The president’s behavior since launching his unauthorized war in Iran is so unusual for that of a president, it is hard to even characterize, his biographer argues.
“It’s not just unpresidential, it’s incoherent. I mean, it’s the language of an ignoramus,” Michael Wolff said of 79-year-old President Donald Trump on the Daily Beast’s Inside Trump’s Head podcast.
He added, “We’re so far from being removed from presidential. I mean, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It’s just it comes out of his mouth, and on either out of his mouth, or onto the page in a rush of self-justification of need, of fear, of aggression.”
Wolff argued that “nothing” Trump says is ever “related to meaning,” but that it’s “all related to what he is feeling.”
“He’s doing this sort of as a self-soothing mechanism that he woke up in a paroxysm of anxiety about this, and another tell for that is that he’s been calling journalists to talk about the war,” co-host Joanna Coles said.
Since Trump launched his war last weekend, it appears that most reporters with Trump’s phone number have been granted an interview with him, including outlets and journalists he has previously dubbed “fake news,” like ABC News, CNN, and NBC News.
Coles called it “completely unusual behavior in the middle of a war.”
“This sense of needing reassurance from people that he’s doing the right thing,” Coles said, asserting that Trump does not have ”any panel of advisors around him to give him that,” so he must resort to getting reassurance in the news.
Wolff responded, “Not just in this instance, but in so many instances that nobody else, I mean, he doesn’t have the language to express what the policies and the strategies that he wants carried out because he has no policies and he has no strategies.”
Wolff continued, “But equally, the rest of the world does not have the language to characterize this strangeness, this lack of meaning functionally. So everybody is caught in a vacuum.”
On Friday, the president said he would only stop bombing Iran if the country agreed to “unconditional surrender.” By Saturday morning, he said Iran would be “hit very hard,” and vowed for “complete destruction and certain death, because of Iran’s bad behavior.”
Wolff argued it was hard for news outlets to even cover the president’s erratic back-and-forth through the lens that they are used to under other presidencies.
“Every news outlet today, or yesterday and today, is analyzing the nature of ‘unconditional surrender,’ even though everyone knows unconditional surrender uttered by Donald Trump is meaningless,” Wolff said.
“So the gap here between his inability to express any plans, and actual, any real meaningful point of view, and everybody else’s inability to characterize that lack of ability to meaningfully express himself has gotten sort of everybody, it creates this sort of paralysis,” he continued.
“We don’t know what’s going on, but we can’t acknowledge that we don’t know what’s going on,” he said. “The world is spinning out of control because Donald Trump, because it’s run by an ignoramus who lives in his own movie, but we can’t really say that.”
The White House did not immediately return the Daily Beast’s request for comment, but Communications Director Steven Cheung has recycled the same statement previously saying, “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 How Trump’s War Exposes His Lost Grip on Reality: Biographer appeared first on The Daily Beast.
