Donald Trump’s biographer says the president’s inability to absorb information has reduced Washington to “a government of one” that his scheming advisers readily exploit.
Author Michael Wolff, who Trump allowed behind the scenes of the White House during his first term, discussed the president’s aversion to reading, his peculiar morning routine, and how Zohran Mamdani should take him on at a live taping of the Inside Trump’s Head podcast before a sold-out crowd at the Museum of the City of New York on Wednesday evening.
Wolff explained that from the first conversation he had with Trump, when the now-president was still an attention-seeking New York City real estate developer, he was already compensating for “the fact that he can’t take in information” by talking “inordinately long.”
When Trump allowed Wolff to be an observer in the White House for nine months from January to September 2017, his aides told the author, “He doesn’t read.”
Despite the presidency being “the most information-intensive job in the world,” Wolff said in his conversation with co-host Joanna Coles, “You can’t give him things to read, not even a paragraph.”
Wolff said that Trump aides told him the problem was “compounded” by the president’s inability to listen to anyone. Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon “once described Trump as [being] in a lifelong war against information,” Wolff recalled.
Instead, the author said, “It just is a wall of words of his verbiage constantly,” and the “United States government, one of the most complex systems in the world, has become a government of one man.”
Those who are “smart in managing Trump” capitalize on his lack of focus, finding areas he’s not interested in to push their own agendas, Wolff argued.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
Trump, who was 70 years old at his first inauguration and is now 79, typically begins his mornings by asking one of his aides to “rehash all of the television shows—which he has seen—and then analyze why whatever he has seen is, in fact, good for him,” Wolff said. Trump then starts working in the Oval Office at around 11 a.m., according to the biographer.
“There’s not a real sense of urgency here,” said Wolff, 72, who has written four tell-all books about Trump.
The author, a longtime New Yorker, said people around Trump had already spun Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the city’s mayoral election into a positive by casting the 34-year-old Democrat as a useful antagonist.
“Bad news must become good news if you’re Donald Trump, and bad news that cannot become good news, then necessarily becomes a conspiracy against him,” Wolff explained, describing Trump’s inner circle as a “world of would-be teachers’ pets.”
But Wolff predicted that the White House is miscalculating the new mayor of Trump’s hometown, arguing, “I think Mamdani is in a perfect position to make Donald Trump his foil, rather than the other way around.”
“How do you get ahead of Trump coming at you?” Coles asked.
“Attack, attack, attack, which is why I am suing the First Lady,” Wolff replied, referring to the bombshell lawsuit against Melania Trump he filed in New York State court last month after she threatened to sue him for $1 billion.
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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