Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

‘Washed Up Psycho’: Trump and Bette Midler Trade Barbs On Twitter

“Be courteous to all, but intimate with few,” George Washington said. Taking a slightly different tack, President Donald Trump tweeted on Tuesday to admonish performer Bette Midler for attributing a fake quote to the president.

“Washed up psycho @BetteMidler was forced to apologize for a statement she attributed to me that turned out to be totally fabricated by her in order to make ‘your great president’ look really bad,” Trump tweeted. “She got caught, just like the Fake News Media gets caught. A sick scammer!”

Midler apologized on Monday for having tweeted a faux-Trump quote calling Republicans “the dumbest group of voters” which has been debunked. “Don’t know how I missed it, but it sounds SO much like him that I believed it was true!” she wrote, acknowledging the mistake with a link to an article explaining that the quote is fake.

However, the President’s ire was only expressed on Twitter the next day, after Midler had tweeted about him once again. “Trump said he was greeted by thousands in the UK, but they were actually thousands of protesters. How does he always hear the opposite of the truth?” Midler wrote, adding, “Donald, if you’re reading this you SHOULD NOT slam your dick in a door!”

Midler rounded out the day by breaking down Trump’s sartorial choices. “PROPORTION FAIL!!” she wrote, on an image of the President dressed to meet the Queen. “Fire the tailor!!”

This isn’t the first public altercation between the two iconic blonde tweeters — in 2012, Trump tweeted, “@Bette_Midler talks about my hair but I’m not allowed to talk about her ugly face or body — so I won’t. Is this a double standard?”

Midler seemed to take the President’s insults in stride on Tuesday night, taking to Twitter to thank her followers for seeing her through her brush with power. “As a newly washed up psycho, I am very grateful for your thoughts and prayers,” she wrote.

Jenny Singer is the deputy life/features editor for the Forward. You can reach her at [email protected] or on Twitter @jeanvaljenny

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.