Image copyright
@FLOTUS/Twitter
US President Donald Trump has lashed out at media reports about Melania Trump's rare public appearances.
"The Fake News Media has been so unfair, and vicious, to my wife," he tweeted on Wednesday, dismissing suggestions of a "facelift" or "abuse".
She is due to make her first appearance before the media in weeks on Wednesday.
The first lady attended a White House event on Monday, her first public appearance since treatment last month for a "benign kidney condition".
But the presidential press corps were not invited to that function for military families.
In a pair of tweets on Wednesday, Mr Trump railed against ongoing media speculation about Mrs Trump's whereabouts.
He later said "four reporters" had spotted Mrs Trump at the White House last week "walking merrily along to a meeting".
But he said they did not report the "sighting because it would hurt the sick narrative that she was living in a different part of the world, was really ill, or whatever".
Mrs Trump is scheduled later to appear with her husband at the headquarters of the Federal Emergency Management Agency in Washington for a hurricane season briefing.
MSNBC co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinksi, who are engaged, responded with arch tweets alluding to Mr Trump's taunting post last summer that Ms Brzezinksi was "bleeding badly from a face-lift" during a visit to his Florida golf retreat.
Last week, Mrs Trump's Twitter account addressed the rumours around her nearly-month long disappearance.
Wild theories have circulated online, including that Mrs Trump had moved back to New York with their son, Barron, or that she was co-operating with special counsel Robert Mueller.
On Sunday, the first lady's spokeswoman, Stephanie Grisham, confirmed that Mrs Trump would not be accompanying her husband to the G7 summit in Canada this week or the scheduled landmark North Korea nuclear summit in Singapore on 12 June.