Donald Trump’s tweet Thursday attacking MSNBC anchor Mika Brzezinski is just the latest in a long line of disparaging jabs he has hurled at prominent women.
The President referred to Brzezinski as “low I.Q. Crazy Mika” and said she was “bleeding badly from a face-lift” when she came to visit him around New Year’s Eve. His tweet, which drew swift and widespread condemnation, fits into a larger pattern for Trump, who has a history of viciously going after women’s appearances and mental health.
During the campaign, he called then-Fox anchor Megyn Kelly “crazy” and described her during the first GOP presidential debate as having “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”He also tweeted out an unflattering photo of Ted Cruz’s wife, Heidi Cruz, and threatened to “spill the beans” about her without explaining what that meant.
But his pattern of behavior was put on its most public display years before he campaigned for president.
During his long-running feud with comedian Rosie O’Donnell in the mid-2000s, Trump repeatedly ridiculed O’Donnell for her weight and once even attacked her for her struggle with depression.
“She announced last week that she suffers from depression,” Trump told an audience at the Learning Annex in 2007. “They called me for a comment, and rather than saying ‘I have no comment’ or ‘isn’t that too bad oh, that’s so bad,’ I said, ‘I think I can cure her depression,’ — most of you heard this. ‘If she stopped looking in the mirror, I think she’d stop being so depressed.'”
In the same speech, Trump said it was “politically correct bullshit” that people would not call O’Donnell fat.
“This slob, now I’m not allowed to use the word fat. They say, ‘he used the fat word.’ I know much worse words,” he said. “It’s funny, I called her a degenerate, I called her the worst things, nobody cared.”
He added, “But I go on the Today Show and Meredith Vieira, ‘Donald is it true?’ — this is like two weeks ago I was supposed to talking about The Apprentice. She said, ‘Is it true that you called Rosie crude?’ I said, ‘no, I called her a degenerate. I didn’t call her crude, it’s not strong enough.’ She goes, ‘But did you call her fat?’ I said, ‘Let me ask you a question Meredith. Is she fat?’ ‘I’d rather not comment.’ Can you believe this bullshit? This is politically correct bullshit, OK?”
O’Donnell would go on to describe Trump’s attacks on her as “the most bullying I ever experienced in my life,” telling People magazine in 2014: “It was national, and it was sanctioned societally. Whether I deserved it is up to your own interpretation.”
Over the years, Trump would make some of his most disparaging comments about women on “The Howard Stern Show.” Discussing actress Nicollette Sheridan in 2005, Trump said, “A person who is very flat-chested is very hard to be a 10.”
He also attacked model-turned-reality TV star Anna Nicole Smith’s lips days in a 2007 episode after her death, saying, “It is the most disgusting thing to look at these big fat pumped up tires.”
On Twitter, Trump has lashed out at media executive Arianna Huffington, tweeting in 2012, “.@ariannahuff is unattractive both inside and out. I fully understand why her former husband left her for a man- he made a good decision.” In 2015, he hit her again, tweeting, “How much money is the extremely unattractive (both inside and out) Arianna Huffington paying her poor ex-hubby for the use of his name?”
In 2012, also on Twitter, Trump went after singer Cher, writing, “.@cher–I don’t wear a ‘rug’—it’s mine. And I promise not to talk about your massive plastic surgeries that didn’t work.”
Trump also said it was a double standard that actress Bette Midler could talk about his hair, but he couldn’t attack her “ugly face or body.”
“.@BetteMidler talks about my hair but I’m not allowed to talk about her ugly face or body — so I won’t. Is this a double standard?” he asked on Twitter in 2012.
“While @BetteMidler is an extremely unattractive woman, I refuse to say that because I always insist on being politically correct,” he added in another tweet.
And when he was live-tweeting the Oscars in 2014, Trump said of Kim Novak, “I’m having a real hard time watching the Academy Awards (so far). The last song was terrible! Kim should sue her plastic surgeon! #Oscars”
Novak said the tweet devastated her. Trump later expressed regret for the comment, and tweeted: “I was always a big fan of Kim Novak and still am—a wonderful actress.”