Donald Trump is once again pushing the limit, bringing Megyn Kelly’s anatomy into a feud that had already opened him to charges of sexism — and the risk of losing support among the Fox News anchor’s rabid following.

After a day of escalating hostility, Trump took his attacks on Kelly to the next level on Friday night, apparently insinuating that the moderator had been menstruating when she questioned him during Thursday’s first Republican debate.


“You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her — wherever,” he told anchor Don Lemon during an appearance on CNN.

The crudeness of the comment sparked an immediate flurry of rebukes, including from RedState.com’s Erick Erickson, who revoked an invitation for Trump to speak at his Saturday conference on the grounds that it showed he wasn’t a “legitimate” candidate.

On Saturday morning, Trump appeared to tweet a clarification of his previous remark: “Re Megyn Kelly quote: ‘you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever’ (NOSE). Just got on w/thought.”

He also released a statement lashing Erickson and the decision to exclude him. “… not only is Erick a total loser, he has a history of supporting establishment losers in failed campaigns so it is an honor to be uninvited from his event. Mr. Trump is an outsider and does not fit his agenda.”

Nevertheless, Trump was a hot topic of conversation at the RedState event. Speaking there, Republican 2016 candidate Mike Huckabee said, “The Republican Party is not engaged in a war on women, the Republican Party is not engaged in saying things about Megyn Kelly,” he said. “One individual is.”

Carly Fiorina, the only female Republican presidential candidate in the race, took to Twitter to condemn Trump.

“Mr. Trump. There. Is. No. Excuse,” she wrote. “I stand with @megynkelly.”

In a tweet sent Saturday, Gov. Scott Walker also repeated the “stand with @megynkelly” line, adding, “There’s no excuse for Trump’s comments.”

Gov. John Kasich tweeted a statement, saying, “Everyone deserves respect and dignity, whether they agree with you or not. You don’t tear people down just because they disagree with you or stand up to you or question you.”

In a statement, Sen. Lindsey Graham said, “I applaud Erik [sic] Erickson for doing the right thing when he disinvited Donald Trump from a gathering of Republican activists. As a party, we are better to risk losing without Donald Trump than trying to win with him. Enough already with Mr. Trump.”

Also in a statement, Sen. Rand Paul called Trump’s statements “inappropriate and offensive.”

And then there was the nature of the target itself. Unlike undocumented immigrants, John McCain or Rosie O’Donnell, the Fox News anchor enjoys a huge following among the network’s viewers, who happen to make up the core of the Republican primary electorate. So picking a fight with Kelly — as Trump did when he chided her during a tough debate question about insults he’s lobbed at women, dissed her in the spin room, and tweeted his complaints about her — carries risks that Trump’s other feuds do not.

So does making such a gendered attack on a journalist at a time when his party is battling the perception that it’s waging a “war on women.”

But if Trump world is worried about taking on the only person who might be more popular with the Republican base than their boss is right now, they’re not showing it.

Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, maintained that the mogul’s willingness to take on Kelly makes him the kind of equal-opportunity brawler Republicans will need next fall.

“If the Democratic nominee is going to be Hillary Clinton, then you would want a strong person to stand up to make America great again,” he said earlier on Friday, before the “blood” comment.

Trump political adviser Roger Stone sounded a slightly more cautious note. “Certainly Fox reaches a disproportionate number of Republican primary voters,” he said, adding that as of Friday afternoon he hadn’t yet sorted out his thoughts about the matter.

Stone said Trump was satisfied with his debate performance when the two conferred last night. And Stone offered a positive assessment, if not a ringing endorsement, of his boss’s performance. “He held his own. He was fine. He made all his key points.”

But Trump and his associates clearly had a bone to pick after a debate in which Fox’s moderators, especially Kelly, trained some of their toughest questions on the controversial front-runner. Trump’s annoyance showed during the debate when he told her, “I’ve been very nice to you, although I could probably maybe not be, based on the way you have treated me” in response to a question about his name-calling of women (which he joked he’d only ever done to his longtime Twitter nemesis O’Donnell). After the debate, Trump said Kelly “behaved very nasty to me.”

It only devolved from there.

In the early morning hours on Friday, his Twitter account tweeted that Kelly was “not very good or professional”and retweeted anti-Kelly tweets from supporters, including one calling her a “bimbo.”

Trump’s deputy and surrogate, Michael Cohen, retweeted a tweet from a Trump fan (@hawaiiluvstrump) after the debate that included the hashtag “boycottmegynkelly” and the message “we can gut her.”

Cohen told POLITICO that he does not believe the tweet implied any sort of physical violence but did not back down from his beef with Kelly. “It is interesting to note that the only attacks against Mr. Trump last night came from the moderators,” Cohen said in a statement. “It appeared to all viewers that it was a coordinated effort. Megyn Kelly clearly tried the hardest and failed as Mr. Trump has been deemed the winner of last night’s debate by multiple polls and media outlets.”

Because he works for Trump Enterprises, rather than the campaign, Cohen said that his being in conflict with Kelly shouldn’t affect Trump’s political fortunes. “It doesn’t matter if I am or I’m not,” he said.

Monmouth University pollster Patrick Murray told POLITICO after Thursday’s debate that Trump’s back-and-forth with Kelly, in which he dismissed her question about insults lobbed at women as “political correctness,” could end up hurting him with female Republican primary voters, a group he is currently winning, though by a smaller margin than he’s winning men.

And despite the negative reaction of a focus group convened for Fox News by Republican messaging guru Frank Luntz to Trump’s interactions with Kelly, as well as his refusal to pledge to support the eventual Republican nominee, there were indications that his trademark Trump bluster continued to play well with important Republican constituencies.

(Trump tweeted that Luntz “is a low class slob who came to my office looking for consulting work and I had zero interest. Now he picks anti-Trump panels!” In a statement, Luntz told POLITICO, “I really enjoy him. I respect him, I respect his success as a businessman, and I respect his ability to tap into the genuine frustrations of the American people. His performance last night was Trump being Trump — and so are his attacks today.” An aide to Luntz said the messaging guru did not believe Trump himself was responsible for the “bimbo” retweet about Kelly: “We talked about that and agreed that one of his staffers had to have tweeted that she’s a bimbo. Even he wouldn’t use that word about her.”)

Attendees who gathered to watch the debate from the RedState summit of conservative activists in Atlanta cheered Trump’s performance and a highly unscientific reader poll on the Drudge Report, the news aggregation site beloved by conservatives, gave Trump an overwhelming victory in the debate, with 45 percent of respondents — more than 250,000 people as of Friday afternoon — saying he won, compared with 14 percent for the second-place Ted Cruz.

Katie Glueck contributed to this report.