President Donald Trump is hitting a breaking point over his flailing war as even his inner circle is left with no comforting answers, his biographer says.
“He’s stuck. He can’t do anything,” Michael Wolff told the Inside Trump’s Head podcast. “He’s yelling at people, ‘Solve the problem... there must be something we can do. What can we do? Do it!’”
“The ‘No Forever Wars’ president [is] now in a forever war,” Wolff added.
Trump, 80, exploded at a meeting with his top national security officials last week, yelling expletives as frustration over his war with Iran boiled over, according to reports from The Wall Street Journal and NBC News.
A U.S. official told NBC News that there was “no unity” on a path forward in the war, which Trump launched on Feb. 28 and has dragged on without the quick triumph he expected.
“The president is exasperated,” a Trump ally who spoke to Trump about the war in recent weeks told the outlet. “I don’t think he believed it was going to be this difficult to get the Iranians to agree to a deal.”
Wolff told co-host Joanna Coles, “He has been told over and over again, because there’s nothing really left to tell him... that we have exhausted all military solutions.”
He argued that the president’s bombing campaign, which has depleted the U.S.’s weapons stockpiles, has reached a dead end because “there is effectively nothing left to bomb,” and Iranian resolve appears to have only hardened.
“There is nothing more we can do except to invade... to put troops on the ground, which is a non-starter of a strategy... for Trump,” Wolff said.
Coles noted that even if Trump tries to end the war by declaring victory and pulling out, “the Iranians still control now the Strait of Hormuz, something they didn’t even think they would be able to do.”
Wolff replied, “Donald Trump is the... Hormuz president. Hormuz hangs around his neck,” arguing that Trump should have anticipated Iran’s ability to weaponize the strategic waterway before launching the war, which has claimed the lives of 18 U.S. service members.
“The one thing that they should have foreseen—that was foreseen, he ignored. And that was the key vulnerability in this war, and it, you know, bit him in the a--,” said the author, who has written four tell-all books on the president.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump’s war has also come with a steep price tag for U.S. taxpayers. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Congress last week that the conflict has already cost $37.5 billion, before requesting another $67 billion to fund operations in the Middle East.
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, Friday, and Sunday mornings on other podcast platforms.
