President Donald Trump’s bizarre Thursday night speech exposed his yearslong “delirium” over the 2020 election, his longtime biographer has said.
Author Michael Wolff called out the 80-year-old president’s “obsession” with the election he lost to Joe Biden, which became national news again this week when he delivered a rambling 25-minute primetime speech alleging fraud and foreign interference in U.S. elections.
“I think everyone around him understands, in fact, that he absolutely believes this,” Wolff told Inside Trump’s Head co-host, Joanna Coles. “No one else believes it. No one else believes that he won the 2020 election. But he does believe it.”
He continued, “And that to me is actually the kind of the scarier thing, the larger thing than that. This is another way for him to try to manipulate the election, or another way for him to set up a rationale for losing the election. There is mental illness here, and it’s kind of a result of his paranoia, his resentments, his insecurity, his inability to appreciate reality, I think you might most accurately say.”
In his much-hyped speech, Trump declared that “great damage has been done to our country” by nefarious foreign actors and that U.S. elections have been “left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen.”
The White House later released a trove of declassified intelligence documents it said backs up his claims, but much of the information has failed to substantiate many of the president’s more serious claims.
“What is so confusing, looking at it is, why is he saying this is about China? And why, when the U.S. is back, I think, on its fourth day of bombing Iran, is he reopening this wound?” Coles asked. “I mean, he’s won an election since then.”
Wolff answered, “Because he’s a nutter. Because it’s an obsessive thing in his mind.”
“Again, this is another description of why you have to see this as an illness: that he can’t get away from this,” he continued. “This does no good for him, and I think we’ve seen in the reaction of other Republicans, this is a political negative for him. And yet he pursues it because he can’t not pursue it.”
In his Substack, HOWL, Wolff recounted his experience of sitting directly across the table from Trump as the president droned on at length about the 2020 election.
“On two occasions I’ve sat with him as he has outlined his case for the stolen election. All his hurt on display,” Wolff wrote. “It’s an obsessive recitation of numbers that he’s been told and then revised to his own specifications of strange things that happened. He’s been told in the night of fragments of information that might easily be disputed or corrected, but have long since lodged in his head. It’s a kind of delirium.”
Wolff told Coles that these sessions had gone on for up to two hours, leaving him at a loss on how to react.
“You just don’t know what to say. I mean, he looks strange, his eyes go, you know, kind of bulge, and you’re afraid. You kind of hold your breath,” he said. “This is craziness. I can’t see this in any other way and I think almost anybody would react in a similar fashion to the way I reacted.”
“This is something that is broken, something is off. And I think everybody around him understands this—understands this, believes that they have to humor it, believes that this just exists. You know, yes, this is crazy, but he was elected the president, he is the president, so therefore we are in some way stuck with this craziness.”
Reached for comment, the White House responded with a boilerplate attack on Wolff.
“Michael Wolff is a lying piece of s--t,” spokesman Davis Ingle said.
