The very stable genius, nine years later

In January 2018, after a book questioned his mental fitness, the president of the United States sat down and wrote his own diagnosis.

“My two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart,” he tweeted. “I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius. And a very stable genius at that!”

He was 71 years old.

Nearly nine years and one reelection later, the self-assessment has not moved an inch. The facts around it have.

Start with the war he promised would never happen.

Trump campaigned twice on ending American wars, not starting them. In January, the US military struck targets across Venezuela and extracted President Nicolás Maduro, who now sits in a New York jail awaiting trial on narco-terrorism charges.

The operation followed months of strikes on small boats in the Caribbean. Well over 100 people were killed on suspicion, never proof, of drug trafficking.

Months later came Iran, a war the administration still calls “Operation Epic Fury.”

Trump recently told a rally crowd that the United States had lost “18 incredible people” in that war. Reporting by The Washington Post placed the true figure at 22 or higher.

Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth called the Post’s reporting “a complete LIE.”

The two numbers have never been reconciled.

Then there is the money.

Qatar gave Trump’s government a $400 million Boeing 747 to use as Air Force One. The aircraft was painted navy and gold to suit his taste. Trump has said it will eventually go to his presidential library when he leaves office.

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At home, he gutted the East Wing of the White House to make room for a gold-leafed ballroom costing $300 million. He covered the Oval Office in gilt cherubs and molding, creating what his own press secretary called “a golden office for the golden age.”

Critics have used different words: tacky, gaudy, a monument to ego.

On the campaign trail this fall, Trump has promised every American adult a $5,000 “dividend” if Republicans retain control of Congress in November.

It echoes two earlier promises. One offered Americans $2,000 from tariff revenue. The other promised an unspecified share of “DOGE savings.” Both were announced with fanfare. Neither was paid.

Polling suggests that most Americans do not believe this dividend will be paid either. In one recent survey, only 17 percent of adults said Trump generally keeps his promises.

His relationship with the truth is not incidental to his politics. It is the engine of it.

For decades, Trump has told audiences that he graduated first in his class at the Wharton School. The university’s own records from 1968 show that he made neither the Dean’s List nor any honors roll.

He has also said repeatedly, including as recently as this March during a meeting with Germany’s chancellor, that his father was born in “a very wonderful place in Germany.”

Fred Trump was born in the Bronx. It was Trump’s grandfather who emigrated from Germany.

These are not policy disagreements or competing interpretations of history. They are verifiable facts about his own life. He has overwritten them in public, repeatedly, at no apparent cost.

The self-praise runs in a straight line from that 2018 tweet to the present.

Trump has told voters for years, in one formulation after another, that he knows more than America’s generals, more than its diplomats, more than its intelligence agencies.

In 2018, standing beside Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Trump was asked whether he believed the conclusion of his own intelligence community that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election, or Putin’s denial.

“I don’t see any reason why it would be,” Russia, he replied.

He spent the following week trying, unconvincingly, to recast the remark as a simple misstatement.

The pattern recurs across his biography and in matters of war and peace: a confident assertion, a contradiction from the record, and no meaningful reckoning with the distance between them.

Three wars into a presidency that promised none, Trump’s instinct to trust his own judgment over everyone else’s has survived every piece of evidence that might have revised it.

That pattern is what a group of mental health professionals has spent nine years trying to name.

In 2017, Yale psychiatrist Bandy Lee assembled 27 colleagues for “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.” They argued that they had a “duty to warn” the public, despite professional norms against diagnosing public figures from a distance.

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Psychologist John Gartner, one of the contributors, has been more direct. For years, he has described Trump as a “malignant narcissist,” a term coined by psychoanalyst Erich Fromm to describe leaders who are grandiose, paranoid, and remorseless.

In 2024, more than 230 mental health professionals signed a public letter repeating the warning ahead of the election.

None of this constitutes a formal diagnosis. The signatories are explicit that it cannot. Trump has never submitted to an evaluation.

Yet the consistency of the assessment, sustained across nine years and echoed by dozens of credentialed observers, is itself a kind of data point.

So is the legal record.

Trump was indicted four times in 2023 on a combined 88 felony counts. He became the first former American president ever charged with a crime.

In New York, he was convicted on all 34 counts in the hush-money case.

He did not go to prison.

Having won reelection in the meantime, Trump received an unconditional discharge: no fine, no probation, no punishment beyond the conviction itself. The judge said it was the only sentence available for a sitting president.

The two federal cases were dropped after Trump’s victory. The Georgia case was dismissed last November.

He did not defeat the charges.

He outlasted the clock.

None of it cost him the presidency.

Trump won the Electoral College in 2024 by 312 votes to 226. He also won the popular vote by 1.5 points. It was a real victory, if a modest one by historical standards, and the second-narrowest popular-vote margin since 1960.

Enough Americans, in other words, looked at all of it: the boasting, the contradicted facts, the criminal indictments, the wars he promised never to fight. Then they voted for him anyway.

That may be the harder question, more troubling than any diagnosis.

Presidential falsehoods are not new in American life. What is new is a public that increasingly treats them as beside the point.

There was once an expectation that a president’s word could be taken to the bank.

Whether that was ever entirely true, the pretense itself is now gone.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.