The kind of insult a person lobs tells you a lot about his or her character – especially the across-the-bow shot out of nowhere. What, then, to make of our Dear Leader's two tweets from Thursday morning about "Morning Joe" co-host Mika Brzezinski, who also happens to be the daughter of well-respected and recently deceased Carter administration national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski:

I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don't watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came.. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 29, 2017

...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! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 29, 2017

So, to recap, the high-profile journalist is "low I.Q.," "crazy," had a less-than-quality face-lift, according to the president and also wanted to hang out with him – but he wasn't interested. It's the junior high school hallway call-out deluxe package: The girl is stupid, crazy, unattractive and has an unreciprocated interest in him. (Note to the president: My mom told me that when boys say mean things like that about me, it means they have crushes on me, and don't think I like them back. I've yet to see much evidence to the contrary.)

Brzezinski, for her part, tweeted, sans context, a picture of the box of a box of Cheerios cereal, which read "Made for little hands," an apparent reference to the 25-year-old Graydon Carter insult about Trump's anatomy that apparently continues to irk the president.

A coterie of Republican senators tweeted their disappointment in the president's mean-spirited remarks – which would seem to fall squarely under the rubric of his wife's once-announced but yet-to-begin campaign against cyberbullying; even House Speaker Paul Ryan condemned the president's nasty cracks.

But it's hardly the first time that Republican politicians have found fault with the president's myriad insults about women, yet continued to support his candidacy and his administration. And President Donald Trump's spokeswoman, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, defended the remarks, suggesting that Brzezinski had brought the criticism on herself because of her show's coverage of the administration, which Huckabee Sanders said amounted to them having "bullied" the president.

It is, of course, not even the first time that Trump has suggested that an insufficiently friendly journalist was bleeding from her face: After the August 2015 Republican primary debate moderated by Megyn Kelly, he told CNN, "You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever," widely understood to be a reference to Kelly possibly having been menstruating. (Republicans were outraged then, too – including Huckabee Sanders' father, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee – but Trump became the party's nominee less than a year later.)

Now, a little context for the non-insult parts of the president's Twitter fit: Shortly after New Year's, Brzezinski's co-host and now-fiance Joe Scarborough faced criticism after New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman wrote, and then tweeted a picture that confirmed, that the two colleagues made an appearance at then-President-elect Trump's Mar-a-Lago New Year's Eve bash. According to Scarborough's account to CNN, he met with Trump alone on December 30 to discuss a potential interview, at which point Trump asked him and Mika to come by at 7 p.m. the following evening, without mentioning the party. They went, met privately with Trump for 15 minutes and departed, according to Scarborough; Haberman's reporting confirmed that they didn't stay very long.

Notably, the grainy picture, provided by Haberman, does not show Brzezinski "bleeding badly," and none of the other people in the frame are reacting to her as though she's bleeding profusely from surgical sites on or around her face. And, if and when you run into anyone bleeding badly after surgery, the proper response is to call an ambulance, not to tweet about it six months later. So, somehow, Trump saw a woman six months ago, apparently decided later that he was mad about something she'd said and, as the president of the United States, announced to the world that she'd had a face-lift and – possibly in order to pre-empt any criticism that he was just being sexist by insisting she'd had plastic surgery – claimed that she'd been bleeding ("badly") from the surgical sites in front of hundreds of witnesses.

At this point, to suggest that the president has an impulse control problem is maybe too mild of an assertion; to claim that he can't help but conflate his opinion of women as people (and especially as professional adversaries) with his assessment of their physical attractiveness to him is hardly even controversial. Trump is who Trump is and who he has always been: As Carter noted 25 years ago, he's thin-skinned and vulgar; he seemingly views women strictly in terms of whether they are professionally useful or worth sleeping with; and he's more interested in the emotional high from people congratulating him for good burns on Twitter than he is in the nuances of the Senate Obamacare repeal bill that's supposed to be one of the signature achievements of his first year in office.