When is a facelift not a facelift?

Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough respond to Donald Trump's infamous "bleeding badly from a face-lift" tweet:

"Putting aside Mr. Trump's never-ending obsession with women's blood, Mika and her face were perfectly intact, as pictures from that night reveal," they said in the column. "And though it is no one's business, the president's petulant personal attack against yet another woman's looks compels us to report that Mika has never had a face-lift. If she had, it would be evident to anyone watching 'Morning Joe' on their high-definition TV. She did have a little skin under her chin tweaked, but this was hardly a state secret. Her mother suggested she do so, and all those around her were aware of this mundane fact."

I think the "obsession with women's blood" is fascinating and deserves a lot of attention. It's not just Trump's obsession, but everyone who hopped onto the task of making that tweet the most important event in the world. Blood is vivid and it means so much to us. If it bleeds, it leads is the classic saying about journalism. Look! Blood!



It's very primal. And Trump has an instinct to reach out and grab us in our deep, secret, sensitive place. And we let him! Come on, everybody. Let's talk about how Mika is bleeding. It's like a magnet.

But I want to talk about the fussy distinction Mika and Joe made between a facelift and "a little skin under her chin tweaked." If you've just gotten a little skin under your chin tweaked, have you not gotten a facelift? Your chin is part of your face, but I guess once you go around to the underside of the chin, you're off the face and onward toward the neck, then technically it's not a "facelift."

But I went to the website of the American Association of Plastic Surgeons, to the page "Facelift" and it lists 3 kinds of incisions, "Traditional Facelift," "Limited Incision," and "Neck Lift." So it looks to me as though the expert terminology would include "a little skin under her chin tweaked" in the category "facelift."

And by the way, why are Mika and Joe acting as if it's so shameful for a woman to get a facelift? Speaking of making a "personal attack" on a "woman's looks," they seem to be implying that it's insulting say that a woman has had a facelift. Does Mika mean to lord her superiority over all the other celebrities who have had more surgery? Trump's tweet stressed the bleeding. The facelift played a secondary role as the source of the bad bleeding. He didn't say: Ugh, Mika had a facelift. He said she was imposing herself on me at a New Year's Eve party when she was bleeding badly from facelift incisions.

Mika's answer was that the incisions — which are back around the temples and ears (as I understand it from the plastic surgeons' website) — were only for the purpose of lifting the skin below the face. By presenting that as a defense to Trump's tweet, she is (unwittingly?) introducing the view that a facelift is a stain on a woman's reputation. Isn't that the retrograde, sexist idea?

I don't think Trump is anti-facelift. I assume women in his life have had facelifts and he's quite familiar with the process. That's probably why he recognized the source of the blood.

If there was blood.

Now, I'm speculating that Mika deliberately imposed on him when she was visibly bleeding to see if she could get the a fame boost — a famelift — like the one that had made Megyn Kelly such a big deal so recently. That was back on New Year's Eve, though, and now, I'm speculating that Trump deliberately delayed his reaction until Megyn Kelly's narrative had arced and cratered.