Trump, the Genius of Twitter [with comment by Paul]

No doubt you’ve heard about it: President Trump proclaimed himself a “stable genius” on Twitter this morning. Here is the series of tweets, so you can see what he actually said. I should add that these weren’t his only tweets this morning; he was busy:

These comments are obviously tongue in cheek, but Trump’s points nevertheless are well taken, including his recollection of the Left’s attacks on Ronald Reagan, who they also claimed was unstable and stupid. Which is not to say that these tweets were a bright idea. Michael Wolff’s book, the main focus of the Left’s current attacks on Trump’s fitness, is already self-destructing because 1) it is full of errors that have been documented within days after the book’s publication, 2) it is entirely anonymously sourced (but apparently based mostly on malicious gossip from Steve Bannon), and 3) its most sensational allegations are implausible. Trump would do well to talk more about his great record over the past year, and less about his enemies.

These tweets reminded me of a famous quote from the Obama era:

The White House takes pride in the fact that Obama’s PDB is “not briefed to him” – because, they say, he is “among the most sophisticated consumers of intelligence on the planet.” That hubris brings to mind this revealing quote from a September 2008 New York Times profile of Obama:

“I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,” Mr. Obama told Patrick Gaspard, his political director, at the start of the 2008 campaign, according to The New Yorker. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m going to think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

So it should come as no surprise that apparently Barack Obama thinks he’s a better intelligence briefer than his intelligence briefers.

Modesty is not a quality we should expect from our presidents.

PAUL ADDS: Not these days. But it was not so long ago that we sometimes got it, or at least the absence of juvenile braggadocio.

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