Over the weekend, Trump proclaimed himself to be a “genius,” so naturally cable news outlets wanted to find out if Republican lawmakers in Washington, D.C. were willing to agree with the President’s assessment of himself. In all of the interviews conducted on Monday, not one single Republican was willing to admit that Trump is a genius, and many deflected the question in order to avoid saying the obvious. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.

Transcript:

Over the weekend, Donald Trump tweeted out that he was a very stable genius. This was in response to the accusations made in Michael Wolff’s new book Fire and Fury and Donald Trump was trying to convince all of us that “Don’t worry. Nothing’s wrong. I’m, like, really smart and, in fact, genius. Very stable genius at that.” So, after tweeting that out over the weekend, the cable news outlets obviously wanted to ask fellow Republicans in Washington, D.C. if Donald Trump was, in fact, a genius. And that’s exactly what they did.

In interviews with more than half a dozen Republican lawmakers in Washington, D.C. on Monday, not a single one of them was willing to admit that Donald Trump was a genius. Kansas Senator Jerry Moran, Republican Senator Ron Johnson, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, Senator John Thune, Texas Representative Roger Williams, Senator Richard Shelby, Senator Jeff Flake, Representative Carlos Curbelo, Senator Bill Cassidy, none of them, when asked if Trump is, in fact, a genius was willing to say “Yes”. Most of them either said nothing at all or they deflected and some of them tried to ease into the conversation of saying, “You know what, I do think he’s mentally stable.” In fact, Bill Cassidy actually added that he’s got great kids. He’s very stable and he’s got great kids. There’s no question about how great those kids are, as if that somehow relates to Donald Trump’s intelligence.

The bottom line is that Trump thinks he is a genius. Republicans in D.C. happen to think otherwise. It remains to be seen at this point whether or not Donald Trump’s going to lash out at any of these eight Republicans who were unwilling to say that he is a genius, even though some of them did say he’s a smart guy or that there’s varying types of geniuses. Well, no, because Trump himself was referring, as he has referred in the past, to his high IQ. That is one specific kind of genius that cannot be interpreted any other way. Either you have a genius-level IQ or you don’t. According to studies, people who’ve done unofficial analysis of Donald Trump, they say that he actually ranks within the bottom 15 U.S. presidents in terms of IQ. Now, these were not official IQ tests performed on the President, but they were done by people who recognize the signs of being able to solve problems, reasoning skills, and things like that, and unfortunately, Donald Trump really doesn’t have any of those.

He may not be the dumbest we’ve ever had, but he’s certainly the dumbest we’ve ever had in my lifetime and Reagan was President when I was born, so I think that’s saying quite a bit. But if Republicans, the people who are your allies, aren’t even willing to actively stand up and defend you, defend your intelligence, you’ve got a real problem and it’s only going to help to further the people in this country calling for some kind of psychiatric evaluation of the President because clearly, if you can’t convince the people that you work with every day that you’re smart, you got a real problem there.

Farron Cousins is the executive editor of The Trial Lawyer magazine and a contributing writer at DeSmogBlog.com. He is the co-host / guest host for Ring of Fire Radio. His writings have appeared on Alternet, Truthout, and The Huffington Post. Farron received his bachelor's degree in Political Science from the University of West Florida in 2005 and became a member of American MENSA in 2009. Follow him on Twitter @farronbalanced