A terrible month for President Donald Trump has raised the question: Is Donald Trump losing his grip on the Republican Party?
Trump biographer Michael Wolff discussed the question with Daily Beast Chief Creative and Content Officer Joanna Coles on Inside Trump’s Head.
“The weaknesses we have here are his physical health, his mental health, and then his hold on the party itself. So I’d say that this is a possible inflection point,” said Wolff.
For the 72-year-old author, two key signs show how Trump is weakening. First, Wolff pointed to Trump’s political ping-ponging as a sign that his mental capacity is declining, as Trump underwent whiplash-inducing 180s on both his allies and enemies in November.
“Wherever he is mentally, I think we’ve seen some evident weirdness,” said Wolff.
“The fact that he can go, and it would seem in the course of a day, from being a Putin booster to a Zelensky booster. That he can go from, ‘Mamdani, we’re gonna deport the guy,’ to ‘we’re gonna embrace the guy.’ I think that he’s traveling very quickly between the extremes of these issues as though, A, he doesn’t know what he stands for anymore, or B, he forgets,” he said.
On Nov. 21, Trump had an unexpectedly chummy meeting with New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani that left Republicans scrambling on how to spin the president’s budding bromance with the 34-year-old Democratic socialist they’d been trying to smear as the villainous, radical new face of the Democratic Party.
Trump has also signaled support for both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin in the ongoing Ukraine-Russia war—though he’s leaned more toward Putin’s side throughout his presidency.
Wolff also noted that Trump’s erratic and unpopular behavior has caused even his most loyal followers in Congress to get sick of him, citing Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s shock resignation last week.
“You sense her incredible weariness of having to deal with Donald Trump,“ said Wolff. ”She’s gone from the greatest loyalist to open rebellion. And I think that we are seeing this more and more throughout the Republican Party.”
Greene’s resignation led to speculation that more Republicans would follow her lead. Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy warned Greene was the “canary in the coal mine” for a crisis among the GOP’s House caucus.
“Other people in that Trump orbit of necessary loyalty and fealty experience the same thing,” said Wolff. “That it is incredibly unrewarding, that all that it gets you is grief because you’re a kind of pinball. You never know what Donald Trump wants. You never know what he’s going to ask you to do. You never know what breach you’re going to have to step into. You never know how foolish you’re going to look.”
To Wolff, no person in Trump’s orbit has suffered that unrewarding battering like House Speaker Mike Johnson. Wolff and Coles discussed Johnson’s appearance on the podcast of Katie Miller, the wife of Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller. They observed that Johnson’s beleaguered testimony of his time as speaker under Trump showed the wear and tear of doing Trump’s bidding.
“[Trump is] a 79-year-old man who doesn’t take care of himself,” said Wolff. “Mike Johnson might be experiencing all kinds of pressures of the job and the whiplash of dealing with Donald Trump.”
“[Trump] emerges from this year as an incredibly dominant character in this moment in time and in this job,” he added. “But the dominance, and I think this is what we’re seeing, has had an enormous price. It’s had a price on him physically because it really has demanded living in the middle of this drama every day. And then it’s exacted a price on so many people around him, like Mike Johnson.”
The White House refused to respond to Wolff’s comments. Instead, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said, “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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The post Weak Trump Losing Physical and Mental Grip: Wolff appeared first on The Daily Beast.
