Grammy and Emmy winning actress and singer Bette Midler, known in part for her ongoing Twitter battle with the US president, has again lashed at a Trump, but this time it was first lady Melania Trump, whom the show-business personality mocked in a limerick.
The 5-line poem implies Melania prefers to hide from her husband in the White House’s East Room, while Trump “plays with his own schizophrenia.”
While some Twitter users praised the actress for “pure poetry,” others mocked the limerick, pointing out Midler had misspelled “Pennsylvania.”
Prior to 2019, some members of the US media circulated rumors that the first couple’s marriage was in trouble. The two were repeatedly shown on video with the president trying to hold Melania’s hand in public as the first lady repeatedly rejected him. In his book “Team of Vipers,” author Cliff Simms stated, however, that the presidential family fares much better than people think. Whatever the case, Melania Trump puts little effort in trying to dispel the rumors.
"I know people like to speculate and media like to speculate about our marriage and circulate the gossip. I understand the gossip sells newspapers, magazines […] and, unfortunately, we live in this kind of world today " she said in an interview with ABC last year, adding that she and the president were “fine.”
The Midler poem comes less than a month after the president described the singer as a “washed-up psycho” after she apologized for tweeting a fake quote attributed to Trump.
“If I were to run, I’d run as a Republican. They’re the dumbest group of voters in the country. They believe anything on Fox News. I could lie and they’d still eat it up. I bet my numbers would be terrific,” was the quote Trump supposedly gave People Magazine in 1998. Fact checking revealed that the quote is fake.
“I apologize; this quote turns out to be a fake from way back in ‘15-16,” Midler wrote after social media users pointed out her error. “Don’t know how I missed it, it sounds SO much like him that I believed it was true!”
On 18 June, Trump officially announced his run for reelection in the US 2020 presidential campaign. He will face 24 Democratic opponents and 1 Republican challenger.