President Trump’s top spokesman on Thursday fired back at media figures who have questioned his mental fitness for office, saying the president finds the notion “disgraceful and laughable.”
“It’s disgraceful and laughable,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters. “If he was unfit, he probably wouldn’t be sitting there.”
Sanders argued Trump would not have been able to defeat a large field of challengers in the 2016 Republican presidential primary if he was not mentally healthy.
“This is an incredibly strong and good leader,” she said.
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Questions about the president’s mental health are being asked more openly in response to the release of excerpts from a forthcoming book chronicling the chaotic first months of the Trump White House.
Author Michael Wolff wrote that concerns about Trump’s mental state are shared even among his own aides.
“My indelible impression of talking to them and observing them through much of the first year of his presidency, is that they all — 100 percent — came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job,” he wrote.
Sanders called the book a “complete fantasy” that is “full of tabloid gossip.”
Indeed, the widespread questions about Trump’s mental fitness are virtually unprecedented in modern times, according to presidential historians.
But despite Sanders’ criticism, Trump himself raise questions about former President Barack Obama’s mental state during the Ebola outbreak of 2014.
“I am starting to think that there is something seriously wrong with President Obama’s mental health. Why won’t he stop the flights. Psycho!” Trump tweeted at the time, when some were suggesting that the U.S. should ban people on flights from countries with Ebola outbreaks.
-Updated 3:10 p.m.