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The book also quotes Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, and other prominent advisers as questioning the president’s competence.

Trump is having none of it.

He tweeted that critics are “taking out the old Ronald Reagan playbook and screaming mental stability and intelligence.” The president said “actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart.”

Trump said going from successful businessman to reality TV star to president on his first try “would qualify as not smart, but genius …. and a very stable genius at that!”

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Chatter about Trump’s mental fitness for office has intensified in recent months on cable news shows and among Democrats in Congress.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders this week called such suggestions “disgraceful and laughable.”

“If he was unfit, he probably wouldn’t be sitting there and wouldn’t have defeated the most qualified group of candidates the Republican Party has ever seen,” she said, calling him “an incredibly strong and good leader.”

In early December, the House voted overwhelmingly to kill a resolution from a liberal Democrat to impeach Trump. Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, said Trump had associated his presidency with causes rooted in bigotry and racism.

To back his claim accusing Trump of high misdemeanours, Green cited incidents such as Trump’s blaming both sides for violence at a deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and his sharing of hateful, anti-Muslim videos posted online by a fringe British extremist group.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said in a statement shortly before the vote that while “legitimate questions have been raised about his fitness to lead this nation,” they argued “now is not the time to consider articles of impeachment.”