Updated July 02, 2017 17:04:28

United States President Donald Trump has again lashed out at 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!"

Mr Trump continued his Twitter tirade into the evening with a series of tweets defending his use of social media and attacking the media.

"The FAKE & FRAUDULENT NEWS MEDIA is working hard to convince Republicans and others I should not use social media — but remember, I won the 2016 election," he said.

The President also said his use of Twitter was "MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL", not presidential, and introduced a new hashtag: #FraudNewsCNN.

CNN recently accepted the resignations of three employees involved in a retracted story about a supposed investigation into a pre-inaugural meeting between a Trump associate and the head of a Russian investment fund.

The network had no comment on Saturday's tweet.

Another target during Trump's latest Twitter barrage were US states who refused to hand over voters' information to a commission he established to investigate voter fraud, however the President did wish a "Happy Canada Day" to the country and its Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau.

Earlier Mr Trump 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.

The President renewed his criticism of the media at a rally held in Washington on Saturday night (local time) to honour military veterans.

After praising veterans from each of the US military branches and highlighting his administration's work to reform veterans' services, Mr Trump went on to lambast "fake media".

"The fake media is trying to silence us, but we will not let them," he said.

"The fake media tried to stop us from going to the White House. But I'm President, and they're not."

Attacks come after criticism over Twitter

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.

Mr Trump effectively denied the allegation in a tweet on Friday, giving a different version of what transpired around the National Enquirer piece.

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.

ABC/wires

Topics: donald-trump, social-media, government-and-politics, united-states

First posted July 02, 2017 00:53:20