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.
.. “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.”
.. 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.
.. “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.
.. 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.
.. After lashing out at Mr. Scarborough and Ms. Brzezinski at one point last summer, Mr. Trump told an adviser, “It felt good.”
.. 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.
Trump is running as Trump. Surprise!
The other major example of doing what’s always worked is the ad hominem attack on big-dog opponents. It worked in the primaries. Trump went after one leading challenger after another, knocking them out sequentially.
.. More riskily, Trump is now going toe-to-toe with a sitting president.
.. Barack Obama is no Jeb Bush. He’s not low energy. He’s a skilled campaigner who clearly despises Trump and relishes the fight.
.. His dabbling in conspiracy, from Ted Cruz’s father’s supposed involvement in the Kennedy assassination to Vince Foster’s (“very fishy”) suicide. All of which suggests, and cements, the image of a man who shoots from the hip and is prone to both wild theories and extreme policies.