President Donald Trump on Thursday assailed the television host Mika Brzezinski in personal and vulgar terms, the latest of a string of escalating attacks by the president on the national news media.
Shortly before 9am, as Brzezinski's MSNBC show Morning Joe was ending, Mr Trump used Twitter to taunt Brzezinski and her co-host, Joe Scarborough, referring to them as "low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe."
In a pair of Twitter posts, he wrote, "I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don't watch anymore). 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!"
Mr Trump has launched broadsides this week against several of the country's major television networks and newspapers, accusing the press of creating "fake news" and of unfairly fixating on his campaign's links to Russian officials. At the White House, the president's deputy press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said on national television that Americans "deserve something better" from the country's media.
I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don't watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 29, 2017
...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!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 29, 2017
The graphic nature of the president's suggestion that Brzezinski had undergone plastic surgery was met with immediate criticism. A spokesman for NBC News, Mark Kornblau, wrote on Twitter: "Never imagined a day when I would think to myself, 'It is beneath my dignity to respond to the President of the United States.'"
In a statement Thursday morning, 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."
The First Lady, Melania Trump, who has said she would like to become an anti-bullying advocate, defended her husband's comments.
"As the First Lady has stated publicly in the past, when her husband gets attacked, he will punch back 10 times harder," her communications director Stephanie Grisham said in a statement to CNN.
A number of Republican senators who have been critical of the president in the past though rebuked the comments. Susan Collins, a Republican senator from Maine, wrote on Twitter: "This has to stop – we all have a job – 3 branches of gov't and media. We don't have to get along, but we must show respect and civility."
Senator Ben Sasse urged the president to "please just stop", adding: "This isn't normal and it's beneath the dignity of your office."
Brzezinski has not commented on the president's comments but did tweet a photo of the back of a box of Cheerios breakfast cereal which carries the slogan - "Made for little hands" along with a picture of a small child. Mr Trump has previously been taunted about the size of his hands.
— Mika Brzezinski (@morningmika) June 29, 2017
Mr Trump's comment Thursday 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 whatever," Mr Trump said, a remark that was widely seen as a reference to menstruation and drew rebukes from women's groups.
The president and his team were buoyed this week by a major error at CNN, which retracted a report about one of Mr Trump's associates; three journalists who worked on the story resigned. Mr Trump seized on CNN's mistake, attacking the news network and other news organisations including The New York Times and The Washington Post.
New York Times, Fairfax Media