Donald Trump’s war against Iran spells the “beginning of the end,” the president’s biographer says.
Author Michael Wolff, on the latest episode of the Inside Trump’s Head podcast, said that whether Trump follows through with his threat to destroy “a whole civilization” or ends up pulling back, he still won’t know how to deal with what comes after.
“I think this situation is the worst situation he has gotten himself into,“ Wolff told co-host Joanna Coles. ”I think we can go broader on it: On a tipping point scale, this is very much, very clearly—I think indisputably—the beginning of the end. He’s not going to recover from this.”
The danger now lies in not knowing what it would look like if the 79-year-old president were to “take everyone with him,” Wolff said.
“I mean, he’s going to take everyone around him with him, but if he were to actually do what he’s threatening to do to Iran—I’m just trying to think,“ Wolff continued. ”I don’t think this is going to happen, and I may absolutely be proved wrong. It is Donald Trump. You don’t know. He is a crazy man. So, does restraint—“TACO”—kick in at some point today? I don’t know. I expect that it will, but if it doesn’t, I don’t know."
Regardless, Wolff added, Trump “still has to deal with this circumstance, and he doesn’t know how to deal with it.“
“He literally doesn’t know how,” he said. “In business as usual, he would declare victory, but we’re over that line. That’s not believable anymore. Him declaring victory would immediately make it clear that we have lost and the Iranians had won. The other side of that is that he can become more aggressive, but more aggression only seems to give the Iranians more backbone, more determination to use the leverage they have against us, and actually, the world.”
Iranians, at the direction of military leaders, have made human chains around electricity stations and power plants.
When reached for comment, the White House disputed Wolff’s credibility.
“Michael Wolff is a lying sack of s--- and has been proven to be a fraud,” White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said. “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 Tuesday morning threat to Iran to try to get the country to reopen the Strait of Hormuz by nighttime has spurred calls for his removal from office from right-wingers like Alex Jones, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Candace Owens—people who at one point were attached at the hip to him. But the president’s power to keep his “America First” allies in check seems to have weakened greatly over the past month, during which Trump has given no firm indication that the war will soon be over.
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.
