Trump's long history of calling women 'crazy,' attacking their appearance

ByMEGHAN KENEALLY ABCNews logo
Wednesday, October 17, 2018

President Donald Trump made insulting comments about MSNBC personalities Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough today on Twitter, calling Brzezinski "crazy" and claiming she was "bleeding badly from a face-lift" a few months ago.

This is far from Trump's first attack on a woman, and his relationship with female voters was dramatically tested during the presidential campaign when an 11-year-old recording of his conversation with then-"Access Hollywood" host Billy Bush about grabbing women was released.

Trump dismissed that tape as "locker room talk," and he made disparaging comments about women and their appearance during his campaign and after winning the election.

Here is a rundown of some of his attacks.

Mika Brzezinski

Today is not the first attack on Brzezinski by Trump.

In August 2016 he called her "off the wall, a neurotic and not very bright mess," "very insecure" and "crazy" in three tweets spanning five days.

The next month, Trump wrote "crazy and very dumb @morningmika had a mental breakdown while talking about me" on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."

This morning he said that she had had a face-lift and tried to spend time with him at his Mar-a-Lago estate, writing in two tweets, "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!"

He wasn't the only member of the Trump administration to insult the two on-air hosts, who recently announced their engagement. Just a half-hour before Trump posted his tweets, the president's director of social media, Dan Scavino Jr., tweeted on his personal account: "#DumbAsARockMika and lover #JealousJoe are lost, confused & saddened since @POTUS @realDonaldTrump stopped returning their calls! Unhinged."

Deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended Trump's tweets on Fox News, saying he has been subject to "outrageous" personal attacks on "Morning Joe."

"This is a president who fights fire with fire and certainly will not be allowed to be bullied by the liberal media and the liberal elites within the media or in Hollywood or anywhere else," she said.

During this morning's broadcast, Brzezinski, referring to a Washington Post article that said Trump displayed a fake Time magazine cover of himself in some of his golf clubs, brought up the size of Trump's hands, a sore point for him.

After his tweets this morning, she shared a photo of a Cheerios box on her Twitter page. The back of the box reads, "Made for little hands."

Despite the vitriol that Trump has directed toward the "Morning Joe" hosts, he has been friendly with the two for years. They told Vanity Fair that they met with him at the White House a week after his inauguration. At the meeting, they said, Trump suggested they get married at Mar-a-Lago and offered to officiate.

The communications team for MSNBC, the cable network that airs "Morning Joe," wrote on Twitter, "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."

Attacks on other female journalists

Brzezinski isn't the only on-air personality to become one of Trump's targets.

During the campaign, he had a turbulent relationship with then-Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, whom he also called "crazy" in eight tweets in March 2016.

Their sparring reached a very public level after she asked him what he perceived as an unfair question during one of the primary debates. Afterward, he insulted Kelly in an interview with CNN, saying, "There was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever." He later said in an interview with ABC's "This Week" that by "wherever," he meant her nose.

At campaign rallies, Trump was known to single out NBC News reporter Katy Tur, sometimes calling her "little Katy" in front of crowds and writing on Twitter that she is a "3rd rate reporter."

He doesn't save his "crazy" label for broadcast journalists. In September 2016, he posted a tweet calling New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd "crazy."

Attacking other women

There are a host of other times Trump publicly criticized women's appearance, both before and during his presidential campaign.

Before he entered politics, he rated women's appearance on Howard Stern's radio show from 1997 to 2008.

During the campaign, he appeared to insult then-competitor Carly Fiorina, saying in an interview with Rolling Stone, "Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?!"

Trump later claimed he was talking about her persona and not her appearance, but Fiorina made it clear at the next debate that she wasn't buying it, saying flatly, "Women all over this country heard very clearly what Mr. Trump said."

Also during the presidential campaign, Trump retweeted a post that had side by side a photo of his wife, Melania Trump, and an unflattering photo of Heidi Cruz, the wife of his then-competitor Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. The photo was captioned, "The images are worth a thousand words."

Asked about the retweet by CNN's Anderson Cooper during a town hall event in Wisconsin, Trump responded, "I thought it was a nice picture of Heidi. I thought it was fine."

When pressed, Trump said that Heidi Cruz is "a pretty woman."

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