Behind closed doors, Donald Trump is wrestling with fears that his administration’s mounting crises might spell his political demise as the midterms edge closer, according to his biographer.
Author Michael Wolff shared on the Inside Trump’s Head podcast that he spoke with sources in the White House who say Trump has a growing “sense” that things are “going wrong.”
The 79-year-old president was “starting to feel it” around the fall of last year, when his approval rating on the economy plunged, and Republicans suffered losses in contests across the country.
According to Wolff, White House sources quoted Trump saying of the upcoming midterms, ‘If we lose, we could be finished, finished, finished.’”
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Wolff added, “And then he would go on—with some almost self-awareness—he would go on to cite the problems that they were having, which are jobs. He seems to have been on top of that, that jobs aren’t growing.”
Since the start of his second term, Trump presided over the weakest year for job growth since the pandemic, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
While the economy added an average of 168,000 jobs per month in the final full year of President Joe Biden’s term, the figure shrank to 49,000 jobs per month in Trump’s second term.
Prices have also risen steadily despite Trump promising to “end inflation,” with food prices seeing the biggest spike since 2022 last month.
Wolff told co-host Joanna Coles that Trump is also feeling pressure from the outcry over the “Epstein s–t” and ICE videos that “everybody is crying over.”
The president acknowledges that Republicans could lose the House and even the Senate in the November midterm elections, and fears that Democrats would put him “back in court,” saying it “won’t be pretty,” Wolff said.
That’s why, the author said, Trump is desperate to create distractions, like abducting Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and making threats to invade allies like Greenland.
“He sort of announced, ‘We need something for 2026, a stand-out thing for 2026,’” Wolff said. “‘It has to be a whole new big deal,’ he’s been going around and saying, ‘it has to play’.”
He added, “That means something that captures all the headlines and all the conversation. So it’s not really about good or bad. It’s about, is anyone thinking about anything else? No.”
Wolff said that when Trump first pitched the idea to “go for” Greenland to his team, “everybody regarded this as a joke,” with his Chief of Staff Susie Wiles rolling her eyes, refusing to even entertain the possibility.
But the self-proclaimed “peace president” has pushed ahead with his headline-generating saber-rattling, telling reporters on Sunday that the U.S. would acquire Greenland “one way or the other.”
When reached for comment, the White House provided the Daily Beast with a recycled statement.
“Michael Wolff is a lying sack of s–t and has been proven to be a fraud,” White House Communications Director Steven Cheung 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.”
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