President Donald Trump’s obsession with being the tallest man in the room furthered his disdain for the recently-indicted James Comey, says biographer Michael Wolff.
It is well known that Trump, 79, cares deeply about his physical appearance, and he has gone to great lengths to conceal hand bruising—albeit not always successfully—this year while also rejecting any notion that he is beginning to show his age.
Trump also insists that he is 6-foot-3, a claim that blew up this month when he visited the United Kingdom and was towered over by Prince William, who is actually that height.
Wolff claimed on the Inside Trump’s Head podcast on Tuesday that Trump’s height insecurities date back to his first term, when there were “enormous problems” that the 6-foot-8 Comey, a political foe who probed his ties to Russia, was so much taller.
“Trump, who has almost a need, a motivating need to be the tallest guy in the room, had enormous problems dealing with” being so much shorter than an adversary, Wolff said.
He went on to claim that Trump’s team would coordinate to ensure that, on the occasions he had to share a room with Comey, that the one-time FBI director would already be seated by the time the president made his entrance.
“There was always an effort to choreograph this, of having Comey seated before Trump came into the room, of any other way to create a situation so that Trump would not be conscious in that immediate moment of Comey’s really impressive height,” Wolff said.
Podcast co-host Joanna Coles noted that Trump, like others who are pushing 80, may have naturally lost an inch or two off his peak height—though it is unlikely he would ever admit to any shrinkage.
Reached for comment, the White House emailed a statement by Communications Director Steven Cheung.
“Michael Wolff is a lying sack of s–t and has been proven to be a fraud,” he said. “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.”
Trump and Comey’s beef goes much further than just their height differences, of course. Trump fired Comey in May 2017 amid an FBI probe into potential collusion between Russia and Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign, making him among the first of many Trump firings during his tumultuous first term.
Comey went on to write in a memoir that Trump had acted like a mafia boss. Trump has had no shortage of insults for the former FBI director over the years, and their dispute culminated with Comey being indicted this month on allegations that he lied to Congress five years ago—a move widely criticized as political retribution that will likely not hold up in a fair court of law.
Find and subscribe to Inside Trump’s Head with Michael Wolff and Joanna Coles on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes of incomparable insight into the psyche of the world’s most talked-about man drop every Tuesday and Thursday evening on YouTube and Wednesday and Friday mornings on other podcast platforms.
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