Donald Trump’s sole priority is softening the blow of his political demise after he loses big in the midterm elections, his biographer says.
The president, 79, is pushing the Senate to pass his long-shot SAVE America Act as Congress struggles to reopen the government. The bill—widely expected to fail—would impose new barriers to voter registration and could potentially bar millions of Americans from casting ballots.
Despite its virtually nonexistent chances of passage, Trump refuses to quit on his beloved SAVE Act—a move Michael Wolff sees as an effort to cushion the impact of a much-anticipated GOP drubbing in the 2026 midterms, the biographer alleged on The Daily Beast’s Inside Trump’s Head podcast.
“It’s just what is to his advantage is just the narrative that the election system in the United States is broken,” he told co-host Joanna Coles on Tuesday. “And chaos is to his advantage, and to create a bubble of uncertainty and controversy around that, no matter what happens, reverts to his advantage.”
Numerous polls show the president and his party underwater in approval ratings, putting Republican prospects on shaky ground. Wolff argues that those warning signs have already prompted Trump to lay the groundwork to contest any losses.
“Let’s assume this [bill] is not going to pass. So why is he doing this?” Wolff asked. “The reason he is doing this is to set up and to continue the narrative when he loses the midterms.”
He continued: “This then becomes the reason he lost the midterms, and he lost the midterms illegitimately…we’ve set up the enemy here.”
If passed, the bill would mandate proof of citizenship to register to vote and largely eliminate mail-in ballots in elections. The legislation also calls for banning transgender women from women’s sports and prohibiting gender-affirming surgeries for minors.
Just before 2 a.m. on Tuesday, Trump went on a Truth Social rampage over the bill, reviving his long-debunked claim that non-U.S. citizens are broadly voting in American elections.
“Democrats are desperate to keep illegals, no matter how bad or dangerous they may be, in the Country. They want them to VOTE! That’s why they are fighting so hard to neutralize ICE. We will fight them all the way, and WIN,” Trump wrote.
But years of research tell a different tale. For example, Georgia, a swing state, identified just 20 noncitizens who had registered to vote during an October 2024 audit of 8.2 million registered voters.
And in 2025, the Michigan Department of State found only 15 instances of non-U.S. citizens voting in the 2024 presidential election, which amounted to 0.00028 percent of the more than 5.7 million ballots cast.
“He’s pushing this forward because he has pushed this story forward from day one of his political career,” Wolff said. “That’s what, essentially, his politics is founded on this... narrative.”
“So if he wins, the system is perfect. And if he loses, the system is rigged,” Coles said, to which Wolff replied: “Yes, but he’s not going to win. So the system is going to be rigged.”
While Trump’s focus appears fixed on shaping the narrative around potential losses, other moves have drawn scrutiny—including his weekend announcement that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents would be deployed to airports to ease travel disruptions tied to a partial government shutdown that has left Transportation Security Administration staff unpaid.
At the same time, the president’s surprise war with Iran—launched in coordination with Israel on Feb. 28 without congressional approval—has entered its fourth week.
Reached for comment, the White House used a recycled statement from communications director Steven Cheung. “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.”
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