President Donald Trump knows the myriad of foreign policy and domestic issues bombarding Americans are a welcome counter-narrative to the demand for the Epstein files, his longtime biographer said.
Author Michael Wolff said the clashes over immigration operations in Minneapolis, the conversations about a U.S. takeover of Venezuela and Greenland, and Trump’s threats to Iran are all intended to distract from the sustained clamor for the release of documents related to the notorious sex offender.
“Obviously, Epstein remains a potentially mortal threat to Donald Trump and he knows it and that’s why he is doing his Trumpian best to distract from it and create an entirely other counter-narrative,” he told Inside Trump’s Head co-host Joanna Coles. “We’re now an imperial power taking over the world and sending troops and defending or not defending protesters who are trying to overthrow their countries’ despotic regimes.”
Trump started the new year by announcing that the U.S. would “run” Venezuela indefinitely after American forces seized its president, Nicolás Maduro, in a shocking raid that claimed about 100 lives.
The 79-year-old commander-in-chief, seemingly emboldened by the success of his Venezuela operation, then began to ramp up his threats to take over Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of Denmark.
Trump also threatened to attack Iran over the killings of anti-government protesters—then later walked those statements back, angering his own base.
Back at home, the president has also been fending off criticism of his hardline immigration policy, which saw Minneapolis become the flashpoint of tense clashes between ICE agents and protesters. Tensions have been rising steadily since immigration agents fatally shot a 37-year-old mother and injured a Venezuelan national during their operations.
“There is no way around this. The Trump people have—I mean, this is a catastrophic mess-up, not to mention a piece of catastrophic cruelty, and then they get in this position that they have to double down on their own defense of this,” Wolff said of the killing of Renee Nicole Good.
“They’ve put an enormous number of people into Minneapolis. I mean, essentially Minneapolis is under siege, is occupied,” he went on. “Trump began to see this as a substantial liability, that this was going to affect the 2026 midterms. He said people are seeing these ICE videos and crying over them. That doesn’t sound very sympathetic, but it does sound like he recognized the political problem here. And the political problem is immense, which is why you then take over Venezuela and Greenland and Iran.”
Wolff also noted that all of these have happened against the backdrop of continued demand for the release of the Epstein files, which culminated in Trump getting heckled as a “pedophile protector” during his visit to a Ford plant in Michigan on Tuesday. Trump responded by flipping his middle finger to TJ Sabula, a Ford worker who later got suspended over the incident.
“I had spoken to people in the White House about the progression toward Venezuela and Greenland,” he said. “But it was the recognition on Trump’s part that he had these significant problems, including the ICE videos, but also including the fact that he has been unable to stem the Epstein disclosures and the attention and the demands for ever more information about what happened with Jeffrey Epstein—and specifically, Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump.”
Trump was close pals with the disgraced financier for years before they had a bitter falling out over staff poaching. He signed a law forcing the release of the Epstein files last year, but the Justice Department has said it needs to review five million more pages despite already missing the Dec. 19, 2025, deadline to release all documents.
When reached for comment, the White House responded with its boilerplate attack on Wolff.
“Michael Wolff is a lying sack of s--t 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,” White House communications director Steven Cheung said.
