Trump defends his ‘mental stability’
WASHINGTON: In an extraordinary public defence of his own mental stability, Donald Trump has issued a volley of tweets that seemed guaranteed to add fuel to a raging political fire.
Suggestions in a new tell-all book that he was mentally unfit to be president were out of “the old Ronald Reagan playbook”, Trump wrote on Saturday.
“Actually,” the president added , “throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart.”
He also said he “would qualify as not smart, but genius ... and a very stable genius at that!”
The book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House , by Michael Wolff, burst into the public consciousness on Wednesday, when the Guardian reported excerpts nearly a week ahead of publication. Trump threatened to sue but succeeded only in prompting the publisher Henry Holt to bring the book forward.
Wolff presents a picture of a doomed administration lurching from crisis to crisis, steered by a childlike figure who responds to overstimulation with intense, reflexive outbursts.
“The president may not be able to restrain himself from commenting but I can restrain myself from commenting on his comments,” Wolff told the Guardian on Saturday. At a lunchtime press conference at Camp David, the president was asked why he tweeted. In a characteristically freewheeling answer, he said: “Only because I went to the best colleges or college. I...was a very excellent student, came out and made billions and billions of dollars, became one of the top business people.”