”... Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart. Crooked Hillary Clinton also played these cards very hard and, as everyone knows, went down in flames. I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star. ...

”... to President of the United States (on my first try). I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius. ... and a very stable genius at that!”

-- President Trump

When the American people voted unanimously to declare Donald Trump a genius (this is what it means to be elected president on your first try), at first, he did not feel any different.

The shape of his thoughts in his head felt roughly the same, and when the sentences formed they did not appear to weigh any more than they had weighed before.

He was sitting in Trump Tower idly looking over at the bookcase when he suddenly noticed that some of the words on it were not “TRUMP.” He did not remember having noticed that before. Curious, he stepped closer and began to read. One of the books was in German. He loved reading German, he discovered. He loved reading, full stop.

He read all the books, ravenously, so quickly he could scarcely believe it. By 4 a.m. he had read everything there was to read in Trump Tower (in fairness, there was not much to read in Trump Tower) and had to call out for more books. Encyclopedias. Histories. Memoirs.

He read them all until his eyes watered and his head ached.

Before, he had felt vaguely confident that if he ever sat down and thought about it he would probably be able to grasp the concept of special relativity. Now, finally, he sat down and thought about it. He did not immediately grasp it, which surprised him, until he realized that he had to learn the mathematics in which it was grounded first.

By lunch he had it figured out.

He built several ant farms, each with a different model of government, to see which would run the most efficiently. He learned the word “syzygy.” He read “Ulysses” and the entire critical apparatus.

“Did you know,” he said to Ivanka, when she joined him for lunch, “that the heartbeat of a mouse is 650 beats per minute?”

“No,” she said.

“That must be so fast,” he went on. “Like a buzz, almost.”

“Yeah,” Ivanka said, looking a little worried.

---

No one around him noticed the change immediately.

His team came in and said that he had lots of great ideas and the best brain, but then one of them tried to distract him with what was clearly a child’s coloring puzzle.

“You have a lot of letters praising your performance yesterday,” someone said.

He looked at what she was handing him.

“Those aren’t letters,” he said, faintly. “Those are -- you just printed out some stuff from the website for ‘Fox and Friends.‘”

Everyone exchanged a concerned glance, which he picked up on, and he quickly found an excuse to leave the room.

Had the people around him always been so ... distinctly underwhelming? Trump wondered. He went to the window and looked down. There were several protesters with signs that contained obvious solecisms. This was a word he understood now.

At least he had Steve Bannon, who was definitely an intellectual. Or he always looked rumpled, which seemed like much the same thing.

“Send in Steve,” he said.

Bannon came in, and Trump was excited to finally be sitting there, head to head, with a fellow genius.

But when Bannon opened his mouth, none of the things that came out made any sense.

“Steve,” Trump said, “talk like you usually talk.”

“I am,” Bannon said.

Trump blinked repeatedly. “No,” he said. “Usually you sound smart, and now you sound like someone dumped out the contents of some rejected Wikipedia pages onto the floor at random. Speak like Thomas Cromwell, although, ha ha, before the beheading.”

“Thomas Cromwell was beheaded?” Bannon asked.

Trump blinked levelly at him, and soon Bannon thought up a reason to go away.

Trump looked over his speeches again.

“Have they always been so ... racist?” he asked, quietly.

“What?” Steve Miller said.

Jared Kushner pushed the door open.

“I am going to solve the conflict in the Middle East,” he said.

Trump sighed loudly.

He called for a hot towel and put it on his forehead and went to bed early.

---

The next morning was distinctly unpleasant. An aide came in and turned on his shows, as usual.

A few minutes in, he became agitated. “What is this?” he kept saying. “This is for imbeciles. Why have you taken away the intellectually stimulating show I usually watch and replaced it with this?”

“You love this show,” Hope Hicks said reassuringly. “You watch it every day.”

“I can’t possibly watch this every day,” Trump said. “This is tripe. Also, why does everyone keep sending me steaks that are cooked to the consistency of vulcanized rubber? Only an idiot would order steak cooked that way.”

No one made eye contact with him, but that night for what they claimed was no particular reason his entire family showed up.

“Ha,” Trump said, “Look, it’s a community production of ‘The Lion In Winter.’” He laughed long and hard. Don Jr. laughed immediately and Eric did not laugh at all. Ivanka and Jared looked nervous and exchanged a glance.

“Lion?” Eric said. “Where?”

“It’s not about actual lions,” Trump said, “Obviously, it’s symbolism.”

“SIMBA-lism,” Melania said.

Trump looked at her and they shared a brief smile.

---

His daily routine began to grate on him. All the television and the sitting. There were no books in most of his rooms, and all information presented to him was in the form of pictures. This newfound genius and stability just made him worried and indignant all the time, and none of the food he felt he ought to eat tasted good at all. His people were not what he had hoped. His agenda seemed haphazard at best and misguided at worst.

His head ached all the time. Once he used his excess mental energy to tip over a glass, but nobody gave him any credit for it. Just for kicks, he raised and lowered the flag on the Interior Department so that it appeared Ryan Zinke was there when in fact he was not but that was not as much fun as anticipated. Everything began to wear on him. He could not sit through international summits. Everyone spoke too slowly.

Gradually he tried to move things that were bigger and bigger. By the end of the first week he was able to knock rockets out of the sky. He sent a tweet about it, but nobody understood that this was what he was trying to say. All the TV ever seemed to show was people closely misreading his tweets. It was miserable. It was a nightmare.

Maybe, he thought, he would wake up and everything would be back to the way it was, and he would still know he was smart without having to see the people who said so. Maybe, if he just used all his brainpower, he could restore the world to the way it was before. Maybe all he had to do was concentrate.

I’m not sure what happened after that, or how he currently spends his days. One set of rumors was recently published as a book. But we know better than to believe it.

Alexandra Petri | The Washington Post

Alexandra Petri writes the ComPost blog, offering a lighter take on the news and opinions of the day. She is the author of “A Field Guide to Awkward Silences.”

Follow Alexandra Petri on Twitter, @petridishes.

(c) 2017, Washington Post Writers Group