President Donald Trump on Sunday assailed as a "Fake Book" an explosive behind-the-scenes account that questions his fitness for office, as allies lined up to defend the US leader, with one dubbing him a "political genius." The White House has been pushing back hard against the unflattering portrayal of the president in "Fire and Fury," a supposed tell-all book by Michael Wolff published Friday.

Trump tweeted Sunday that the instant bestseller - which paints him as disengaged, ill-informed and unstable, with signs of serious memory loss - was a "Fake Book, written by a totally discredited author." A day earlier, seeking to refute Wolff's suggestion that he lacked stability, Trump called himself a "very stable genius." Senior Trump policy adviser Stephen Miller treated the book derisively while insisting that his boss was in fact "a political genius," in an interview with CNN on Sunday. Wolff, Miller said, "is a garbage author of a garbage book." He assailed Trump's former chief strategist Steve Bannon, reportedly a key source for the author, as "vindictive" and "out of touch with reality."

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2018