Chaos and disorder within the Trump administration may be the point, but the risks are existential, President Trump’s biographer says.
On the latest episode of the Daily Beast’s Inside Trump’s Head, author Michael Wolff posed the question to co-host Joanna Coles, “Does the incompetence have a purpose?”
Wolff pointed to the FAA’s brief closure of the El Paso International Airport as one example of the administration’s “rank, utter astounding incompetence.” The original explanation for the planned 10-day closure was that the Defense Department had shot down Mexican cartel drones, but the flying material actually turned out to be just a party balloon, and the closure lasted a couple of hours.
Coles noted that the chaotic incident “pitches two old Fox hosts together: Sean Duffy in charge of Transport and Pete Hegseth in charge of the Department of Defence/War.”
Both were weekend anchors on the network. Duffy began as a star of The Real World and Road Rules, then became a congressman, quitting suddenly to join Fox. Hegseth was a National Guard officer who turned being a pro-Iraq war commentator into both a Fox career and a chance to meet his third wife, who was initially both his producer and his mistress.
“Two people that may have been fine as weekend co-hosts but have no business running a government department, no business,” Coles said.
“Right. They’re on opposite sides now, which is that other interesting thing, which it seems logical that we could look forward to, and perhaps it is happening now, of the people inside of the Trump administration, whose whole point in life is merely to be loyal to Donald Trump, now find themselves at odds with each other. That’s when things really start to fall apart,” Wolff said.
The hosts also pointed to Trump’s revamped efforts to investigate unfounded claims of election fraud in the 2020 election, and his administration’s willingness to go along with the lies.
“It’s the point that nobody can quite get their heads around this willingness to remake reality and then to insist upon it and not in any way to be caught out having done it. The election was stolen from him. Well, we know that it wasn’t stolen from him. We know he didn’t win,” Wolff said.
“Everybody knows, literally everybody but possibly this one person knows that he lost the 2020 election,” he continued.
Wolff and Coles also argued that the Department of Justice’s failed attempt to prosecute two of Trump’s perceived political enemies, former FBI director James Comey and current New York Attorney General Letitia James, were apart of Trump’s strategy to keep his administration loyal to him.
“It is incompetent to say prosecute these enemies when, with any reasonable thought, you would understand that these prosecutions are not going to go forward. They are going to be thrown out in court,” Wolff said. “But what is the effect anyway of even insisting that this administration and then taking the steps to prosecute these people?”
“Fear, obviously, in this other sense of the world divides between Donald Trump and the people who are not on his side,” Wolff said.
“So he makes this, this is the thematic point of this administration over and over and over again. And this willingness, you know, this all-or-nothing sense: I am going to do it. And I am willing to risk everything to do it, to be the guy who comes out to break the establishment or be broken by it,” he continued.
Wolff noted that even with the 2026 midterm elections looming, in which Republicans are poised to lose control of the House and potentially the Senate, Trump still “creates this existential structure that he understands that in order for him to succeed, everybody else must be defeated.”
“Everybody else must die,” Wolff noted.
“We are in this all-or-nothing radical, dangerous mortal condition,” he added.
The White House did not immediately respond to the Daily Beast’s request for comment. White House Communications Director Steven Cheung has previously called Wolff “a lying sack of s--t” who “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,” Cheung previously told the Beast. Trump has repeatedly highlighted Cheung’s weight and outed him as being on “the fat drugs.”
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