President Donald Trump’s influence hinges upon his ability to villainize those who oppose him, his longtime biographer argues.
Appearing on the Inside Trump’s Head podcast, author Michael Wolff explained that the 80-year-old president feeds on conflict to fuel support for his agenda, even painting his own allies as foes if they step out of line.
“This is the thing that he always looks for. This is the conflict,” Wolff told host Joanna Coles. “Today, the court is the enemy... It isn’t the issue at hand, which is mail-in voting... which would require a complicated explanation. It’s the court: the court is at fault.”
Trump lashed out at the Supreme Court on Tuesday after it rejected his plot to curb mail-in voting, saying that the justices he nominated to the court were “not the people I interviewed.”
“This Supreme Court is bullied and cajoled by the Radical Left into making decisions that have set America back at least a hundred years,” Trump raged on Truth Social. “They are merely a shell of their original selves, a Court that is costing the United States Trillions of Dollars with shockingly bad rulings that are of such magnitude that it won’t be easily possible for our Country to recover or heal.”
Trump nominated three of the justices in the court’s conservative majority: Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, and Brett Kavanaugh. All three voted in favor of the ruling to reject the president’s limit on mail-in ballots, while Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas were the sole dissenters.
“There is no logic here. The... logic is only the conflict,” Wolff said. “‘Who is my enemy? Let me vilify my enemy.’”
“He’s in an awkward position here,” he continued. “These are the people he appointed. These are the people he appointed because of their... conservative beliefs. These are the Federalist Society people.”
“Now, they are turning against him. So, what does that mean? Well, it just means that we will have to... come up with a rationale for why they are not the people I appointed,” the author added.
Claiming three conservative justices were manipulated by the “radical left” was “extraordinary,” Wolff noted. But the author says it makes sense that Trump would emphasize that.
“They only have one issue in the midterms: the radical left, the Democratic Socialists. All... that is their... singular issue,” he explained. “So it’s how to get that into everything. Repetition, repetition, repetition. Put it in here, make that the issue.”
“It’s pathetic, of course. It’s intellectually pathetic, but for... what Trump is doing, it’s identifying a conflict and having him stand up,” Wolff added. “Now, this is not going to get him Democratic votes, certainly, and not independent votes. But from his point of view... this is what he’s bringing to the MAGA core.”
Reached for comment, the White House referred the Daily Beast to the president’s lengthy Truth Social screed on the Supreme Court’s ruling.
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.
