Donald Trump’s aides are in a constant state of panic about the elderly president dozing off on camera—not least because he blows up at them afterward—according to his biographer.
Trump, 79, appeared to fall asleep in the middle of a televised roundtable with lawmakers and farmers on Monday—less than a week after he was caught drifting off at a Cabinet meeting.
Speaking on the Inside Trump’s Head podcast, author Michael Wolff said Trump’s increasingly frequent on-camera naps are putting his aides on edge.
“I mean, you can’t wake him up. Also, the cameras are running. Everybody is in a low-level panic now all of the time about Trump falling asleep because then he gets mad,” Wolff said. “He gets angry. He essentially blames the people around him for the fact that he fell asleep.”
Co-host Joanna Coles said, “Well that’s ridiculous. I mean, poor Marco Rubio was trying to talk louder, I think, to keep him awake.”
Wolff added, “You’re on camera, so you can’t jostle him… So nobody knows what to do.”
The author, who has written four Trump tell-alls, including 2018’s Fire and Fury, drawn from his White House access during Trump’s first term, said the president is “in denial” about his dozing episodes.
“He’s railing about this, and he’s mad at people, but he’s also in denial. ‘I didn’t fall asleep.’ I mean, that’s what he’s saying now.’”
Wolff said Trump’s habit of sleeping on the job is unusual, noting that in the decade he has followed the president, he never saw him fall asleep during events. He recalled that when Trump got “bored” during his first term, he would simply “walk out” of the room.
“Certainly, in the first White House, 90 seconds, he was bored. He was out of the room,” Wolff said.
But Trump was still very much in the room—and on live TV—when he drifted off to slumberland at Monday’s roundtable, at last week’s Cabinet meeting, and at an Oval Office press conference last month. Some have seen the moments as yet another indicator of a cognitive decline in the president.
But Wolff said that within the president’s inner circle, the naps have contributed to a sense that he may be “losing interest” in the face of a more challenging political landscape.
“He’s had this incredible year. Everything essentially has gone right for him. And I think now what we’re starting to see is, it’s not really going right anymore. It may be going kind of dramatically wrong,” Wolff said.
“And I think he’s losing interest in that. He likes success. He certainly doesn’t like hard work.”
When reached for comment, the White House provided the Daily Beast with a statement from Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
“As the President’s physician, Dr. Sean Barbabella, has made clear time and again — and as the American people see with their own eyes every single day — President Trump remains in excellent overall health,” Leavitt said.
“President Trump’s relentless work ethic, unmatched energy, and historic accessibility stand in sharp contrast to what we saw during the past four years when the failing legacy media intentionally covered up Joe Biden’s serious mental and physical decline from the American people. Pushing these fake and desperate narratives now about President Trump is why Americans’ trust in the media just fell to a new all-time low.”
In addition, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung told the Daily Beast in a statement, “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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