Donald Trump’s need for validation is nowhere more apparent than in the way he works the phone, according to his biographer.
The 79-year-old president has always been notoriously accessible by phone since his days as an attention-seeking New York real estate developer—using the receiver as a stand-in for the human connection he lacks, author Michael Wolff explained on the Inside Trump’s Head podcast.
“Anyone who has that number, he’ll talk to,” Wolff said. “It is kind of instant access. You have that number, you call him up, and he will talk to you.”
But Trump’s phone lines are tightly managed by aides he relies on, according to the author. At one point, the president’s team changed his phone number so that Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and Trump lawyer, could no longer reach him, Wolff said.
Noting that the elderly president depends entirely on speed-dial contacts, Wolff added, “Sometimes the staff will take his phone and take people out of the phone because they don’t want him calling this person—often a reporter.”
Trump’s calls begin early in the morning while he is still lying in bed, but “there’s never a conversation” because “he wants to tell you what he thinks, and then for you to confirm that,” Wolff said.
“He’s using it for a human connection,” Wolff told co-host Joanna Coles, adding, “I mean, I don’t think he knows how to make a human connection. So without the actual connection, he has the phone.”
Coles chimed in, “It’s very interesting that you say he uses the phone for human connection because his daughter’s not there. His wife’s not there,” referring to Ivanka and first lady Melania Trump, both of whom live in Florida.
She continued, “What I’m taking from this is he’s lonely, and this is his way of reaching out and sort of dominating the person he’s talking to.”
“Well, it’s certainly dominating because you never get a word in edgewise,” Wolff replied.
The author, whom Trump threatened to sue earlier this month, said he would often receive calls from Trump while he was a media columnist at New York Magazine around the turn of the millennium.
“He found out I was the media guy, and then he started to call me up,” Wolff said, noting Trump was “almost always” calling to whine about being left out of an article.
“So it’s not, ‘You wrote this about me and it’s wrong.’ It’s, ‘You didn’t write this about me. And because you didn’t write this about me and didn’t include me in this article, the article is wrong.’”
Their calls continued over the years, including after Trump was elected as president in 2016. Wolff explained that Trump never phoned to exchange information, instead talking at length about nothing in particular.
“You’re not clear about what the subject is. You’re not clear about the purpose. You’re not even clear that he has called the right person,” Wolff said.
When reached for comment, Trump’s communications director Steven Cheung provided the Daily Beast with a recycled statement.
“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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