.” Mr. 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.
Mr. Trump is famed for his online provocations, but the coarseness of his remark about Ms. Brzezinski — coming from a president who has faced criticism for his attitudes toward women — drew immediate denunciations in the political world, including from prominent members of his own party. The president described Ms. 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 Mr. 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 Ms. Brzezinski deserved a rebuke because of her show’s harsh stance on Mr. Trump.
“Obviously, I don’t see that as an appropriate comment,” the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan, told reporters on Capitol Hill. Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a Republican whose vote is considered critical to the success of Mr. Trump’s health care plan, wrote on Twitter, “This has to stop.” She said, “We don’t have to get along, but we must show respect and civility.” The tweets ended five months of relative silence from the president on the volatile subject of gender, reintroducing a political vulnerability: his history of demeaning women for their age, appearance and mental capacity.
Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, also a Republican, wrote on Twitter, “Mr. President, your tweet was beneath the office and represents what is wrong with American politics, not the greatness of America.” “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,” Senator 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.
The president has fumed for weeks about his coverage on “Morning Joe,” where Mr. Scarborough and Ms. Brzezinski have been increasingly blistering in their commentary about the Trump administration. They have openly questioned Mr. Trump’s mental state, comments that particularly upset the president, according to a senior administration official. “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. “People may say things during a campaign, but it’s different when you become a public servant. I don’t see it as undermining his ability to negotiate legislation, necessarily, but I see it as embarrassing to our country.”
Mr. Trump has used the “psycho” moniker in private to describe Mr. Scarborough, and he views the “Morning Joe” criticism as a personal betrayal, the official said. Until recently, the president and the co-hosts had a relatively friendly relationship. Mr. Scarborough and Ms. Brzezinski visited Mr. Trump’s Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, this past New Year’s. A slew of Republicans echoed her sentiments. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who, like Ms. 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.”
On Thursday, Ms. Brzezinski responded to the president’s comments by posting a photograph on Twitter of a box of Cheerios with the words, “Made For Little Hands.” The tweet referred to a longstanding insult against Mr. Trump referring to the size of his hands. In a statement, MSNBC said, “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.” Senator Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican who opposed Mr. 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.”
Mr. Trump’s deputy press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, defended Mr. Trump’s tweets in an interview on Fox News. Senator James Lankford, Republican of Oklahoma, added, “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.”
“I don’t think that the president has ever been someone who gets attacked and doesn’t push back,” she told the Fox anchor Bill Hemmer. “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.” Ms. Brzezinski responded by posting on Twitter a photograph of a box of Cheerios with the words “Made for Little Hands,” a reference to a longstanding 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.”
“But is that necessary?” Mr. Hemmer asked, referring to the graphic nature of Mr. Trump’s remark about Ms. Brzezinski. Mr. 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: Mr. Trump has a problem with the half of the population more likely to vote.
“I think what’s necessary is to push back against unnecessary attacks on the president,” Ms. Sanders replied. 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 that he had used only one derogatory word — “psycho” — to describe the show’s other co-host, Joe Scarborough, and the remainder of his limited characters to hit upon damaging stereotypes of women.
Mr. Trump also received a boost from one of his stalwart defenders, Sean Hannity of Fox News, who suggested that the president’s remarks about Mr. Scarborough were justified. “Maybe liberal Joe should stop calling the @POTUS a schmuck, a liar, a thug and mentally unhinged,” Mr. Hannity wrote on Twitter. “He included dumb, crazy, old, unattractive and desperate,” Ms. Matthews said.
Mr. Trump has launched broadsides this week against several of the country’s major television networks and newspapers, accusing the news media of creating “fake news” and of unfairly fixating on his campaign’s links to Russian officials. At a televised White House briefing, Ms. Sanders castigated CNN and said that Americans “deserve something better” from the country’s media. “The continued tweeting, the fact that he is so outrageous, so unpresidential, is becoming a huge problem for him,” she added. “And it is particularly unhelpful in terms of building relationships with female Republican members of Congress, whose votes he needs for health care, tax reform and infrastructure.”
