Trump complains about 'Fake Book,' likens himself to Reagan

(Image credit: Getty Images)

published 7 January 2018

President Trump followed his Saturday declaration that he is "like, really smart" and "a very stable genius" with a pair of Sunday morning tweets boasting of his weekend accomplishments at Camp David and again bemoaning Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House:

Trump's announcement that he will handle questions of his mental capacity in the style of former President Ronald Reagan is an odd choice, explains a Washington Post analysis, given that Reagan revealed an Alzheimer's diagnosis soon after leaving office: "The news media did indeed question Reagan's mental health at times, but such questions were at least somewhat validated" by the diagnosis, the Post notes, as well as "his son's 2011 claim that Reagan displayed symptoms of the disease while in office."

By comparing himself to Reagan here, Trump thus unintentionally suggests he is, in fact, concealing mental decline.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.