Just as hostility between White House reporters and President Trump seemed to be peaking and couldn’t get any worse, one tweet from Trump about MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski’s alleged bloody face-lift made it worse.
“I heard poorly rated ‘Morning Joe’ speaks badly of me (don’t watch anymore),” Trump wrote in a pair of tweets after the MSNBC show’s co-hosts spent the better part of three hours criticizing the White House. “Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came… to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!”
Brzezinski responded by tweeting a photo of a Cheerios advertisement that said, “Made for little hands,” an apparent reference to the long-running meme that the president has short fingers.
The slight against Brzezinski’s appearance set Washington ablaze, as congressional Republicans eagerly denounced the remark, and experts searched for new ways to describe the deteriorating relationship between the White House and the press.
The clash capped an already long week of confrontation between the administration and reporters. Trump complained about an erroneous CNN article related to a Trump associate’s tie to a Russian bank — the article was retracted and the journalists involved resigned from their jobs. The press complained about fewer on-camera White House press briefings. Trump kept up his attacks on networks and newspapers for delivering “fake news.”
At the White House press briefing on Tuesday, deputy press secretary Sarah Sanders berated all the media and said, “We have gone to a place where if the media can’t be trusted to report the news.”
When the Q&A session was about to move on, Brian Karem, then a little-known reporter for Playboy and a Maryland newspaper, interrupted to go on a lengthy tirade against the White House’s criticism of the press.
“What you just did is inflammatory to people all over the country who look at it and say, ‘See, once again, the president is right and everybody out here is fake media,'” Karem said. “And everybody in this room is only trying to do their job.”
He added, “We’re here to ask you questions. You’re here to provide the answers.”
All throughout the week, the president tweeted insult after insult directed at the media, save the soft spot he has for Fox News.
On Wednesday, Trump targeted both the Washington Post, which he called the “guardian of Amazon,” and the New York Times, which he said writes “false story after false story about me.”
The previous day, he did it again, with a few more outlets dropped in. “So they caught Fake News CNN cold, but what about NBC, CBS & ABC?” he tweeted. “What about the failing New York Times & Washington Post? They are all Fake News!”
Even after drawing swift rebukes from Republicans, the White House stood its ground on the face-lift dig at Brzezinski. During an interview on Fox News on Thursday morning, Sanders defended the tweet.
“I don’t think that the president has ever been someone who gets attacked and doesn’t push back,” she said.
