The First Bully just doesn’t know when to stop. President Trump’s tweet about MSNBC hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough was vile, misogynistic and most likely false on multiple counts. It again displayed a hostility toward women in a gratuitous belittlement of a female target’s physical appearance.

Trump’s Thursday-morning blast chided the “Morning Joe” hosts as “low IQ” and “psycho” and alleged that Brzezinski was “bleeding badly from a face-lift” when the couple tried to invite themselves to his Mar-a-Lago estate around New Year’s Eve. “I said no!” he tweeted.

It was despicable and cruel, even by the low standards of this president.

But the story took an even more insidious turn Friday, when Scarborough and Brzezinski alleged that White House staff members warned them that the National Enquirer was about to publish a negative story about them — and that the only way to stop it was to call the president and beg to have the story spiked. They were told to call the president, apologize for criticizing him and ask for his forgiveness.

Those White House calls had been preceded by Enquirer reporters calling Brzezinski’s teenage children and close friends, she said.

“We ignored their (White House staffers) desperate pleas,” Brzezinski and Scarborough wrote in the Washington Post.

If true, the episode would represent a disturbing abuse of power. It also has a ring of plausibility because of Trump’s longtime friendship with David Pecker, chief executive officer of the Enquirer’s parent company whose unabashed loyalty to Trump was reflected in its coverage of the 2016 campaign. Coincidentally, this week’s New Yorker piece on the Enquirer quoted an associate of Pecker who said the CEO “told me very bluntly that he had killed all sorts of stories for Trump.”

In a Friday tweet, Trump denied the account, saying it was “fake news” and that Scarborough “called me to stop a National Enquirer article.” Scarborough replied that he had texts from top aides and phone records to corroborate his version.

“Why do you keep lying about things that are so easily disproven?” Scarborough tweeted. “What is wrong with you?”

Those are two very good questions that keep arising.