Trump: I'm a 'very stable genius'
President Trump, in Camp David for a weekend of meetings with Republican leaders and Cabinet members, was up early Saturday to fire off a series of tweets boasting about his intelligence and mental stability.
Not only is the president a genius, according to him, but “a very stable genius at that.”
After warming up with an attack on ABC News reporter Brian Ross, Trump in three tweets over 11 minutes took on “the Democrats and … the Fake News Mainstream Media” who are “taking out the old Ronald Reagan playbook and screaming mental stability and intelligence.”
“Actually,” he continued, “throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart. … I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star to President of the United States (on my first try). I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius….and a very stable genius at that!”
A provocative new book by journalist Michael Wolff, “Fire and Fury,” paints a picture of Trump as disengaged from the presidency, confused by his job, unable to absorb new information and given to childish demands and tantrums. The White House has disputed the book and charged that former adviser Steve Bannon, one of Wolff’s main sources, “lost his mind” when he was fired last summer.
Similar questions were raised about Reagan in his second term, especially after he admitted in a 1987 speech that his “mind” and “best intentions” on the Iran–Contra arms-for-hostages deal were contradicted by “the facts and the evidence.”
In 1994, five years after leaving office, Reagan announced he had Alzheimer’s disease. His son Ron later said he saw signs of dementia in his father while he was in office, although that was disputed by his doctors.
In claiming he won the presidency on his first try, Trump appears to have forgotten that he had run once before, in 2000, when he was briefly a candidate for the Reform Party nomination. He dropped out of the race after a few months with poll support of around 7 percent.
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