Donald Trump tweets extraordinary defence of his 'mental stability

In an extraordinary and unprecedented public defence of his own mental stability, Donald Trump issued a volley of tweets that seemed guaranteed to add fuel to a growing constitutional crisis.
uggestions that he was mentally unfit to be president were out of “the old Ronald Reagan playbook”, Trump wrote on Saturday.
“Actually,” the president added, “throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart.”

He also said he “would qualify as not smart, but genius ... and a very stable genius at that!”

Michael Wolff, the author of the book that precipitated fierce debate over Trump’s fitness to be president, declined to comment on Trump’s latest claim.

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House burst into the public consciousness on Wednesday, when the Guardian published excerpts nearly a week ahead of its planned publication. Trump threatened to sue the journalist and former Guardian columnist. He succeeded only in prompting the publisher Henry Holt to bring the book forward.

Speaking to the Guardian from his Manhattan townhouse on Saturday, Wolff said he did not wish to get into a call-and-response with the president.

Wolff’s book presents a picture of a doomed administration lurching from crisis to crisis, steered by a childlike figure who responds to overstimulation with intense, reflexive outbursts.

“The president may not be able to restrain himself from commenting but I can restrain myself from commenting on his comments,” Wolff said.

Before Trump’s tweets, Wolff spoke to the BBC. He said: “I think one of the interesting effects of the book so far is a very clear ‘emperor has no clothes’ effect.”

He added: “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 if a majority of the cabinet and the vice-president agree. Talk of such a path to removing Trump from power has increased with the publication of Wolff’s book, in which the then White House strategist Steve Bannon refers to vice-president Mike Pence as “our fallback guy”.

Bandy Lee, an assistant clinical professor at the Yale School of Medicine, briefed a dozen members of Congress, mostly Democrats, last month on the potential risks associated with Trump’s behaviour.

The Guardian view on the Trump presidency: a reckless and undignified spectacle
Editorial: Written without much hindsight and without access to official papers, Michael Wolff’s new book Fire and Fury is more than journalism, if less than history
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At the end of a week that began with Trump taunting North Korea over the size of his “nuclear button”, Lee, whose career has centred on studying, predicting and preventing violence, told the Guardian she and other psychiatrists felt “the danger has become imminent”.

Trump was at the presidential retreat Camp David on Saturday for a policy weekend with Republican congressional leaders. Not long after 7am local time, the president wrote: “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...

“... 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 ...

“... 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!”

Trump’s election win in 2016 was actually his second try for the presidency. In 1999, he mounted a brief run for the nomination of the Reform party, a minor organisation founded by Ross Perot.