Which U.S. president was the one who “never listened to anyone, always thought he was smarter than every expert in the room, and treated every meeting as an opportunity to lecture everyone else”?

By the looks of his New York Post article, Charles Gasparino doesn't seem to be too convinced (thanks to Stephen Green) that Donald Trump's mental state is something to be unduly concerned about:

One thing we don’t have to worry about is the economic sanity of President Trump.

In fact, it’s safe to say that the current president, for all his temperamental flaws and petty insecurities, makes his tightly wound predecessor, Barack Obama, look like a raving madman when it comes to showing sense on economic growth. Armchair psychiatrists are having a field day diagnosing the president’s mental state from afar, especially after his increasingly bizarre tweeting, but the market says otherwise.

Consider: The United States had one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world — so high that companies (and jobs) were fleeing to places like Ireland. That’s why it was perfectly sane to lower the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent as Trump just did, and presto: Corporations are announcing plans to hire more workers, and the economy, which was expected to slow after seven years of weak growth, is heating up. The markets are predicting that growth with their surge.

Likewise, regulations have been strangling businesses for years while making it difficult for banks to lend to consumers and small business. Trump went out and hired perfectly sane regulators who basically pulled the federal government’s boot off the neck of the business community.

It was described to me as a de facto tax cut by one business owner that gives him leeway to hire more people. A major win for the working class.

And since so many of my fellow journalists are at it, let me do a little psychoanalysis of what an economically insane person might do as president.

An insane president would threaten a significant tax increase immediately upon taking office following a financial crisis, and then eventually impose one on individuals and small businesses still in recovery.

He’d impose job-crushing regulations on these same businesses as unemployment rose. He’d put a cumbersome mandate on businesses that upends the entire health care system just as the economy was finally turning a corner.

A really insane president would blow nearly $1 trillion on a stimulus plan with little planning and direction, wasting much of the money on boondoggles (see: Solyndra) and then laugh at the lack of “shovel ready” jobs created. He’d then try to spread his delusion to the masses, telling them to ignore historically low wage growth, anemic economic growth and the massive amount of people who dropped out of the work force because the stock market rallied, thanks in large part to the Fed printing money instead of his own fiscal policies.

Is Barack Obama crazy? No, but his post-2008 economic policies were. …

Speaking of which, Donald Trump is regularly called a self-absorbed bully, while Barack Obama is unfailingly depicted as a modest gentleman. What, then, to make of a U.S. president called “one of the most narcissistic, self-absorbed people [a British Prime Minister had] ever dealt with”?
 
What, then, to make of a leader who “never listened to anyone, always thought he was smarter than every expert in the room, and treated every meeting as an opportunity to lecture everyone else”?

David Cameron’s former director of strategy has said Cameron thought Barack Obama was one of the “most narcissistic, self-absorbed people” he had ever encountered, despite the pair’s once notorious “bromance”.

Thus writes Nadia Khomami in the Guardian (cheers to Instapundit).

Steve Hilton, one of Cameron’s closest advisers before the pair fell out over immigration and Brexit last year, made the comments during the latest instalment of his show, The Next Revolution, on Fox News.

Discussing Michael Wolff’s new book, Fire and Fury, Hilton said any claims by elitists and the establishment that Donald Trump was mentally unfit for the presidency came second to Trump’s promotion of a pro-worker, populist agenda on immigration, infrastructure, trade and the fight against China.

He went on to emphasise the shortcomings of Trump’s predecessors, adding:

“My old boss, former British prime minister David Cameron, thought Obama was one of the most narcissistic, self-absorbed people he’d ever dealt with.
 
“Obama never listened to anyone, always thought he was smarter than every expert in the room, and treated every meeting as an opportunity to lecture everyone else. This led to real-world disasters, like Syria and the rise of Isis.”

But the real world did not matter to the elites, Hilton said.

“For them, it’s all about style and tone, not substance and results. Donald Trump offends the elites aesthetically, like a piece of art that’s not to their taste.

“They can afford to do that because they live in a world of booming neighbourhoods, delightful hipster eateries and everyone they know employed in the virtual world of the knowledge economy. They don’t see what’s going on in the actual economy. Whatever his mental state, [Trump] has achieved more for working Americans in one year than his predecessors did in eight, or 16, frankly.”

Hilton’s comments contradict reports of Cameron and Obama’s “transatlantic bromance” in office. The two leaders were often pictured together playing ping-pong or golf, eating or watching a basketball game. …