A retraction by CNN of a report about one of Mr. Trump’s associates — followed by the resignations of three CNN journalists who worked on the story — has buoyed Mr. Trump and his team. The president has seized on the CNN report as evidence that the establishment news media is biased against him, and he has expanded his criticisms to encompass other news organizations including The New York Times and The Washington Post. But it was unclear whether the vehemence of the president’s latest attack would embolden members of his party to turn disdain into defiance.
Mr. Trump’s comment about Ms. Brzezinski echoed a contentious remark that he made about another female television anchor, Megyn Kelly, during last year’s presidential campaign. “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever,” Mr. Trump said, a remark that was widely seen as a reference to menstruation and drew rebukes from women’s groups. Senior Republicans, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, cycled through what has become a familiar series of emotions and calculations after the Twitter posts, according to staff members: a flash of anger, reckoning of possible damage and, finally, a determination to push past the controversy to pursue their agenda.
“Obviously, I don’t see that as an appropriate comment,” the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan, said during a Capitol Hill news conference. Then he told reporters he wanted to talk about something else.
Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, demanded an apology, calling the president’s Twitter posts “sexist, an assault on the freedom of the press and an insult to all women.”
A spokeswoman for the president, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, urged the news media to move on, arguing during the daily White House briefing that Mr. Trump was “fighting fire with fire” by attacking a longtime critic.
Ms. Brzezinski had called the president “a liar” and suggested he was “mentally ill,” added Ms. Sanders, who defended Mr. Trump’s tweets as appropriate for a president.
Melania Trump, the president’s wife — who has said that, as first lady, she will embark on a campaign against cyberbullying — also rejected claims that her husband had done what she is charged with undoing.
“As the first lady has stated publicly in the past, when her husband gets attacked, he will punch back 10 times harder,” Mrs. Trump’s spokeswoman wrote in a statement, referring to the first lady’s remarks during the campaign.
Current and former aides say that Mr. 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 self-restraint 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.
Moreover, Mr. Trump’s oldest friends say it is difficult for him to distinguish between large and small slights — or to recognize that his office comes with the expectation that he moderate his behavior.
And his fiercest, most savage responses have almost always been to what he has seen on television.
”Morning Joe,” once a friendly bastion on left-leaning MSNBC, has become a forum for fiery criticism of Mr. Trump. One adviser to the president accused the hosts of trying to “destroy” the administration over several months.
After lashing out at Mr. Scarborough and Ms. Brzezinski at one point last summer, Mr. Trump told an adviser, “It felt good.”
Even before he began his campaign two years ago, Mr. Trump showed a disregard for civility when he made critical remarks on television and on social media, particularly about women.
He took aim at the actress Kim Novak, a star of 1950s cinema, as she presented during the 2014 Academy Awards, taking note of her plastic surgeries. Chagrined, Ms. Novak later said she had gone home to Oregon and not left her house for days. She accused Mr. Trump of bullying her, and he later apologized.
As a candidate, Mr. Trump was insensitive to perceptions that he was making sexist statements, arguing that he had a right to defend himself, an assertion Ms. Sanders echoed on Thursday.
After the first primary debate, hosted by Fox News in August 2015, Mr. Trump trained his focus on the only female moderator, Megyn Kelly, who pressed him on his history of making derogatory comments about women.
He told a CNN host that Ms. Kelly had “blood coming out of her wherever,” leaving Republicans squeamish and many thinking he was suggesting that Ms. Kelly had been menstruating. He refused to apologize and kept up the attacks.
Later, he urged his millions of Twitter followers to watch a nonexistent graphic video of a former Miss Universe contestant, Alicia Machado, whose weight gain he had parlayed into a media spectacle while he was promoting the pageant.
Mr. Trump went on to describe female journalists as “crazy” and “neurotic” on his Twitter feed at various points during the race. He derided reporters covering his campaign, Katy Tur of NBC and Sara Murray of CNN, in terms he rarely used about men.
His tweets on Thursday added strain to the already combative daily briefing, as reporters interrupted Ms. Sanders’s defense of the president to ask how she felt about them as a woman and a mother.
She responded that she had only “one perfect role model”: God.
“None of us are perfect,” she said.