When President Donald Trump tweeted last week about “crazy” Mika Brzezinski “bleeding badly from a face-lift,” it was shocking but hardly surprising. His first online barb against the MSNBC host had come at 8:20 on a Monday morning last August: “@morningmika is off the wall, a neurotic and not very bright mess!” Since then,
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Trump has referred to “crazy @morningmika” at least three times; claimed she had a mental breakdown on-air; and threatened to expose the “real story” of her relationship with her co-host, Joe Scarborough. And Brzezinski is hardly alone: The president has demonstrated an unrelenting fondness for Twitter attacks against celebrities, fellow politicians and the media—most recently, and infamously, CNN.
What explains Trump’s increasingly bizarre online behavior? Brzezinski and Scarborough have raised the possibility that the president is “unmoored,” “not well” and certainly “not mentally equipped” to watch their show.
Others have suggested he has pathologically poor impulse control. But the best insight might come, ironically, from Trump’s wife, Melania, who shortly before the election decried an internet culture that “has gotten too mean and too rough.” She was talking about cyberbullying, an online behavior she described as “absolutely unacceptable”—but which some experts say is an accurate, and helpful, descriptor of the president’s Twitter habits.