Trump went on a twitter rant about a woman bleeding from a face-lift - here's what actually happens when you get one
The president claimed Brzezinski once visited his Mar-a-Lago golf estate in Florida while bleeding because of a face-lift.
"I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don't watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came... to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year's Eve, and insisted on joining me," Trump tweeted. "She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!"
Trump's claims about Brzezinski are unverified - there is no proof the situation he described ever occurred, though there are photos of Scarborough at Mar-a-Lago on New Years Eve.
Dr. Clyde Ishii, a practicing plastic surgeon in Honolulu, Hawaii and the president of the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, told Business Insider that severe bleeding following a face-lift is very rare.
"Typically following a face-lift a patient is going to have some swelling and some bruising - those are the common things that can occur," he said.
Ishii usually recommends that his patients wait a couple of weeks before going out in public, but said bleeding is only likely to happen within a day or two after a procedure. And even then, it's rare to see any significant amount of blood unless a patient were to bend over or exert themselves, raising their blood pressure during those initial recovery days.
"You have fresh suture lines, so like like all surgery fresh suture lines can bleed," Ishii said. "It'd bleed a little bit, but it wouldn't be profuse. If this person [Brzezinski] truly did have a lot of bleeding, then you've got to think maybe the person might have had the face-lift yesterday and then was bending over and bled at some point. But short of that, it's probably not likely to happen."
Ishii estimates, however, that 3 or 4% of patients develop a little blood clot under the skin after surgery - this is called a hematoma, and generally has to be removed by a doctor. It happens because a face-lift involves elevating the skin from an underlying layer called the fascia, which is what actually gets tightened in a typical procedure. Once the fascia is pulled tight, the skin is retraced onto it, and any excess skin is removed.
"Whenever large bodies of tissue are elevated, you can develop a hematoma," Ishii said. It is important to note, however, that it's not known whether Brzezinski experienced this - or even got a face-lift at all.
According to media reports, Donald Trump used to be friendly with Brzezinski and Scarborough, who are currently engaged to be married. Vanity Fair even quoted Scarborough describing an instance in which Jared Kushner and Donald Trump each offered to officiate the couple's wedding at the White House. But the relationship between the MSNBC hosts and the president has since turned sour.
The tweet Brzezinski fired back after Trump's statement about her face-lift shows the current state of animosity between the two: