President Donald Trump is fighting three battles at once: over money, over secrets, and over force.
On the latest episode of the Inside Trump’s Head podcast, author Michael Wolff said that those fights—playing out through Melania Trump’s glossy new documentary, the release of long-sealed Jeffrey Epstein files, and the federal response in Minneapolis—are not separate crises, but expressions of the same worldview.
Wolff began with Melania Trump’s self-produced film, Melania, which co-host Joanna Coles described as less a documentary than an exercise in “power porn”: glamour without intimacy, image without explanation.
“There’s absolutely no interaction with Donald Trump at all,” Coles said.
“She is signaling to us, the viewer, that they are not in the same bedroom—and she doesn’t want us to think they are,” she added.
Wolff noted that Trump did not see the film before its release and was described by aides as “vaguely irritated” about it—a reaction he claimed reflects something deeper than annoyance.
“Everybody in the family is, at some point, owed,” Wolff explained.
“They all believe he has to deliver. And now this is very clearly Melania’s turn. She gets the money. She gets the attention.”
That transaction, Wolff said, leaves Trump feeling exploited.
“He believes that his family is basically a family of moochers,” Wolff added. “Whatever you have comes to you because of me.”
That sense of grievance, the hosts argued, helps explain the president’s posture as newly released documents tied to Epstein reopen long-denied questions about elite relationships.
Wolff said the files undercut years of claims that powerful figures barely knew Epstein.
“What we’re learning is they were good friends,” he said.
“They sought to spend time with each other. They appeared to enjoy the time they spent with Jeffrey Epstein.”
And the mass release of documents, they both agreed, was no accident.
“The same day Melania releases a movie about herself, the Justice Department dumps millions of Epstein-related documents. That doesn’t feel accidental—it feels pointed,” Coles observed.
“This is obviously an example of flooding the zone,” Wolff replied. “There is so much here that no one can focus on any single thing.”
That same strategy, Wolff said, is now visible in how Trump exercises power more broadly.
Turning to the federal response in Minneapolis, Wolff was blunt.
“This is martial law,” he said. “This is what martial law looks like in every way, shape, and form.”
The administration’s approach, he argued, follows a familiar pattern: push aggressively, absorb backlash, retreat slightly—then reset the baseline further toward force.
“The Trump White House governs on the basis of what it can get away with,” Wolff stated.
For Coles, the through-line is leverage. Whether it’s money, secrets, or power, Trump sees every relationship as transactional. And when those transactions break down, force steps in.
Together, she and Wolff suggested, Melania’s monetized distance, the Epstein document dump, and Minneapolis are not isolated moments, but signals of a presidency testing how much control it can still exert, and how far it can go before something finally pushes back.
When reached for comment, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung once again challenged Wolff’s credibility, saying: “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.”
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