Bedbugs....

'Tough guy!': Trump mocks Bret Stephens over bedbug controversy

By QUINT FORGEY

President Donald Trump on Wednesday doubled-down on his mockery of conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, sarcastically ribbing the journalist as a “Tough guy!” for deactivating his Twitter account following criticism by a college professor.

“‘The infestation of bedbugs at The New York Times office’ @OANN was perhaps brought in by lightweight journalist Bret Stephens, a Conservative who does anything that his bosses at the paper tell him to do!” Trump wrote on Twitter, mentioning the handle for the right-wing One America News Network.

“He is now quitting Twitter after being called a ‘bedbug.’ Tough guy!” Trump continued.

After David Karpf, an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, likened Stephens to a bedbug in a tweet on Monday, Stephens admonished Karpf in an email and copied his university provost on the correspondence.

“I’m often amazed about the things supposedly decent people are prepared to say about other people -- people they’ve never met -- on Twitter. I think you’ve set a new standard,” Stephens wrote, according to a copy of the message Karpf posted to Twitter.

“I would welcome the opportunity for you to come to my home, meet my wife and kids, talk to us for … a few minutes, and then call me a ‘bedbug’ to my face,” Stephens wrote. “That would take some genuine courage and intellectual integrity on your part.”

As viral taunting of Stephens for his reaction to the seemingly innocuous criticism intensified, the columnist on Tuesday announced he would be leaving Twitter, calling the social media platform “a sewer” that “brings out the worst in humanity.”

Addressing the controversy on MSNBC on Tuesday, Stephens asserted that “there’s a bad history of … being analogized to insects that goes back to a lot of totalitarian regimes in the past.”

Slate on Monday published a leaked internal email warning Times employees about “evidence of bedbugs” in the paper’s offices. The biting insects made an appearance in another media narrative this week after the president promoted his Trump National Doral Miami resort as a potential location for next year’s G-7 summit of world leaders.

A 2016 lawsuit claimed a room in the Doral's Jack Nicklaus villa had a bed bug infestation, and Trump has sought to defend his property from the accusation on Twitter this week.

“A made up Radical Left Story about Doral bedbugs, but Bret Stephens is loaded up with them!” Trump tweeted Tuesday night. “Been calling me wrong for years, along with the few remaining Never Trumpers - All Losers!”