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That's plaud.ai slash DailyBeast and use code beast for 10% off. Okay, we're back, Michael. Say something, please. Joanna.
Tuesday's episode was just so full. It was Epstein's visit to see Putin. It was what does Putin have on Trump? Where can we go today?
And I think we promised that we would talk about why Donald Trump can't shut up. It's a pathology. Yeah, no. And I think just to emphasize what we're trying to do here, the way people, the media, particularly, continues to talk about Trump as if he is a normal person or at least a normal politician, politicians function in certain ways.
It's all about cause and effect. That's what they do. You can analyze them on a through a very precise window instead of saying, because you can't say the New York Times can't run a headline, you know, Trump, there's something wrong with him. Well, actually it could, but it doesn't because they insisted on covering it with a special formula which is saved for politics and I think make politics very dark.
Well, it also fails to understand what's going on here. So let's get a picture of what everyone who has ever spent any time, I mean the slightest amount of time with Donald Trump. What is the impression that they come away? What do they take away from this?
They take away a single thing. They go in many things, but the top of the list is he cannot stop talking. When I say that, I don't mean that as an exaggeration. I don't mean that as a something we might say about this gas bag or that gas bag.
This is not just gas baggery. This is, there is no breath. All right, let's just remind people that this is, well, where are we going? Inside Trump's head.
This is our new podcast, Michael Wolf, the Trump chronicler and myself going deep into the dark matter of Donald Trump's head. And one of the things that when he speaks what is inside the head comes out of the mouth and it doesn't, so whatever confusion, chaos, churning, past grievances, weaving, you know, comes out and it doesn't stop. So you will sit with him and you could sit with him for hours and you will never ever, ever have a moment to say anything. So does he ever listen?
No, and you know, when in the early administration, the first administration in the early years, and I was sitting there in the White House writing this first book of mine about Trump and sat there for, you know, seven months. And I saw, and everyone at that point in the White House was new to Trump. I mean, he didn't really know anybody in the political world except Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie. That was literally it.
So everybody kind of came in and it was all new to them. And I remember this kind of watching this and hearing people's talk about this and they would say, they would say in a kind of puzzle fashion, you know, he doesn't read anything. I mean, really doesn't read anything. So he doesn't read intelligence or cool.
It's not even, but even that it doesn't read anything. It's not that he reads synopsis. It's not that even reads headlines for some people. So he reads headlines.
He doesn't. It doesn't. And you could not give him information in written form. And then they would say, you know, this is a big problem.
He's the president of the United States, probably the most information intensive job on Earth. And there was no way to get him this, this information. And then they would sort of pause and he said, but it's even more severe because he doesn't listen either. So therefore the two ways, the only two ways of getting information to someone, he had blocked off.
So he doesn't listen and he doesn't read Susie Wiles. I was watching her on a podcast, Pod Force One with Amanda Devine from the New York Post. And Susie Wiles pushed back on the concept that he doesn't read. And as proof, she said that he's always marking up articles in magazines and newspapers and sending them to the Germans with his kind of school.
I can give you my experience with this. So I wrote a piece about, first piece about Trump or in his political career in 2016, just while he was on the Hollywood Reporter. For the Hollywood Reporter and it was a cover story. Yeah, I remember you went to his house in Hollywood.
Exactly. And I got one of those things in which he wrote on the piece. And he said, great cover. Right.
His picture, of course. Which I'm sure he's got frames. So you know, Susie Wiles is going to, I mean she's paid to say that she can't say, oh yeah, he doesn't read anything. Do you think he's dyslexic?
I mean his behavior is slightly, I mean the fact that, I mean lots of people don't read and they've been all the time. I think it's more complicated than that. And that's why it's always, I think not helpful to apply. He's a narcissist.
And Steve Bannon, I often come back to Steve because, you know, I mean in the trenches with Trump and Steve is a smart guy, he came out with some of the better insights about what was going on with Trump. He was always kind of like a flabbergasted. But he said, in his view, Trump was waging a lifelong battle against information. He didn't like people to tell him things.
He was likely because he couldn't absorb it or process it very well. And then he had authority issues so he really didn't like people to tell him things. He couldn't sit in a classroom when he had to sit in a classroom that always ended poorly and he got bad grades and teachers yelled at him. And that's why he got sent to me in literary schools.
Yes, I mean it was all a thing and it was all kind of involved with people telling him stuff and I think probably his parents too were always doing his so as a way to prevent people from telling him things. He just talks. I mean so therefore it's all one way. It's all broadcast.
Nothing comes in. Everything is blocked by this Trump wall of sound. Right, so he's on transmit. He's never on receive.
Never. You can literally, you cannot stop him. I have wondered from time to time, how does Trump go to bed at night? Because it's increasingly obvious.
Melania's nowhere there. He spends a lot of time on his own. He doesn't appear to have any friends. His colleagues around him will hate him and they hate each other.
When he actually goes into his bedroom at night and he gets into bed, does he, I mean like what's going on in here? Is he still talking to the joke himself to sleep? I don't know. I haven't been in the Trump bedroom.
