The president is never one to shy away from praising himself if given the opportunity, and in the process of praising himself, he has long proven himself willing and ready to throw essentially any interest under the bus, including the American news media.
Of course, all of this self praising has been marked by a strong sense of volatility on the part of the president — to put it lightly — and he put this volatility on display yet again this Sunday morning. Taking to Twitter, he didn’t hold back, comparing himself to none other than Ronald Reagan, although even if the two share economic policies, they certainly don’t share approval ratings.
For instance, Reagan’s average approval rating as measured by Gallup was 57 percent during his first year in office, while Trump’s approval rating has barely managed to crack 40 percent.
Still, that didn’t stop Trump from comparing himself to Reagan on Twitter early this Sunday morning, even though it’s not even a given that he, like Reagan, will end up being a two term president seeing how much of a wreck that his initial time in office has proven to be.
He compared himself to Reagan in the context of a defense against a new book from author Michael Wolff called Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. This book is a collection of incendiary claims about life inside the White House and the broader Trump team, including the widely publicized claimed comments from Steve Bannon as to the “treasonous” nature of a meeting involving Donald Trump Jr.
The publication of those comments has blown open a rift between the former allies Trump and Bannon, with the president quipping that his former campaign manager had lost his mind.
In spite of Trump repeatedly claiming the book to be nothing more than fake news, he’s felt the need to defend himself against the book over and over again as if saying fake news repeatedly is some kind of magic spell that will make the book go away.
On Sunday morning on Twitter, he wrote:
‘I’ve had to put up with the Fake News from the first day I announced that I would be running for President. Now I have to put up with a Fake Book, written by a totally discredited author. Ronald Reagan had the same problem and handled it well. So will I!’
This tweet comes after Trump has already claimed the book to be “fake news,” even though he has also called some of the information in it “leaked.” He can’t have it both ways — the information is either leaked or made up, not both.
Wolff asserts that he did really speak to Trump personally, among an array of other interests, in preparing his book.
As for Reagan’s case, he was, actually, eventually diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease, so for Trump to take to comparing himself to him is actually a backhanded validation of concerns about his mental state such as those raised by Wolff’s book. Wolff relates, among other items of interest, that Trump has allegedly “begun to repeat himself in conversation more frequently,” in the description of The Washington Post.
Check out Twitter’s response to the president’s latest ranting below.
Featured Image via Chris Kleponis-Pool/Getty Images
