Even Donald Trump—a man who feeds on flattery—is running out of patience with his Cabinet of sycophants and knifes them behind their backs, according to his biographer.
Trump held a televised meeting with his Cabinet on Tuesday, where his secretaries—many facing spiraling scandals—took turns singing his praises. Yet the 79-year-old president couldn’t keep his eyes open.
Author Michael Wolff said on the Inside Trump’s Head podcast that while the moment could be seen as another red flag about the president’s cognitive health, those inside the White House took it as a sign that he has become “bored” by the relentless flattery from his floundering team.
The author said he’d heard from a White House source that “in the last couple of weeks” Trump has “been on the phone... and asking questions, the questions of which imply an answer. Questions like, ‘Is Pete an a--lick? Is Pam a suck-up?’”
Trump’s paradox, Wolff told co-host Joanna Coles, is that he needs and demands “the whole flattery sycophant thing,” but simultaneously gets irritated by it, because he’s not getting enough of it and irritated because now he sees through it.”
“So Pete becomes an a--lick, Pam becomes a suck-up, and little Marco—he’s asking—‘Is he just saying what I want to hear?’”
Wolff, whose best-seller Fire and Fury detailed the fractious opening months of Trump’s first term, argued, “This is all evidence of an indication of Trump’s disgruntlement with the people around him.”
The commander-in-chief’s Cabinet, which Wolff dubbed a “moronocracy,” has generated a steady stream of negative headlines in recent weeks.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, 45, has been accused of war crimes in the administration’s boat strikes in the Caribbean and a new report reignited scrutiny of the ex-Fox News anchor’s role in Signalgate this week.
FBI Director Kash Patel, 45, already under fire for allegedly using an FBI jet for private trips across the country, has been further embarrassed by an insider dossier that said some of his own agents view him as “in over his head” and “insecure.”
Patel, like Attorney General Pam Bondi, was already in hot water for the administration’s handling of the Epstein files.
Bondi, 60, recently suffered a blow to her revenge cases against Trump’s political foes when a judge ruled that she had unlawfully appointed the U.S. attorney who had brought the indictments.
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, 54, has been caught in the crossfire in MAGA’s civil war over the White House’s negotiations to end Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Cabinet members tried their best to heap praise on Trump on Tuesday. Rubio said Trump was “the only leader in the world that can help end” the Russia-Ukraine war, while Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem thanked the president for keeping the hurricanes away.
But Wolff said Trump is tiring of his yes-men dishing out “maximum groveling” day in and day out. “If you deliver the same level of flattery, no matter how lavish and groveling, and if you can’t up the ante, then he gets bored,” he said.
Amid his Cabinet’s struggles and his own trajectory as a second-term president with sagging approval ratings, Trump isn’t getting the “stimulation” he needs, Wolff suggested.
“Trump is a man who lives in the moment. It is about his stimulation, now. And if that fails him, I think everything starts to fail him. And if we’re suddenly in a more complicated, naughty, draggy political moment, the stimulation is going to go down,” he said. “I’m not sure that he knows what to do with that, except his head droops and he falls and then lists to the side because he is fundamentally bored.”
Wolff predicted that Republican senators who voted to confirm the Cabinet members, whom the author called “distinguished only by their lack of distinction,” would end up turning on them.
“Every Republican senator knows they’re morons,” he said. “So when it becomes the moment, the emperor’s no clothes moment, they’re not then, at that moment, going to continue to defend them.”
When reached for comment on Wolff’s remarks, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung told the Daily Beast, “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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