Trump says he’s a ‘stable genius’
WASHINGTON — President Trump said Saturday that he’s a “very stable genius,” a day after a new book about his first year in the White House said that many of his top aides and confidants consider him unfit to hold office.
“Throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart. Crooked Hillary Clinton also played these cards very hard and, as everyone knows, went down in flames,” Trump wrote on Twitter.
In the posts, Trump also said he went from being a very successful businessman to top TV 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!”
The comments followed the release of Michael Wolff ’s book “Fire and Fury,” which details dysfunction, chaos and incompetence in the Trump White House — allegations the administration has denied. Wolff said in an interview with NBC on Friday that “100 percent of the people around” the president question his intelligence and fitness for office.
Trump, 71, is scheduled for a physical this week at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., consistent with the practice of previous presidents.
In his Twitter messages, Trump said his detractors, including Democrats and the media, were shifting from stories about Russian collusion with members of his campaign team, which he’s repeatedly denied, to focusing on his fitness for office.
Those critics “are taking out the old Ronald Reagan playbook and screaming mental stability and intelligence,” Trump said.
Former President Reagan disclosed in November 1994, almost six years after leaving office, that he’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease that year. He died in 2004.
The publication of Wolff ’s book, initially via excerpts focused on Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon and in its entirety Friday, sapped the momentum with which the president entered 2018 after the passage of a Republican tax cut bill in December.
Instead of focusing on legislative priorities ahead of midterm elections in November, Trump and the White House spent the week on defense. That included a public falling out with Bannon, since nicknamed “Sloppy Steve” by the president, and the sending of a cease-and-desist letter demanding that Wolff ’s publisher, Henry Holt and Co., stop distribution of the book. The company instead moved up the publication date by several days.
On Twitter Thursday, Trump called the book “phony” and “full of lies, misrepresentations and sources that don’t exist.”
“They all say he is like a child,” Wolff told NBC. “What they mean by that is he has a need for immediate gratification. It’s all about him.”
“This man does not read, does not listen. He’s like a pinball, just shooting off the sides,” Wolff said. “They say he’s a moron, an idiot.”
“It’s absolutely outrageous to make these types of allegations” about Trump’s mental fitness, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told Fox News on Friday.
While the president said he never spoke to Wolff for the book, the author said he spoke to Trump during the campaign and after the inauguration. “Whether he realized it was an interview or not,” the conversations weren’t off the record, Wolff said.
Trump’s campaign released a letter from his doctor in September 2016, several weeks before the election, saying he was in “excellent physical health.”