US President Donald Trump has escalated his attacks on two television hosts, labelling them “crazy” and “dumb” despite days of bipartisan criticism over his initial attack on the pair

Mr Trump attracted widespread condemnation from across the partisan divide over tweets on Thursday in which he called co-host of the MSNBC Morning Joe program Mika Brzezinski “low I.Q. Crazy Mika”, and said she was “bleeding badly from a face lift” when she visited his Mar-A-Lago estate around New Year’s Eve.

He referred to her co-host and fiance Joe Scarborough, a former Republican US congressman, as “Psycho Joe”.

Dragging the scandal into a third day, Mr Trump tweeted on Saturday: “Crazy Joe Scarborough and dumb as a rock Mika are not bad people, but their low rated show is dominated by their NBC bosses. Too bad!”

Earlier the President tweeted about MSNBC’s dumping of former Fox News presenter and veteran journalists Greta Van Susteren’s program on the cable network that began earlier this year.

Van Susteren did not respond to the tweet.

Mr Trump’s latest attack came on the heels of a response by the two hosts yesterday, where they questioned the mental health of the US President and accused him of trying to exert pressure on them over unfavourable coverage.

“This year, top White House staff members warned that the National Enquirer was planning to publish a negative article about us unless we begged the President to have the story spiked,” they wrote in a column in The Washington Post titled “Donald Trump is not well”.

“We ignored their desperate pleas.”

Scarborough told the Morning Joe show he received calls from three top administration officials asking the co-hosts to call Mr Trump and apologise for their coverage of his administration.

They told him that if he called and apologised, Mr Trump would get the story killed, Scarborough said.

“The calls kept coming, and kept coming. And they were like, ‘Call, you need to call. Please call. Come on, Joe. Just pick up the phone and call him’,” Scarborough said.

TV hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski have accused President Trump of trying to destroy their reputations as serious commentators.

In a response to Mr Trump’s claim Scarborough had called him to get the National Enquirer article stopped, Scarborough tweeted that it was “yet another lie”.

Republicans at Congress and others had sharply rebuked Mr Trump, who has previously been forced to defend himself from claims of sexism, over his initial attacks late last week.

The tweets “represent what is wrong with American politics, not the greatness of America”, said Republican senator Lindsey Graham, while another Republican senator, Ben Sasse, called Mr Trump’s remarks, “beneath the dignity of your office”.

“I don’t see that as an appropriate comment,” Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan said of Mr Trump’s tweets.

There was no immediate comment from the National Enquirer, a tabloid that specialises in scandalous stories about celebrities and has been supportive of Mr Trump.