U.S. President Donald Trump continues to defend himself in the wake of a new book that suggests top White House aides fear that he is unfit for the job.

In a tweetstorm Saturday morning, the president called himself a “very stable genius” and called being “really smart” one of his greatest assets. Trump cited his career in business and reality television and his victory in last year’s election as evidence of his mental prowess. And he again lashed out at the ongoing special counsel investigation into his campaign’s contacts with Russian operatives, calling suggestions that he colluded with Moscow a “total hoax on the American public.”

“....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.....” Trump tweeted Saturday, “....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!”

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Trump’s outburst came a day after the public release of a new book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, by Michael Wolff, a New York media columnist who said he spent time in the West Wing interviewing top aides, as well as Trump.

Wolff paints the picture of a president who is unfit for the job and aides who come to fear Trump is not capable of, or interested in, processing information and making important decisions. Late Friday, Trump blasted Wolff as a “total loser,” and the president mocked his former campaign chairman and White House adviser, Stephen Bannon, who was a key source for the book. Bannon criticized other aides and Trump’s son, calling a meeting at Trump Tower last year between Donald Jr. and a Russian lawyer “treasonous.”

“Michael Wolff is a total loser who made up stories in order to sell this really boring and untruthful book. He used Sloppy Steve Bannon, who cried when he got fired and begged for his job. Now Sloppy Steve has been dumped like a dog by almost everyone,” Trump said on Twitter.

“I consider it a work of fiction,” Trump told reporters, then bemoaned what he called the country’s “weak libel laws.”

Trump tweeted Saturday morning from Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland, a few hours before a strategy session on the 2018 legislative agenda with Republican congressional leaders and Cabinet members. And when Trump addressed reporters later, the Ivy League graduate was ready for the question.

“I went to the best colleges for college,” said Trump, who holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania. “I had a situation where I was a very excellent student, came out, made billions and billions of dollars, became one of the top business people, went to television and for 10 years was a tremendous success, as you probably have heard, ran for president one time and won.”

In one of his morning tweets, the president said critics are “taking out the old Ronald Reagan playbook and screaming mental stability and intelligence.”

Reagan died in 2004, at age 93, from pneumonia complicated by the Alzheimer’s disease that had progressively clouded his mind. At times when he was president, Reagan seemed forgetful and would lose his train of thought while talking.

Doctors, however, said Alzheimer’s was not to blame, noting the disease was diagnosed years after he left office. Reagan announced his diagnosis in a letter to the American people in 1994, more than five years after leaving the White House.

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Trump, now 71, was the oldest president ever when assuming office. Reagan was nearly eight months younger.

White House aides have mounted an all-out Wolff’s attack on the book since it was first reported on Wednesday, calling it “fiction” and a “complete fantasy.” And Trump’s lawyers sent cease-and-desist letters to Wolff and his publisher demanding they not release the book. But the publisher, Henry Holt, moved up the release date from later this month to Friday amid the publicity, and hard copies were quickly sold out in the Washington area.

Reporters asked White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Thursday to respond to the book’s suggestion that Trump is mentally unfit for office.

“It’s disgraceful and laughable,” she said. “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. This is an incredibly strong and good leader. That’s why we’ve had such a successful 2017 and why we’re going to continue to do great things as we move forward in this administration.”

With files from The Associated Press

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