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Trump defends mental fitness, cites Ronald Reagan
A tell-all book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, has claimed that Trump is mentally unfit to carry out his duties as president.
US President Donald Trump has called himself a “very stable genius” as he and his aides continued to battle a book that has shook up presidency with claims that he was not prepared for the job and that he is mentally unfit to carry out his duties.
For the second day running, the president defended his mental fitness, tweeting on Sunday: “Ronald Reagan had the same problem and handled it well. So will I!” He was referring to former president Ronald Reagan, who faced questions about his mental fitness due to his age, especially during his re-election and second term.
A day earlier, Trump, from a presidential retreat outside Washington, tweeted about his greatest assets— “mental stability” and being “really smart”. “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!”
He built on it on Sunday: “I went to the best colleges for college … I was a very excellent student. Came out and made billions and billions of dollars. Became one of the top businesspeople. Went to television and, for ten years, was a tremendous success, as you probably have heard. Ran for president one time and won.”
Michael Wolff, the author of the tell-all book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, wrote that Trump aides and acquaintances worried about him. In an account about writing the book in Hollywood Reporter, he said that his “indelible impression of talking to them and observing them through much of the first year of his presidency, is that they all — 100% — came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job”.
“At Mar-a-Lago, just before the new year, a heavily made-up Trump failed to recognise a succession of old friends,” he wrote, referring to Trump’s Florida resort
And Trump did little to help himself by comparing himself to Reagan on Sunday. Experts and commentators noted that Reagan, it turned out later, did indeed have problems.
As The Washington Post noted: “The news media did indeed question Reagan’s mental health at times, but such questions were at least somewhat validated by the 40th president’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis in 1994 and his son’s 2011 claim that Reagan displayed symptoms of the disease while in office.
“If Trump’s aim is to dismiss concerns raised by Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury as completely unfounded, then Reagan is not the best historical reference.”
