The Problems of a Very Stable Genius

I have no idea how much of Michael Wolff's book is to be believed but I do know…

  1. It's selling like crazy.
  2. It's driving Donald Trump off the deep end.
  3. When a book sells like crazy, it's followed by many more just like it.  Every best-selling book that insisted Barack Obama was a Kenyan Socialist Mole spawned ten more.

Other authors may not have whatever access Wolff had but it's now established that there's an eager market out there for books that say Trump is full-goose-bozo banana-wackie.  If you're a fan of the guy, brace yourself for the flood.  Even as we speak, book publishers and authors are figuring what they can write that will top Wolff's book — and of course, it's important that it be something so outlandish that Trump himself will denounce the book as garbage, preferably in a string of incoherent tweets.

This has very little to do with the running of our country. It's just how the Free Market works in publishing. If your book can make him feel he has to tell the world he's a "very stable genius," you can probably retire on your royalties.

The book I'm waiting for is the one that will tell us, with sufficient credibility, how these unhinged tweets happen and what (if anything) the more rational folks around Trump have done to try and control them. Does he write them all? Does he run them past no one before he sends them out? It does seem his spelling has gotten a little better.

Years ago, I worked for a TV producer who had his own company and who considered himself a visionary genius…and he was successful because he had indeed come up with some brilliant ideas. Some of them were not so brilliant and many of them were very, very expensive. The network would give him $250,000 to do a show and in the excitement of some concept that came to him in a dream, he'd spend $400,000 to put it on the screen. Needless to say, you will not have a company if you keep doing this.

So he hired a Very Sane Person and said to him, "I'm making you the president of the company. Your job is to stop me from spending money foolishly." And thereafter, the Very Sane Person would occasionally veto some decision made by the owner of the company. He'd just say, "No, we're not going to fill the studio with Guacamole and dress all the dancers in tortilla chips!" — or whatever that week's profound but exorbitant vision was.

The owner of the company would not overrule his employee. He believed he was a genius, maybe of the very stable kind. He certainly told us all often enough that he was a genius. But he was wise enough to believe that his genius had its limitations; that it was somehow lacking in cost-efficiency.

I'm curious if Donald Trump knows or cares how much a majority of Americans thinks he's out of his friggin' mind. He knows this new book claims he is but how much does he care if 55% of the country thinks that? When he was on the campaign trail, he tried real hard to convince us that he was moderate on many issues and might even be to the left of his opponent on some. As Harry Enten notes, those days are gone. Those who thought he had some liberal views got sucker-punched.

I understand him being concerned that his base may start to think he's nuts. Does he care if we, who'd never vote for him in a million years, do? If he does, he needs to have a Pretty Sane Person read those tweets and sometimes say, "You shouldn't send this one." Then again, maybe he has someone doing that and the supposed Very Sane Person is not Very Sane.