President Donald Trump has been called a lot of things. “Unpresidential.” “Off the cuff.” “Unpredictable.” A “non-traditional politician.” Frighteningly, “mentally unstable” has been bandied about, too. Those concerns have come to the forefront in the past week with the publication of journalist Michael Wolff’s Fire & Fury, a first-hand, fly-on-the-wall account of the first year of Trump’s administration.
Wolff, who was embedded in the White House and for all intents and purposes, wrote down what he saw from the purview of a White House couch, painted the president as someone who might be losing his mind. Wolff wrote that Trump frequently seems to forget things and repeat himself. “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,” Wollf wrote. There’s also the matter of Bandy Lee, an assistant clinical professor at the Yale School of Medicine, who in December briefed 12 members of Congress on the president’s mental state. The sound bite from that address: “The danger has become imminent.”
In other words, he may not be the most stable choice to have access to the nuclear codes.
And so, to prove that he is, in fact, not only stable but smart, and, like really smart, Trump went on an early Saturday morning Twitter rant to proclaim how smart and stable he was, which is definitely something smart and stable people feel the need to do.
Now that Russian collusion, after one year of intense study, has proven to be a total hoax on the American public, the Democrats and their lapdogs, the Fake News Mainstream Media, are taking out the old Ronald Reagan playbook and screaming mental stability and intelligence…..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2018
….Actually, 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. I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star…..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2018
….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!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2018
Shortly thereafter, U.K. prime minister Theresa May, Trump’s counterpart in England in terms of both power and right-wingedness, appeared on the BBC’s The Andrew Marr Show. And according to her, we can all relax, because Trump is fine. Just fine. Really. She knows Trump, you see, because she visited the White House that one time last year. (She also invited him to the U.K. for a state visit that’s yet to materialize, which she told Marr is definitely, certainly happening. Eventually.)
When Marr asked May if she seriously considered the idea that Trump wasn’t mentally fit to be president of the United States, May gave a direct “no,” and then a bland, diplomatic answer.
“I deal with President Trump. What I see is somebody who is committed to ensuring he is taking decisions in the best interests of the United States.”
Yeah, the people of Twitter didn’t buy it.