Trump made the audacious claim while discussing fraught US-China relations at a press conference in New York on Wednesday. The president declared that he likes China and believes the feeling is mutual before going on to explain why the nation's president, Xi Jinping, respects him.
"If you look at Mr Pillsbury, the leading authority on China... he was saying that China has total respect for Donald Trump and for Donald Trump's very, very large brain," Trump said, speaking of himself in the third person.
The expert in question was Michael Pillsbury - the director of the Center for Chinese Strategy, a conservative think tank in Washington and author of The Hundred Year Marathon: China's Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower.
Trump was apparently referring to Pillsbury's interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox News last month, in which he described Trump as "so smart" and said the US leader was "playing three-dimensional chess with China."
Of course, Trump's bragging comment went down a treat on Twitter, leaving many dumbfounded by the president's incredible boast.
Comment: It's safe to say at this point in US politics that if a US president doesn't automatically accept the 'deep state' running things, then they are literally locked out of foreign policy. Trump's foreign policy tweets and statements like the above just show that he has accepted this deal. This explains why he sounds increasingly crazy on foreign affairs. He really does have no idea what's going on at specific fronts on the empire's 'frontier', and he couldn't care less.
So from now on, Trump is president of the United States, but not of US foreign policy, which he learns about after the fact like the rest of us.