Donald J. Trump: Super Genius

White nationalist Trump adviser Stephen Miller gets
cut off by CNN's Jake Tapper on Sunday 

Granted it's been hard enough being cooped up inside because of the frigid temperatures outside over the past few days.

But being subjected to the incessant media coverage of Donald Trump's efforts to reshape the news cycle, after publisher Henry Holt & Co. pushed up the release date of Michael Wolff's bombshell tell-all "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House" on Friday, has been hard for me to stomach.

Trump was desperate enough to trot out his remarkably obtuse white nationalist senior adviser Stephen Miller on the Sunday morning news show circuit earlier this morning.

That went south when Miller went all "Kellyanne Conway" on CNN's Jake Tapper and instead of answering the questions put to him, began babbling about kooky, half-baked "Fake News" theories - it was so bad Tapper cut him off and ended the interview after admonishing the dull Trump sycophant for "[wasting] enough of my viewer's time."

On Saturday, with outside temperatures skirting the single digits and the news media repeating Trump's claim that he is a "very stable genius", I had to take a break from the news.

Watching 45 laud his own intelligence reminded me of an old Bugs Bunny - Wile E. Coyote cartoon I used to watch when I was a kid.

Instead I turned on some music, got out my new cast iron frying pan, and tried out a new recipe for Classic Braised Chicken with Celery and Potatoes I saw on the Whole Foods Website - which turned out pretty good though I will tweak the recipe next time I try it.

Cooking turned out to be much a more pleasant distraction than listening to a sitting U.S. president reduced to wheedling before television cameras, not to promote a legislative policy objective, but to try and convince the American public that he's not a complete idiot.

Top Republican Congressional leaders cringe as
Trump defends his own intelligence

The monumentally-insecure Trump was so desperate to try and at least appear competent that he hastily assembled what he claimed was a Republican "strategy session" at Camp David with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Speaker Paul Ryan and members of 45's cabinet.

Look at the photo to the left, do McConnell, VP Mike Pence, Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise look like they want to be there on a Saturday?

Seriously, look at their faces - they look like four kids forced to watch a chicken thaw.

But it was arguably just a thrown-together photo-op staged at the last minute to allow Trump to appear in front of the television cameras looking theatrically-presidential with top Republicans lined up behind him like reluctant human props on a freezing cold Saturday when they looked like they wished they were anywhere else.

Trump was reportedly furious over the salacious details from the book leaked earlier in the week by The Guardian and New York magazine revealing that many White House insiders considered 45 a childish narcissist who's as dumb as a fence post and totally unfit to serve in the Oval Office.

But sadly (for him), Trump's own statements and tweets simply reinforced the accusations leveled in Michael Wolff's book - accusations obtained from over 200 interviews with a range of current and former White House advisers and staffers.

The three men accused of plotting to blow up a
mosque and Somali refugees in Kansas in 2016 

Part of what's unfortunate about Trump spending his Saturday using the news media to try and salvage what's left of his reputation is that it overshadowed more important news stories.

Like the dilapidated state of some of the nation's public schools epitomized by students in Baltimore having to attend classes at Patterson High School bundled up in coats, scarves and gloves last week because the heat wasn't working and it was 40 degrees inside the building.

Or, as the Associated Press reported on Thursday, the attorneys for Gavin Wright, Patrick Stein and Curtis Allen (the three men accused of planning to bomb a mosque and an apartment complex housing refugees from Somalia on the day after Trump won the 2016 election) asking U.S. District Judge Eric Melgren to allow more white jurors on the jury from rural Kansas because they'd be more likely to have voted for Trump.

(The judge denied their request and those three bigots will go on trial in March.)

There were a lot of news stories that should have gotten more mainstream media coverage this weekend, but unfortunately the focus was on a beleaguered, unpopular president desperately trying to convince the American people of how smart he is. 

That in and of itself is a sad reflection of the current state of American politics - and don't think Vladimir Putin isn't laughing about it over a glass of vodka.

As writer Stephen King observed on his Twitter feed yesterday:

"Anyone who has to call himself a genius...isn't."