President Donald Trump is dooming himself by backing MAGA “buffoons” who will not have the benefit of sharing a ballot with him in the midterms, his longtime biographer says.
Author Michael Wolff tells the Inside Trump’s Head podcast that the all-important difference between a general election and midterms is that Trump’s base is not nearly as energized when he is not at the top of the ticket.
With Trump-backed Senate candidates like Ken Paxton in Texas and Mike Collins in Georgia being particularly scandal-scarred, Wolff estimates that a MAGA disaster is looming.
“There’s an interesting pattern of men who won’t admit to their wives that they are voting for Donald Trump, and then they vote for Donald Trump,” Wolff said. “The dynamic is different in this midterm election because he’s not on the ballot. So, you know, the buffoons who are running in his name don’t have the luxury of being the ultimate buffoon, as it were.”
Wolff added, “You might like to vote for the greatest buffoon of all time. But the many buffoons, you don’t really want... Ken Paxton. Do you really want to vote for Ken Paxton?”
Co-host Joanna Coles theorized that many Americans secretly support Trump while telling friends and pollsters they do not. Whether that applies to MAGA-friendly Republicans in the midterms, too, is another question.
“I think a lot of people don’t want to admit that they support Donald Trump,” Coles said. “They don’t want to admit they like his party, so they don’t admit it. And then, right up in their final run to the privacy of the voting booth, they can finally admit they do like him. Yeah, no, they would prefer him to the other candidates.”
Reached for comment, a White House spokesman emailed that “Michael Wolff is a professional scumbag and serial liar whose brain has been completely warped by his severe and incurable disease known as Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
Trump has acknowledged Wolff’s theory himself. Just last week, he urged his supporters to vote as if his name is at the top of the ticket.
“So what I really want you to do is pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot,” he said. “Just come and vote. It’s so important... We have to get Darline and other people elected.”
The Darline he is referring to is Darline Graham, the sister of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, whom Trump handpicked to finish Lindsey’s term and seek re-election—despite her outright admitting on a debate stage that she knows so little about national security, she did not even want to attempt to speak about Taiwan or the South China Sea.
That debate flub, paired with a nonsensical argument against universal healthcare, is sure to be an attack point for Democrats against Graham—though she is running in deep-red South Carolina. Others, like Collins and Paxton, do not enjoy that same benefit in Texas and Georgia.
Wolff says these swing-state candidates will suffer from voters being energized by Trump’s failures without the MAGA-voter boost that comes with sharing the ballot with Trump.
“Donald Trump is not on the ballot, but Donald Trump is all over the ballot,” Wolff said. “He is the subject.”
The author continued, “We’re in a situation where the specter of Donald Trump is on the ballot, and that’s a negative, rather than Donald Trump in person being on the ballot, which turns out, inexplicably, to be a positive.”
