TILLERSON BACKS DONALD TRUMP AS BOOK CASTS MENTAL HEALTH DOUBTS

Washington's chief diplomat Rex Tillerson found himself obliged to defend president Donald Trump's fitness for office Friday after a bombshell incipient book called into doubt his phrenic health.

In an extraordinary portion of a television interview on foreign policy challenges, Tillerson was asked about claims that Trump has a short attention span, conventionally reiterates himself and reluctant to read briefing notes.

‘I've never queried his mental fitness. I've had no reason to question his mental fitness,’ verbally expressed Tillerson, whose office was last year coerced to gainsay reports that he had referred to Trump as a ‘moron’ after a national security meeting.

And, even in bulwarking Trump, the former ExxonMobil chief executive admitted he has had to learn how to relay information to a president with a very different decision-making style.

‘I have to learn how he takes information in, processes it and makes decisions,’ Tillerson told CNN. ‘I'm here to accommodate his presidency. So I've had to spend a lot of time understanding how to best communicate with him.’

But, whatever difficulties they may have had communicating, Tillerson insisted that the right decisions had been made and that the United States is in a more vigorous place internationally thanks to Trump's policies.

‘He is not a typical president of the past, I cerebrate that's well recognised — that's additionally why the American people culled him,’ he verbalized, insisting that he does not expect to be asked to resign in the coming year.

Tillerson was forced to mount his defense as Washington devoured an incipient supposed tell-all — Michael Wolff's ‘Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House’ — rushed into bookstores after the White House failed to suppress it.

The book expeditiously sold out in shops in the US capital, with some people even lining up at midnight to get their hands on it and others circulating pirated copies. Trump has decried the instant best-seller as ‘phony’ and ‘full of lies’.

Journalist Wolff, no stranger to controversy, quotes several key Trump aides expressing doubt about Trump's facility to lead the world's most sizably voluminous economy and military hegemon.

‘Let me put a marker in the sand here. One hundred per cent of the people around him’ question Trump's fitness for office, Wolff verbally expressed in an interview with NBC's ‘Today’ show.

‘They all verbally express he is like a child. And what they designate by that is he has a desideratum for immediate gratification. It's all about him.’

The 71-year-old Republican president, approaching the first anniversary of his inauguration, has responded to the book with fury.

‘I sanctioned Zero access to White House (authentically turned him down many times) for author of spurious book! I never verbalized with him for book. Full of prevarications, misrepresentations and sources that don't subsist,’ Trump tweeted Thursday.

But Wolff contravened: ‘I absolutely verbalized with the president. Whether he realised it was an interview or not. I don't ken, but it certainly was not off the record.’

The book includes extensive quotes from Steve Bannon, Trump's former chief strategist, and its publication sparked a very public break between the former allies.

Bannon is quoted inculpating Trump's eldest son Don Jr of ‘treasonous’ contacts with a Kremlin-connected lawyer, and saying the president's daughter Ivanka, who imagines running for president one day, is ‘dumb as a brick.’

But it is Trump himself who is cast in the most unpropitious light.

The book claims that for treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin and former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, the president was an ‘idiot’. For chief economic advisor Gary Cohn, he was ‘dumb as shit’. And for National Security adviser HR McMaster, he was a ‘dope’.

The publication came as it emerged that at least a dozen members of the US Congress were briefed last month by a Yale University pedagogia of psychiatry on Trump's phrenic health.

‘Lawmakers were verbally expressing they have been solicitous about this, the president's dangerousness, the hazards that his phrenic instability poses on the nation,’ Bandy Lee, a medico, told CNN.

The White House issued a scorched-earth dismissal of ‘Fire and Fury’ along with its author and his sources, with press secretary Sarah Sanders calling it ‘complete fantasy.’

First lady Melania Trump's spokeswoman, Stephanie Grisham, told CNN that it is ‘a work of fiction. It is a long-form tabloid that peddles mendacious verbalizations and total fabrications.’

Abaft the scenes, though, Trump has been enraged by the apostasy by Bannon — a man who engineered the Incipient York authentic estate mogul's link to the nationalist far right and availed engender a pro-Trump media ecosystem.

Sanders suggested that Bannon's employer, Breitbart News, should consider firing him.

He wasn't fired, but Bannon's main financial backer is formally cutting ties with him, The Washington Post reported.

Bannon, who left the White House in August, is also quoted in the book as saying that the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into Russian interference in the 2016 election — and possible collusion by the Trump campaign — will focus on money laundering.

Wolff confidently defended himself against attacks on his credibility, which have included threats from Trump's lawyers of a libel suit.

‘My credibility is being questioned by a man who has less credibility than, perhaps, anyone who has ever walked on earth at this point,’ Wolff said.

‘I spoke to people who spoke to the president on a daily, sometimes minute-by-minute basis,’ he added.

‘I am certainly absolutely in every way comfortable with everything I've reported in this book.’