To celebrate his tremendous healthcare win and the successful rollout of “Energy Week,” the President of the United States tweeted a long-winded insult at Mika Brzezinski that was ugly even by his heroically low standards, claiming that the MSNBC host tried to hang out with him while “bleeding badly from a face-lift.”
After this astounding splatter of sentences hit the airwaves, NBC News spokesman Mark Kornblau tweeted: “Never imagined a day when I would think to myself, ‘It is beneath my dignity to respond to the President of the United States.” Brzezinski apparently disagreed:
A few Republicans bleated helplessly:
Meanwhile, deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders had some fairly dizzying spin for us: when repeatedly pressed on Fox News as to why Trump had tweeted such a personal insult, Huckabee Sanders remarked mildly that “the president, again, isn’t going to be someone who’s bullied.”
The First Lady, noted anti-bullying advocate, was also pretty fine with it*:
It’s exhausting to keep singing this god-awful song, but here is a man who was accused of sexual harassment and assault by 15 women, and admitted to sexually assaulting women, and implied a woman who accused him of sexual assault was not attractive enough for him to assault, and then became president. Ironically—you know what, “ironically” is starting to feel like too tame of a word for what we’re dealing with here—according to reporter Harry Hurt III’s Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump, Ivana Trump once accused her ex-husband in a deposition of violently raping her following a painful scalp reduction surgery he’d gotten to remove a bald spot. (Trump and Ivana both later denied this.)
In the earth-shatteringly hypocritical mind of our elected leader, the best way to insult a woman is to fling back the curtain on the elaborate, glossy shield of inhumanity men like him have long imposed upon the female body, even if the particular curtain in question is a deranged projection.
This is not, as we can all recall, the first time Donald Trump has accused a disobliging woman media anchor of “bleeding.” Amidst his administration’s intensified screechings about the media, the president simply cannot bear to allow us to forget about his deep and reptilian disgust for women—and he will continue to conflate those two unpleasant reminders of his own deficiencies as long as the latter remains less politically convenient than the former.
*UPDATE: Melania Trump’s spokeswoman clarified that the First Lady has not actually responded to the incident in question: