President Donald Trump got his ass handed to him yes again after he lost yet another court battle to slap his own name in every nook, cranny, and crevice of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, prompting the Trump-led board to shutter the famous and beloved performing arts center altogether.
As a result of that brutal ruling, the president is tailspinning into one of his worst temper tantrums to date. But if he thought he was going to take all his ire out on Joyce Beatty, he thought wrong.
Ohio Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty -- who maintains her ex officio position on the Kennedy Center Board of Trustees through her congressional leadership role, making her one of the few members not hand-installed by Trump himself -- filed a lawsuit in December to stop the board-approved renaming of the Kennedy Center.
Now that he's coming to the stark realization that his dream of turning the performing arts venue into a tacky interpretation of Mar-a-Lago will likely never come to fruition, the president has taken it upon himself to direct his rage and vitriol at the woman he believes is responsible for raining on his parade.
Appearing on MS NOW's The Weeknight, Beatty publicly revealed the president's deeply unhinged behavior after the embarrassing court ruling.
"Well, we were in court right before we went into the board meeting. So they opened up the board meeting by informing the board that we had again, Beatty V. Trump, Beatty had been victorious and he went into a tantrum," Beatty explained.
"I mean, let me just make it simple. It was the most unprofessional thing that I've ever witnessed or been a part of."
The Democratic congresswoman went on to explain that Trump targeted and attacked her specifically, quickly devolving into name-calling and unhinged insults. But Beatty made it clear that she did not take the president's abuse lying down.
In fact, she went for the man's throat in front of the entire board of trustees.
"He went into name-calling from everything, from trying to say that I was an obstructionist," Beatty said. "I was dumb, he said, ‘I think you’re incompetent.’ And I said, ‘I know you’re incompetent.’"
"And I looked to the chair who was chairing, and I said, are we really going to do this? This is unprofessional," she continued before pointedly adding, "But I was not going to let him call me awful things."
He said he was going to hold me responsible if something fell out of the ceiling and killed someone.
And I told him, I said, you’re already killing people. We’re at war.
We also have people who are starving. You’re doing this. And then he wanted to talk about how great he was with developing, and he didn’t know anything about me, but I had never done anything. This was the biggest thing I had done.
So I reminded him that he had more bankruptcies than anybody in the room.
I mean, it really went there because I was not going to let him. He was there in his role as chairman of the board. I was not going to let him bully me, intimidate me, and the facts stand for themselves.
Donald Trump has spent the last decade carefully constructing an environment in which everyone around him not only reveres him, but is openly afraid of him. In fact, he's purposely surrounded himself with so many devout loyalists who tell him exactly what he wants to hear that NYT's Maggie Haberman recently described him as completely detached from reality.
Joyce Beatty was all too happy to give him a heaping helping of it.
