President Donald Trump’s off-the-rails social media posts in the dead of night indicate the need for “an intervention,” his biographer says.
Michael Wolff, the author of four books about the president, said on the Daily Beast’s Inside Trump’s Head Podcast that the often sleep-deprived 79-year-old’s posts are detached from reality. On Monday night, for instance, he reposted a call for the arrest of “traitor” Barack Obama in one of the 54 posts that came from his Truth Social account between 10:14 p.m. and 11:28 p.m.
“Right now, you can look this up and find the president of the United States saying things—regularly saying things, continuously saying things—that are out of control, bizarre, unhinged, irrational, that have in every possible way departed reality,” Wolff told co-host Hugh Dougherty. “How do you react to that? Nobody actually has quite reacted to this. There are no headlines in The New York Times that say, ‘The president of the United States has flipped his lid,’ which in any reasonable, fair-minded reading of what he posts on social media... that’s the conclusion that you would come to.”
Wolff added: “If this were a family member of literally anybody, anybody who stayed up all night and posted—sometimes in a night, a hundred posts—this kind of wingnut stuff, that would be a mental health crisis."
The Daily Beast, which has extensively chronicled Trump’s social media posts, as well as his health, found that in April, he kept quiet on Truth Social between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. on just five nights. Among his many posts was a since-removed depiction of himself as Jesus Christ, more election denialism, and AI slop of a lunar Trump Tower.
Wolff seemed to be stumped by what the path forward was for an elderly world leader who posts like that.
“What do you do with a situation in which you have the president of the United States who is openly—without any kind of inhibition whatsoever, in print, in black and white, in his own hand—delivering these statements, which are off the beam constantly?” he wondered.
“What do you do with the clear evidence that the President of the United States is behaving in a way that for anyone else—your own family members, CEOs of other companies—would beg for an intervention?"
When reached for comment, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung provided a recycled 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.”
Trump’s Truth Social posts, according to the Wall Street Journal, are also due in part to his executive assistant, Natalie Harp, who presents him with printed out drafts of post for him to approve. After he has done so, Harp logs into his account and posts them. The president also makes some posts himself.
Sources told the Journal that the fact Harp doesn’t share draft posts with the chief of staff, White House communications aides or national security officials has irked some White House officials.
Cheung declined to delve into the process or the reaction to it in the West Wing.
“We don’t discuss internal deliberations of how the process works, but no other social-media tool has been more effective than Truth,” he told the paper in a statement.
Wolff said that during the 2024 campaign, some people close to Trump were glad he was posting on Truth Social as opposed to X, where he currently has nearly 100 million more followers but posts sporadically.
“This was a conversation that I had... with a bunch of the people close to Trump. It was like... ‘God, we’re so grateful that he says this stuff on Truth Social because, you know, he’s the only one on Truth Social, so people don’t see this,’” Wolff said. “But of course, at the same time, it was there for everyone to see.”
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, Thursday, and Saturday evening on YouTube and Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday mornings on other podcast platforms.
