WASHINGTON - US First Lady Melania Trump is standing by her husband amid a social media storm over his attack on TV host Mika Brzezinski via Twitter, according to CNN.
US President Donald Trump unleashed a brutal personal attack on Thursday (June 29) on respected host Brzezinski, sparking an instant backlash.
Trump's Twitter outburst - in which he describes the journalist "bleeding badly from a facelift" - appears to have been triggered by Brzezinski's sharp comments during the morning show she co-hosts with Joe Scarborough on the left-leaning MSNBC network.
"I heard poorly rated @Morning-Joe speaks badly of me (don't watch anymore)," wrote Trump, an avid cable news watcher.
"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 tweeted.
Melania Trump's communications director Stephanie Grisham said in a statement to CNN: "As the First Lady has stated publicly in the past, when her husband gets attacked, he will punch back 10 times harder."
Speaking about her husband's social media habits in an interview on CBS' 60 Minutes just after the election, Melania Trump said that sometimes it got him in trouble, "but it helped a lot, as well."
Asked whether she spoke up if she felt he crossed a line, the First Lady said, "Yes, I tell him all the time."
But she conceded that at the end of the day, he does what he wants.
"I think he hears me. But he will do what he wants to do on the end. He's an adult. He knows the consequences. And I give him my opinion. And he could do whatever he likes with it," Melania Trump said, according to CNN.
On the campaign trail, Trump said she would seek to champion combating cyberbullying as one of the "main focuses" of her work as First Lady.
"Our culture has gotten too mean and too rough, especially to children and teenagers," she said at a rally in Pennsylvania days before the election.
"We have to find a better way to talk to each other, to disagree with each other, to respect each other. We must find better ways to honour and support the basic goodness of our children, especially in social media. It will be one of the main focuses of my work if I'm privileged enough to become your first lady."
Melania Trump, who officially moved into the White House earlier this month, is expected to roll out her platform in more detail in the coming months, CNN said.
