Decision 2020

Speaker Ryan calls Trump Twitter slam of TV host ‘not an appropriate comment'

A pair of morning tweets by President Donald Trump, where he attacked the hosts of a morning cable television show in personal terms, saying one was “was bleeding badly from a face-lift,” drew public rebukes from a handful of GOP lawmakers in the Congress, as Speaker Paul Ryan said the President’s outburst did not help efforts to instill more civility in politics.

“Obviously, I don’t see that as an appropriate comment,” Speaker Ryan said in a response to a question from a reporter from Fox News.

“What we’re trying to do around here is improve the tone, the civility, of the debate; and this obviously doesn’t help do that,” the Speaker added.

The social media dustup began this morning when comments on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program drew the ire of the President on Twitter:

“This is a President who fights fire with fire, and certainly will not be allowed to be bullied by liberal media and the liberal elites within the media or Hollywood.”,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said on Fox News this morning.

At first, most Republican lawmakers in Congress had little to say about the President’s tweets. But the response grew through the day.

Mr. Trump’s tweets came on a day when Republicans in the Congress wanted to focus on a pair of bills being voted on in the House, which would take federal dollars away from so-called ‘sanctuary cities,’ and toughen penalties on illegal immigrants who are deported and then come back to the United States.

Mr. Trump used his official @POTUS Twitter account to try to get back on message, tweeting three times in nine minutes about those House immigration bills.

But those immigration tweets were not sent out on the President’s personal Twitter platform.