By Emily Heil
Emily Heil
Co-author of the Reliable Source

MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski attend the 2013 Matrix New York Women in Communications Awards at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. (Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

The strange and twisted saga of the relationship between President Trump and the hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program, Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, has entered a new chapter.

Trump this morning tweeted an attack on the pair (who are engaged), first claiming that he no longer watches the show.

“I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don’t watch anymore),” he wrote. “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!”

Brzezinski clapped back, since she’s apparently not from the Michelle Obama School of Insult Handling (motto: “when they go low, we go high”). She tweeted a picture of a Cheerios box, with the boast that the cereal is “made for little hands.” That’s a reference, of course, to the commander-in-chief’s preoccupation with the size of his… anatomy.

It’s unclear exactly what prompted the president’s mean tweets.

But it follows a few patterns. First, Trump likes to insult those who criticize him by casting his critics as privately courting his attention and himself as the one who rejects them.

And second, the tweets show that Trump can’t ever seem to drop a personal vendetta (remember the Rosie O’Donnell saga?). His relationship with Brzezinski and Scarborough is complicated. The TV talkers were first criticized for seeming too cozy with candidate Trump (they were widely panned for kids-gloves treatment they gave then-candidate Trump while hosting a televised town hall with him in February 2016).

But Trump soon turned on them. “Some day, when things calm down, I’ll tell the real story of @JoeNBC and his very insecure longtime girlfriend, @morningmika,” Trump tweeted last August, before the couple had publicly revealed their romance. “Two clowns!”

Nevertheless, Scarborough and Brzezinski did spend last New Year’s at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, prompting more concerns about the hosts rubbing shoulders with the then-president-elect. Scarborough later claimed they weren’t at the Palm Beach property to party, but rather to set up an interview.