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Friday, June 30, 2017
Betty MacDonald, Donald Chauncey MacDonald and bleeding badly from a face-lift
Hello 'Pussy' it's Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and Pippi Longstocking:
You lashed out Thursday at the appearance and intellect
of Mika Brzezinski, a co-host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” drawing
condemnation from your fellow Republicans and reigniting the controversy
over your attitudes toward women that nearly derailed your candidacy last
year. You 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 your resort in Florida around New Year’s Eve.
Trump Mocks Mika Brzezinski; Says She Was ‘Bleeding Badly From a Face-Lift’
Mika Brzezinski in Trump Tower in November.Credit
Evan Vucci/Associated Press
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
“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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.
Representative Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas and others in the House criticized President Trump’s remarks on Thursday.Credit
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
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.
“He included dumb, crazy, old, unattractive and desperate,” Ms. Matthews said.
“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.”
But
it was unclear whether the vehemence of the president’s latest attack
would embolden members of his party to turn disdain into defiance.
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.
One of the reporters on this story, Glenn Thrush, has a contract for regular appearances on MSNBC. Glenn Thrush reported from Washington, and Maggie Haberman from New York.
A version of this article appears in print on June 30, 2017, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump’s taunts Aimed at TV Host Prompt Rebukes. Order Repr
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