President Donald Trump is desperately seeking a “big thing” to distract from Jeffrey Epstein—and is willing to sacrifice Ukraine to achieve it, his biographer Michael Wolff has revealed.
In the debut episode of the new Daily Beast podcast, Inside Trump’s Head, the best-selling author told co-host Joanna Coles that the president is making “relentless” calls to aides and allies to demand something to get past the unending questions over his links to the dead pedophile and his surviving lover-turned-sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.
And, Wolff disclosed, not only have successive plans failed or fallen flat, but Trump is now willing to give up Ukraine to Vladimir Putin when they meet in Alaska on Friday to achieve the distraction he needs.
Inside Trump’s Head, a new twice-weekly podcast, will explore what is really motivating and shaping the world’s most powerful and most polarizing man, using Wolff’s unique access, insight and authority as the author of four best-selling books on Trump. It grows out of the success of The Daily Beast podcast, on which Wolff has been a regular guest. Episodes of the podcast regularly draw more than 500,000 and even 1 million views on YouTube—and have set the agenda on Trump and Epstein.
Wolff’s reporting has drawn consistent fire from the White House. In response to questions from the Daily Beast Tuesday about Wolff’s reporting that Trump was willing to sacrifice Ukraine to distract from his Epstein crisis, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung told the Daily Beast: “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.”
The central revelation the debut episode is of Trump’s frantic need to move on from Epstein.
The firestorm began last month when the Department of Justice quietly said at a weekend that there was nothing more to say about Epstein—despite Attorney General Pam Bondi claiming in February that the files were on her desk, and the White House handing MAGA influencers folders of “Epstein Files,” promising more to come. In the backlash, conservatives accused Trump and Bondi of a cover-up, prompting the most dramatic break between the president and his base to date.
Wolff told Coles, “Let me go back about a week or so, or 10 days, when Trump started to say to everyone who would listen—and everyone listens to Donald Trump—to staffers and on the phone calls, the relentless phone calls that he’s constantly making, he said, ‘I need a big thing. I need a big thing.’
”What’s the ‘big thing?’ And everyone understood that this was code for I need a distraction from Epstein. What’s the thing that will move us beyond that?”
Options included making New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani the next MAGA enemy. The New York Times reported that Trump spoke with Andrew Cuomo, Mandami’s chief rival, about the race in recent weeks, though both denied it. But that plan didn’t pan out, Wolff said.
“It didn’t get that traction,“ Wolff said. ”I mean, Epstein still goes on behind everything. Epstein, Epstein, Epstein, that drum beat.”
Then came the next solution, which played on the apparent success of seizing headlines in June by deploying National Guard troops and then active duty Marines to Los Angeles: to flood soldiers and federal law enforcement into Washington D.C., a move bouncing off the alleged assault on 19-year-old DOGE staffer Edward “Big Balls” Coristine in the capital at 3 a.m. on a Sunday morning a week before.
Trump announced it on Monday but, Wolff said, is still seeking something “big” for the MAGA base—leading to the focus on Ukraine.
“That is what he got to,” Wolff said. “‘I’m going to have to do Ukraine.’”
Wolff explained that Trump would likely pull the U.S. out of any involvement in the Russia-Ukraine conflict—something which would please, in his judgment, the MAGA base, which has been opposed to U.S. involvement and particularly to Ukraine’s President Volodymr Zelensky.
“He’s going to sacrifice Ukraine for Epstein,” Wolff said. “Essentially, this is, in his mind, a trade. It is the MAGA people who have pressed this Epstein issue constantly. I mean, they’re the threat.”
White House staffers were befuddled by Trump’s renewed direct involvement in brokering a settlement—including meeting with Putin directly, Wolff said—and they still weren’t sure what Trump would ultimately do. “Nobody in the White House can see this turning out so well for Ukraine,” he said.
But, Wolff said, the distraction appears doomed.
“The Epstein drumbeat is real,” Wolff said. “It is unceasing and it is threatening, most of all, to Donald Trump.”
Trump and Epstein were friends for decades before he said he severed ties with the pedophile in the mid 2000s. Multiple outlets have reported on Trump’s ties to Epstein, including The Wall Street Journal, which Trump sued for its bombshell report that he sent Epstein a lewd greeting for his 50th birthday, hinting at a “secret.” Trump denied sending it.
Wolff’s tape of one of his interviews with Epstein—who asked the author to be his biographer—were first revealed by the Daily Beast in November and uncovered the dead pedophile describing himself as Trump’s “closest friend” and detailing their long relationship.
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.
The post Trump Is Plotting This Desperate Move to Distract From Epstein: Wolff appeared first on The Daily Beast.
