On Saturday morning, President Donald Trump characterized himself as a “very stable genius” who is “like, really smart” in a series of tweets fired off from the Camp David presidential countryside retreat, where he was supposed to be meeting with lawmakers about 2018 priorities such as infrastructure, the budget, and health care.
Trump tweets that he’s a genius and “a very stable genius at that!”
The president lashed out Saturday morning after Fox News talks about his mental state.
Emily Stewart covered business and economics for Vox and wrote the newsletter The Big Squeeze, examining the ways ordinary people are being squeezed under capitalism. Before joining Vox, she worked for TheStreet.
Apparently reacting to a new round of questions surrounding his mental health, the president used Twitter to defend himself in the weekend’s early morning hours. The tweets seemed to be spurred by a Fox News segment.
The discussion about the president’s mental state has been intensifying in medical circles, the media, and Congress in recent weeks.
On Friday, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders fielded questions about suggestions that Trump might be mentally unfit to serve as president; she characterized them as “disgraceful and laughable.”
Later that evening, the president tweeted from Camp David, calling the author of a new book about him a “total loser” and describing a former top adviser’s firing as being “dumped like a dog.” By Saturday morning, still at Camp David, Trump was having a field day online; he fired off several tweets about his mental stability. (He also tweeted about the unemployment rate and an ABC News reporter suspended by the network over a reporting error.)
Bandy Lee, a Yale psychiatrist who last month traveled to Capitol Hill to meet with a group of Democratic lawmakers (and one Republican) to brief them on Trump’s mental health, told Vox’s Eliza Barclay recently she believes special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictments brought about a “mental health crisis” for Trump, who is not able to cope well with ordinary stresses. She is among a number of professionals in the field calling for an emergency evaluation of Trump’s mental state.
Questions about the president’s mental fitness also appear in Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, the salacious new book about the early months of the Trump White House by longtime media writer Michael Wolff.
Fire and Fury is full of dishy gossip, although its veracity is often unclear. Wolff’s book depicts a deeply unprepared, incurious president surrounded by toadying advisers concerned about his ability to do the job. Wolff’s described what reporting the book was like in the Hollywood Reporter this week:
Everybody was painfully aware of the increasing pace of his repetitions. It used to be inside of 30 minutes he’d repeat, word-for-word and expression-for-expression, the same three stories — now it was within 10 minutes. Indeed, many of his tweets were the product of his repetitions — he just couldn’t stop saying something.
One excerpt from Fire and Fury, which I have a digital copy of, describes how some of Trump’s closest aides — including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who reportedly called the president a “fucking moron” — spoke of him behind closed doors:
This—insulting Donald Trump’s intelligence—was both the thing you could not do and the thing—drawing there-but-for-the-grace-of-God guffaws across the senior staff—that everybody was guilty of. Everyone, in his or her own way, struggled to express the baldly obvious fact that the president did not know enough, did not know what he didn’t know, did not particularly care, and, to boot, was confident if not serene in his unquestioned certitudes. There was now a fair amount of back-of-the-classroom giggling about who had called Trump what. For Steve Mnuchin and Reince Priebus, he was an “idiot.” For Gary Cohn, he was “dumb as shit.” For H. R. McMaster he was a “dope.” The list went on.
The book has set off a feud between Trump and his former top strategist, Breitbart News Chair Steve Bannon, who looks like a major source for Fire and Fury. (Wolff maintains that many of Trump’s aides spoke with him; he spent weeks going in and out of the White House to report the book. Wolff also says he spoke directly with Trump.)
In a briefing with reporters later on Saturday at Camp David, President Trump said Wolff’s book was a “disgrace” and that the writer, who interviewed him in 2016 for a Hollywood Reporter profile, “does not know me at all.” He declared the book a “work of fiction” and renewed his call for federal libel laws to be strengthened. “Libel laws are very weak in this country. If they were stronger, hopefully, you would not have something like that happen,” he said.
Trump on Wednesday said Bannon had “lost his mind” in a scathing statement reacting to Bannon’s comments to Wolff.
Trump’s bizarre behavior has often prompted questions about his mental state, long before Fire and Fury. On Tuesday, the president unleashed a series of tweets — apparently prompted by Fox News, as Vox’s Matthew Yglesias pointed out — that culminated in a nuclear threat to North Korea.
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