Donald Trump’s biographer says it’s rich for the president to mock people with learning disabilities when even his inner circle knows better than to put heavy reading on his plate.
The 79-year-old president has attacked people with learning disabilities while ranting about California Governor Gavin Newsom, who has dyslexia, several times in the past month, including during a Thursday Cabinet meeting.
“Honestly, I’m all for people with learning disabilities, but not for my president. I don’t want—I think a president should not have learning disabilities, OK?” Trump told reporters earlier this month. “And I know it’s highly controversial to say such a horrible thing.”
Trump proceeded to call Newsom, 58, “dumb” and “a low IQ-person” because of his dyslexia. He doubled down on his stance against presidents with disabilities while phoning into Fox News’ The Five on Thursday.
Yet behind closed doors, doubts about Trump’s own intelligence have circulated among his inner circle, Michael Wolff said on the Inside Trump’s Head podcast.
Wolff, who was granted inside access to the White House during the chaotic opening months of Trump’s first term, recalled a conversation he had at the time with “Trump whisperer” Sam Nunberg, who advised Trump in his early political forays before being forced out of the 2016 campaign when racist Facebook comments he made resurfaced.
“I remember Sam looked at me and he said, ‘You don’t get it, do you?’ And I was like, ‘Tell me.’ And he said, ‘He’s an idiot,’” Wolff recounted.
In response to Wolff’s comments, Nunberg, 44, previously told the Daily Beast, “That was a long time ago and President Trump has certainly proved me wrong by getting [re-elected] in 2024.”
Wolff said Steve Bannon, another political adviser and a key source for his 2018 tell-all Fire and Fury, “absolutely” believed Trump was an “idiot,” too.
“In terms of [Trump] knowing anything, in terms of being able to process information, in terms of following the chain of logic, Bannon would be rolling on the floor now,” Wolff told co-host Joanna Coles.
According to the author, the president’s aides “know you cannot give him written material.”
“If you give him written material, that is a very bad strategy for communicating with your boss,” he said.
Wolff said that Bannon, who has remained a Trump loyalist even after he was fired as White House chief strategist half a year into his first term, once linked the president’s supposed difficulty processing information to a deep-seated aversion to authority rooted in his school days.
“[Bannon] would say it was not only that Trump had problems with school—that he was a lackluster student—but he was so lackluster that he was always rebelling against school, so that his entire life after school then became resistant to anyone telling him anything, anyone suggesting that they had more expertise than he did,” Wolff said.
“School was not only a bad experience for him, but it became the experience that made him reject all further learning,” he added.
The reality TV host-turned-president has sought to keep his school records private, according to his former attorney Michael Cohen, who said Trump ordered him to write to Fordham University before the 2016 election to demand that his transcripts remain secret.
The president’s niece, Mary Trump, has alleged that her uncle paid “a smart kid” to take his SATs to help him transfer from Fordham University in the Bronx to the Ivy League Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
According to Wolff, Bannon observed about Trump that “one of his ways to compensate for not knowing anything is just to keep talking.”
The president’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, made a similar point on The Daily Beast Podcast earlier this month, telling Coles that the president often “didn’t care about” or simply “couldn’t process” the briefings his advisers prepared.
Bolton said Trump “didn’t take briefings all that seriously” and would “frequently talk more than the intelligence briefers, which makes it hard to consume intelligence.”
When reached for comment on this story, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung provided the Daily Beast with a recycled statement:
“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.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to Bannon for comment.
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 and Friday mornings on other podcast platforms.
