Donald Trump’s biographer has warned that the president’s cognitive tailspin is turning into a “civil emergency.”
Author Michael Wolff argued on the Inside Trump’s Head podcast that the 79-year-old president and his White House should not be seen as a “reasonable enterprise.”
“If you stop seeing it as a reasonable enterprise—that is a civil emergency,” the president’s biographer told co-host Joanna Coles.
The increasingly foul-mouthed president’s mental deterioration appears to be playing out more openly by the day.
He has threatened to kill a “whole civilization,” alienated NATO allies, picked a fight with the pope, and gone scorched earth on his former MAGA supporters—all while he continues to suffer the mental gaffes that have come to define his second term.
Wolff noted that what comes out of Trump’s mouth is “more and more distinct from, cut-off from, separate from reality.”
“And so that would be another indication of erratic behavior, another indication that he is in this place and reality is in this place, which would be alarming,” the author said, gesturing to two widely separated points.
Trump’s apparent unraveling comes as setbacks mount: his economic message has collapsed, his popularity has tanked, his Cabinet is in chaos, and his war on Iran has turned into an own goal.
But the president, who is in control of the nuclear codes, often appears to inhabit an alternate reality. He called Iran peace talks a “total and complete victory” despite Iran holding greater leverage than before the war, frequently and falsely proclaims “no inflation” and the “greatest economy ever,” and this week posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus.
“We have seen 10 years of erratic behavior, but I think it is coming faster and more furious in these past number of weeks, probably prompted by the war, which is going terribly, of course, and he doesn’t know what to do, and he doesn’t know how to get out of it,” Wolff said.
“But also, I think, prompted by a whole set of other things—Minneapolis, ICE, the failing economy, the dimwits that surround him, which he has now been forced to fire. So I think he is in a corner, and that has meant he’s flailing out erratically.”
Wolff, who was granted access to the White House during Trump’s first term, told Coles, “There is every reason to believe, and for every reasonable person to believe, that something is seriously off here and dangerous.”
“Something’s going wrong mentally with Trump. Something is going wrong on a broad range of policy issues with Trump. Something is going wrong with the way the Trump base is now looking at Trump,” he said. “I’ve said before, and I keep saying it again, the story that we are now seeing is the eclipse of Trump.”
Wolff, 72, argued that Trump is “obviously” experiencing a kind of deterioration often seen in older relatives, where “more extreme behavior patterns, which you might have displayed all through your life, suddenly become more pronounced, more extreme, more frequent.”
Psychologist Dr. John Gartner made a similar point on The Daily Beast Podcast last week, saying that the commander-in-chief is “losing all the internal controls and he’s more like an out-of-control mental patient—only here is somebody who has the nuclear button.”
When reached for comment, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung sent the Daily Beast a recycled statement:
“Michael Wolff is a lying sack of s--t and has been proven to be a fraud. He routinely fabricates stories originating from his sick and warped imagination, only possible because he has a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain.”
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