Donald Trump calls Bette Midler a 'washed-up psycho'

The US President was responding to Midler's Twitter apology for posting a quote wrongly attributed to Trump

US President Donald Trump has called actress and singer Bette Midler a 'washed up psycho'
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You might think that, with his state visit to the UK still ongoing, Donald Trump would have enough to think about. But the US President has somehow managed to find the time to log onto Twitter and call the singer and actress Bette Midler a "washed-up psycho".

Sorry, what? Yes, at some point around 1.30am GMT, presumably after he had enjoyed dinner on Tuesday evening with the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall at Winsfield House in London, Trump must have taken his phone out and decided that it was just the moment to settle a score with Midler.

“Washed up psycho, Bette Midler, was forced to apologise 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,” the tweet reads. “She got caught, just like the Fake News Media gets caught. A sick scammer!”

Trump was triggered after Midler, who has sold over 30 million records worldwide, had earlier been forced to apologise on Twitter after she posted a fake quote on Sunday, which she attributed to Trump. The quote, which Trump has been wrongly accused of saying in 1998, includes lines such as, “[Republicans] are the dumbest group of voters in the country. They love anything on Fox News.” The quote was exposed as fake in 2015.

Midler wrote on Twitter: “I apologise; this quote turns out to be a fake from way back in ’15-16. Don’t know how I missed it , but it sounds SO much like him that I believed it was true!” She later added: “Because there are so many lies, most of them generated by Trump himself, that the task of separating the truth from the lies is impossible. Which is just how he likes it.”

Trump and Midler have locked horns in the past with Trump calling the singer “extremely unattractive”. But Midler is showing no signs of backing down in this particular battle. Since apologising over the fake quote, she has continued to attack the US President on Twitter, describing the white waistcoat he wore to a recent white tie dinner as a “proportion fail”.

And in what appears to be an escalation of hostilities, Midler's latest tweet about Trump suggests that someone should "give him a shiv", which is slang for a knife stab, before adding, "I mean, shove."

Many people on Twitter felt this comment was a step too far, with one Twitter user saying, "jokes about knifing people aren't funny".