Trump boasts he is a ‘very stable genius’
PRESIDENT DEFENDS HIS MENTAL FITNESS FOLLOWING THE RELEASE OF TELL-ALL BOOK
I n an extraordinary and unprecedented public defence of his own mental stability, Donald Trump has issued a volley of tweets that seemed guaranteed to add fuel to a growing constitutional crisis.
Suggestions that he was mentally unfit to be president were out of “the old Ronald Reagan playbook”, Trump wrote yesterday.
“Actually,” the president added, “throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart”.
He also said he “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!”
The author of the book that precipitated a week of fierce and growing debate over Trump’s fitness to be president, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, had told the BBC: “I think one of the interesting effects of the book so far is a very clear emperor has no clothes effect.”
Michael Wolff said: “The story that I have told seems to present this presidency in such a way that it says he can’t do his job.
“Suddenly everywhere people are going, ‘Oh my God, it’s true, he has no clothes’. That’s the background to the perception and the understanding that will finally end ... this presidency.”
The 25th amendment of the US constitution provides for the removal of a president deemed unfit to fulfil his role if a majority of the cabinet and the vicepresident agree. Talk of such a path to removing Trump from power has increased with the publication of Wolff’s book.
In President George W. Bush’s last year in office, his former press secretary, Scott McClellan, wrote a tell-all book concluding that the Iraq War was a “serious strategic blunder” based on the “ambition, certitude and selfdeceit” of a White House that was not fully honest with the American people.
The President’s remaining advisers were livid at what they considered the betrayal of an aide who had been with Bush since his Texas days. But when Dana Perino, who then held the same spokesman’s job, expressed her indignation, Bush sighed and told her to find a way to forgive McClellan or risk being consumed by anger.
First instinct
Forgiveness is not exactly President Donald Trump’s first instinct, as he made clear this week when a new book quoted his former chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, offering his own harsh judgements about the White House where he once worked. Every president, it seems, goes through the spin cycle of former aides and revelatory books — some they write themselves, others they are quoted in — and every president has to find a way to grapple with the questions of loyalty and candour that invariably arise. Trump chose blunt force.
What is different about Bannon’s stark assessments in Michael
Wolff’s new book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White
House, is not that a former aide would speak out, but that it would happen so early in a presidency.
Most books of this sort appear later in a president’s tenure, or even after its end, not before the one-year anniversary. But then again, Trump’s White House has burnt through staff so quickly that the usual patterns have accelerated dramatically.
Strained ties with the truth
In a way, what is shocking about the book is that its depiction of a capricious, uninformed and erratic president is not really all that shocking. Indeed, while the White House and various others challenge the accuracy of specific episodes in the book, its broader portrayal largely squares with the journalistic coverage of the past year based on the President’s own staff.
Many readers and viewers have become numb to the stories after watching them play out in public day in and day out. Twitter has made clear that Trump veers wildly from subject to subject, fight to fight. Fact checkers have made clear that he has a strained relationship with the truth.
Bannon is quoted in the book saying things that other advisers have said confidentially for months — that the President is stunningly undisciplined with no patience or interest in learning and driven by intemperate, sometimes absurd motivations.
At one point, Bannon describes Trump acting “like a nine-year-old”, an observation that has power not because it was unique to those who worked for the president but because it is now on the record in Bannon’s name.
Suddenly everywhere people are going ‘oh my God, it’s true, he has no clothes’. That’s the background to the perception and the understanding that will finally end ... this presidency.” Michael Wolff | Author He used Sloppy Steve Bannon, who cried when he got fired and begged for his job. Now Sloppy Steve has been dumped like a dog by almost everyone. Too bad!” Donald Trump | US President