A Petulant Child

Ahead of President Donald Trump's trip to a Ford Motor plant in Ypsilanti on May 21, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel wrote him a letter outlining the rules for visiting her state: Masks are required.

Trump, who has consistently flouted his own government's recommendation that face coverings be worn in public settings, wore a mask for the private portion of his Ford tour but took it off for the public event in front of cameras, despite the Ford facility's own mask requirement.

Frustrated, Nessel did something that caught the president's attention: She compared him to "a petulant child who refuses to follow the rules" on CNN.

Trump responded by trashing her in a pair of tweets, calling her the "Wacky Do Nothing Attorney General of Michigan, Dana Nessel" — to which she responded, in part, that she was "impressed" he knew her name, a nod to Trump's habit of bashing Governor Whitmer as "that woman from Michigan" and his attack on Michigan's elections chief, Jocelyn Benson, as an unnamed "rogue Secretary of State."

"I was infuriated and exasperated, because I know that for every person who goes into a place of business where they're told to wear a mask, and they see the president not wearing one, their reaction is going to be, 'The president of the United States doesn't have to wear one. Why should I?'" she said Friday of Trump's Ford visit. "This isn't funny, these are people's lives."

In an interview, she listed all the ways he's made it more difficult for her and her colleagues to battle the COVID-19 outbreak, such as encouraging protesters who opposed the governor's lockdown to take to the streets and threatening to withhold funding over the state's efforts to expand vote-by-mail.

"I'm tired of having to pretend that something isn't very wrong with the man that is our president," she said. "I never thought I'd be in a Twitter war with the president of the United States, but I never thought we'd have a president of the United States quite like Donald Trump."

--  NBC News