Donald Trump doesn’t want any of the conflicts he has a hand in to “actually create danger to him,” the president’s biographer says.
Author Michael Wolff explained on the Inside Trump’s Head podcast how Trump exploits uncertainty by announcing conflicts he has no intention of taking decisive action on.
“Remember, the Venezuela business is a created crisis where there is no crisis,” Wolff told co-host Joanna Coles, referencing how Trump has said he would “run” the South American country after invading Venezuela and capturing President Nicolás Maduro.
“You don’t have to create a war to distract. You just can announce that you have done something. ‘We’ve taken over Venezuela’—a distraction from everything, although we have not taken over Venezuela. We haven’t done anything. We will do nothing. Nothing will be at stake or at issue,” Wolff said.
Wolff contrasted that to “very real issues,” like the significance of Russia firing a nuclear-capable missile into Ukraine, close to the Polish border. “The Russians fired a missile with nuclear capabilities, and clearly a warning shot, clearly a threat,” Wolff said.
“Now this is an existential situation in the world that Donald Trump may well have to address. Can he address it?” Wolff asked. In the situation of an actual crisis, Wolff said it is impossible to predict how Trump would react.
“What does Donald Trump do?” he asked. “We’ve then gone over the line of what is imaginable. What’s unimaginable is not that they would do it, but it’s unimaginable how Donald Trump would respond to this.”
Wolff then pivoted to another part of the world where a conflict that Trump has not manufactured is occurring. The protests by tens of thousands of Iranians against their government have the potential to be “the most critical foreign policy issue of the last several generations,” Wolff explained.
“What does Donald Trump do?” Wolff wondered, in the event of regime change in Iran. “I haven’t heard anything—the U.S. administration seems at this point to have been absent from whatever is happening there.”
“Well, they’re fiddling while Rome is burning,” Coles replied.
The situation in Venezuela, Wolff continued, “is a perfect example of this: he wants to create conflict which puts him at the center of attention, which distracts from other issues, which means people are wholly focused on this conflict, but he doesn’t want the conflict to actually create danger to him.”
In the White House, Wolff continued, there is the assumption that someone, somewhere knows what is going on, when in fact nobody does—and Trump exploits that.
Trump, 79, is “taking advantage of the fact that nobody knows anything.”
“So, he can go in, we do this Venezuela thing, and...literally nobody knows what to think about this. Nobody knows what he’s doing because actually he’s not doing anything,” he said. “He gets to fool everyone.”
When reached for comment, the White House disputed Wolff’s credibility.
“Michael Wolff is a lying sack of s--t and has been proven to be a fraud,” Communications Director Steven Cheung told the Daily Beast. “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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