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President Trump unified Washington Thursday in opposition to a pair of tweets he wrote in which he criticized a female MSNBC anchor and said she had undergone plastic surgery.

"Obviously, I don't see this as an appropriate comment," House Speaker Paul Ryan said when asked about the tweets Thursday.

"I think it's a blatantly sexist [tweet]," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said of Trump's social media rant. "That really saddens me because it is so beneath the dignity of the president of the United States to engage in such behavior."

Criticism of Trump's comments poured in from both sides of the aisle and spilled into the White House briefing room on Thursday, where deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders faced an onslaught of questions about whether the president crossed an ethical line with his tweets.

The host he attacked, MSNBC "Morning Joe" co-anchor Mika Brzezinski, has been an outspoken critic of Trump and has even questioned his mental stability.

Few rallied to Trump's defense in the wake of his attack on Brzezinski, and even the president's strongest supporters questioned the wisdom of his early-morning Twitter tirade.

Laura Ingraham, a conservative radio host who has been considered as a possible candidate for press secretary, chided Trump for diverting attention away from his administration's crackdown on illegal immigration.

And Mike Huckabee, a longtime Trump supporter and father to Sanders, stopped short Thursday of saying his daughter defended the president's words and cautioned Trump against using the same harsh tactics in future situations.

Trump's tweets about Brzezinski come as Republicans in the Senate struggle to sell their Obamacare repeal legislation to the public in one voice amid intra-party disputes about the direction of the healthcare plan.

The president, who had stayed mostly on the sidelines of the Obamacare repeal debate as senators put together a bill behind closed doors over the past month, emerged as a leading spokesman for the bill after the GOP released it last week. His latest tweets could provide a distraction from his efforts to build support for the policy.

But it wouldn't be the first time Trump's social media antics disrupted the work of his White House and united lawmakers against his Twitter feed.

Earlier this month, for example, Trump seemingly announced that he was under investigation for alleged obstruction of justice just as the frenzy surrounding former FBI Director James Comey's testimony before Congress had finally begun to die down.

The tweet revived scrutiny of Trump's efforts to downplay an investigation into his former associate, Gen. Mike Flynn, and gave Democrats room to hammer home the latest set of allegations against his administration.

In early June, Trump threw a wrench into his Justice Department's efforts to defend an executive order temporarily suspending immigration from the Middle East by embracing the "travel ban" nickname with which several courts had taken issue.

Trump's tweets soon surfaced in court documents as critics of the so-called "travel ban" fought to block it in the legal system.

The president touched off a firestorm of controversy in May when he hinted that the White House may have "tapes" of conversations between Trump and Comey.

Comey cited the tweet as the motivation behind his decision to share details from his Trump talks with the media, which in turn prompted the deputy attorney general to appoint a special counsel.

And in March Trump drew widespread condemnation with his claim that former President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower.

In each case, Trump put Republicans in the awkward position of having to defend his rants and stole the focus from their attempts to build support for GOP legislative items.

The White House has relied on a familiar tactic to dismiss questions about the president's disruptive social media habits.

For nearly every day that's dominated by an off-message Trump tweet, White House officials have clung to the line so ubiquitous that it has become a running joke in some corners of the media: "The tweet speaks for itself."

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Trump's tweets unnerve Republican allies - Washington Examiner