Donald Trump has lost his grip on political reality—and it may cost him badly in the midterms, according to his biographer.
“This is the golden age of America,” the 79-year-old president proclaimed during his State of the Union address on Tuesday, insisting, “We’re winning so much that we really don’t know what to do about it.”
But author Michael Wolff says that Trump is failing to grasp the true and “devastating” reality of his political standing among Americans.
“The state of the union was Trump reality, which was, by the way, largely, ‘The state of the union is utterly perfect,’” Wolff said on the Inside Trump’s Head podcast.
“Let’s see the world the way we want to see it, even though everybody else sees it differently and knows that it is different,” the author said, suggesting the White House is refusing to acknowledge the “true reality” of Trump’s cratering polls.
During his address to the nation, Trump claimed that “the roaring economy is roaring like never before,” that “inflation is plummeting,” and that he had transformed the U.S. into “the hottest country anywhere in the world.”
But 60 percent of Americans said the country is worse off than a year ago, according to a NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released the day before Trump’s speech.
A Washington Post–ABC/Ipsos poll released Sunday found that only 32 percent of Americans approve of how he’s dealt with inflation. A majority, 57 percent, said they disapproved of how he’s handled the economy.
Wolff said the disconnect between Trump and public sentiment may mark a potential “inflection moment.”
“He can’t get anything right. He can’t even find the rhetoric now to create a kind of, a kind of consistent opposition to all of these things that are going wrong on a palpable basis for most Americans,” he said.
The author argued that Trump’s bungled ICE surge in Minnesota revealed just how disconnected the increasingly unpopular president has become from the political landscape.
“They sent in the troops to Minneapolis and basically lost their own issue there,” he told co-host Joanna Coles, noting that the Trump administration’s focus had initially been on Minnesota’s sprawling fraud scandal before it sent thousands of federal immigration officers into the state as part of an immigration crackdown in December.
Wolff said the White House “had a bona fide issue there” before ICE’s aggressive tactics and the killings of two U.S. citizens at the hands of federal agents began to dominate the conversation.
“Could no one think in a political straight line there? Apparently not,” he quipped.
“What happened in Minneapolis is hugely unpopular, incredibly unpopular, maybe one of the things that will result in the midterm election rout,” Wolff said. “Could not be less popular.”
After pulling some troops from Minnesota last month amid mounting outrage, Trump tried to reclaim the narrative on Tuesday by announcing that he had tapped Vice President JD Vance to spearhead a “war on fraud” in Minnesota.
Vance’s first salvo on Wednesday was to temporarily halt $259 million of Medicaid payments to Minnesota, which Coles said has “re-inflamed” the situation and dubbed “another Trump own goal by JD Vance.”
When reached for comment, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung provided the Daily Beast with a recycled statement.
“Michael Wolff is a lying sack of s— 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,” Cheung said.
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