Nasty Trump tweet ‘shameful’
UNITED STATES: The first tweet contained the typical name-calling fare from US President Donald Trump, labelling MSNBC’s talk show Morning Joe ’’poorly rated’’ and calling its hosts ‘‘low IQ Crazy Mika’’ and ‘‘Psycho Joe’’.
But the second tweet, about six minutes later, caused an immediate and sustained uproar, as it contained a deeply personal and vulgar attack on Mika Brzezinski.
‘‘She was bleeding badly from a face-lift,’’ Trump tweeted yesterday, claiming that months earlier, Brzezinski and co-host Joe Scarborough tried to spend time with him at his private club in Florida. ‘‘I said no!’’
More than three dozen Republicans and Democrats in Congress issued tweets of their own expressing disgust, calling the remark ‘‘unpresidential’’, ’’vile, sexist and unbecoming of an American leader’’, ‘‘divisive’’, ‘‘unhinged and shameful’’ and ‘‘amazingly graceless’’.
‘‘It is really not normal that the president of the United States and the commander-in-chief would be tweeting about somebody’s face,’’ said Liz Mair, a longtime Republican strategist and critic of the president. ‘‘It does not conform with the norms that we expect and we treat as pretty set in stone in this country, but it’s also just strange.’’
Trump’s staff quickly came to his defence, saying that Brzezinski and Scarborough had said far worse things about the president and his staff. ’’Look, the American people elected a fighter ... They knew what they were getting when they voted for Donald Trump.’’ Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters at the White House.
Trump once had a chummy relationship with Morning Joe, regularly calling in for lengthy interviews, and referring to Brzezinski and Scarborough as ‘‘supporters’’ and offering to officiate their wedding. But the couple have become increasingly critical of him.
For months, Brzezinski has raised questions about the president’s psychological health, calling him ‘‘possibly unfit mentally’’ and saying that he is ‘‘such a narcissist, it’s possible that he is mentally ill in a way’’.
Brzezinski said yesterday that if someone took over NBC and acted as Trump had - ‘‘tweeting wildly about people’s appearances, bullying people, talking about people in the competition, lying every day, undermining his managers’’ - then ’’there would be concern that perhaps the person who runs the company is out of his mind’’.
Sanders pointed to such rhetoric in her defence of Trump.
Later in the day, Sanders’ father, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, said in a Fox News interview that the president ‘‘makes my daughter’s job very difficult with tweets like that’’.
Less than half an hour after Trump fired off the tweet, Brzezinski responded by tweeting a photo of a Cheerios cereal box including the caption: ‘‘Made for Little Hands.’’ The message seemed to be aimed at mocking the size of the president’s hands - a sensitive topic for Trump that has dogged him for decades and even came up during a Republican presidential candidates’ debate.
NBC released a statement saying: ‘‘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.’’
The tweet marked a new low in presidential history, said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University.
‘‘We make a big deal that Harry Truman told off a newspaper critic for writing a bad review of his daughter’s music concert,’’ he said. ‘‘How G-rated is that compared to what Donald Trump has done?’’
The tweets also came up in press conferences and interviews on Capitol Hill, where most lawmakers would have much rather discussed immigration and healthcare legislation.
‘‘Obviously, I don’t see that as an appropriate comment,’’ Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan said.
Trump claimed in his tweets that Brzezinski and Scarborough tried to spend time with him at Mar-a-Lago over three days around New Year’s Eve. Scarborough said at the time that they were there to set up an interview with the president-elect.
Trump’s tweet was reminiscent of comments he made about women on the campaign trail including his rival, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, GOP rival Carly Fiorina, the wife of then-rival Senator Ted Cruz, and Megyn Kelly of Fox News. Hundreds of thousands of women held protests in cities around the world the day after his inauguration.
– Washington Post