This has not been an especially good week for the credibility of Donald Trump and his presidency, overall, as Michael Wolff’s incendiary new tell-all, Fire & Fury, poked further holes in the wheezing, dyspeptic gasbag of Trump’s leaking image as an even semi-effective world leader. Wolff’s book—which is already getting pretty hard to find, reportedly, as people everywhere scoop it up for a little political schadenfreude this weekend—paints Trump as an ineffective, cranky bumbler, surrounded by people desperately trying to stop a foggy-headed bull from smashing the china shop 63 million people inexplicably voted him into.
Still, that’s nothing a little damage control and careful political spinning can’t fix, right? In an apparent effort to rectify Wolff’s portrait of him as an erratic, angry, and not especially intelligent man, Trump did what any rational world leader would do in this situation: Hopped on Twitter this morning and loudly, repeatedly, told anybody who would listen that he was a genius. And not just any kind of genius, mind you: A stable genius. (The best kind!)
Trump actually started his PR assault last night, elevating Wolff into the club of people he’s dubbed a “total loser,” and repeating his new nickname for ally-turned-punching-bag Steve Bannon, “Sloppy Steve.” (He even used it twice in the same tweet, because for all of Trump’s many faults, he has the branding strategies of a successful playground bully down pat.) The real storm came this morning, though, in a flurry of tweets in which Trump managed to simultaneously attack his former political opponent, Hillary Clinton, compare himself to dead Republican saint Ronald Reagan, and lash out at the mainstream media, all before even getting to the genius stuff.
Despite his assertions of being, like, really smart, Trump’s tweets did contain a few minor inaccuracies, like the multiple bankruptcies dotting his VERY successful business career, or the fact that he actually tried to secure the Republican nomination multiple times over the years before the party’s weakened immune system finally gave out. (We’re not discounting his status as a top reality TV star, though; he should try going back to that.) More depressing, of course, is the rock-solid certainty that there are millions of people out there nodding along with Trump’s tweets right now, agreeing that, yes, waggling his dick at a hostile nuclear power is absolutely a “very stable genius” move. Really, it’s enough to make you want to just close the blinds, turn on the Gorilla Channel, and do your damnedest to drown out the world.