But do you think he goes to bed rooms? I mean I haven't slept with Trump. But which is not the same by the way and we will do this some other time with RFK Jr. We'll go to...
You slept with RFK Jr. I slept in the same room as RFK Jr. So we'll go back. Oh, was this recently?
No, this was quite a while ago, a long time ago. It's memorable. Well, that's an... Okay, I want to hear more about that.
That's an episode. I assume that Trump forces sleep with the televisions on. I assume that too. And he's on the phone too.
So I think into the last possible moment. So he's talking almost himself to sleep. He's talking to somebody. I mean the only thing that I know about Trump's bedtime habits is that during the first administration he had a lock installed on his bedroom door and that precipitated a fight with the secret service who actually took it off.
It'd be taken off. And it was a... You know, they were... This was a confrontation.
And then there was another issue when the White House domestic staff changed his sheets and he had a fit. What that's about, I have no idea. But meaning what? That he likes to change his own sheets?
I don't know. It was one of those things I did not want to pursue that beyond... Michael, that is a journalistic question. You should be an after that.
I would have pursued that. That is very interesting. All right, so he's got this wall of sound. You walk into his office.
I mean, you've talked before about the Oval Office and how he sits behind the door. That's an... Just to slide back in. Again, something extraordinary.
The Oval Office and other administrations has been a kind of, you know, a sacrosan place and a place of meaning and ritual and you know, you're making a point. You're having people into the Oval Office and you want them to know it. In Trump's Oval Office, it's like a bus station. It's just filled with people, 20 people, 30 people, more.
They bring in chairs. Almost anyone can come in and sit down. And Trump is behind the desk talking, talking. It's like a monologue.
He's monologue. I mean, it is his monologue. And sometimes it's kind of funny. He's trying to make jokes and he's...
Or then digressing into, you know, have no idea where. And everybody is sitting there pretending to listen. They're not really the phones. Right.
They're all on their phone. Yeah, down. But that's the thing. And that's the idea of proximity.
You have to be there because you want to be close to him, but there's no interaction of being close to him. But I've often wondered if actually with Donald Trump, you don't want to be in the room. Because if you're in the room, you're on his radar and his radar is so unpredictable and it's picking up signals. Absolutely.
It's many people, including Jared Kushner, understood, don't be in the room. But you're not really in the room in the Oval Office in these big sessions. I mean, you're just sitting there with literally everybody else. So basically everybody is an audience.
Everybody is an audience. Everybody is an audience. And everybody doesn't want to speak to people. He doesn't want you to tell him things.
He doesn't want to discuss the issues and problems and how do we solve this. I mean, if you think about this, being a president of the United States is an incredibly detailed job. I mean, all of these problems are intractable and you have to parse them on a very incremental basis. Well, that's not something that Trump is going to do ever.
So how does he avoid that? And the way to avoid that is that one way is that he doesn't shut up. I mean, I've seen him win in the great mistake, especially this is the generals make this mistake. The generals are all kind of McKinsey-like people now.
And they always bring out the power points. He's out of the room. So the minute he doesn't last 45 seconds. Well, actually, I'm with him on that.
I can't bear a PowerPoint. And I didn't enjoy school either. So I'm also slightly more sympathetic to the sort of rote learning and trying to squeeze information into people. But again, it takes one back to your book and this extraordinary dilemma that it was almost as if Trump was going to prison or he was going to the White House.
And you think of his friend Jeffrey Epstein. The two of them were best friends for at least 10 years. One of them ends up dying in strange circumstances in jail. The other ends up- The one of them ends up dying in the worst jail in America with all sorts of conspiracy theories around their death.
And the other ends up swinging his legs from the president's chair behind the resolute desk. It's just a remarkable story, which is why I think it has to be told why I like your way of thinking about Donald Trump as a really remarkable character who stayed on top of popular culture for the last 40 years. He's gone from magazines, through television to digital. How does his talk all the time play out on the apprentice?
At the same time, he's a person stuck in another time. He's stuck in a permanent 1965. I mean, Rat Pack, Vegas. I think I described that scene during his trial in New York when he gathered all his lawyers together to yell at them and said, have you ever heard of a man by the name of Perry Mason?
So all of his references are from another moment. But that speaks to people because there are lots of people in America whose references are also stuck there. And there is Roger Ailes, who is instrumental in the rise of Donald Trump. And Roger Ailes is the founder of Fox News and who led Fox News for 20 years.
But once said to me, he said, your people, meaning you, I guess, liberals, you know, you live in today, whatever. He said, the people I speak to, the people Fox News is for, they live in 1965. He said, singled out. And then with a kind of look, he said, before the Voting Rights Act.
Right. And then there was, I mean, I think that there's a smart argument there that culture moves at a different speed. And some people move with it. Or some people, their culture is on a fast speed.
Others very much not. We're going to take a break right now for some advertising. Words I never thought I would say. And we're back to talk about why Donald Trump doesn't ever, ever shut up.
Okay. So he's got one leg in 1965, but he definitely has one leg in 2025 in terms of truth, social understanding Twitter, really getting a grip of digital media in a way that no other political figure has managed to do with quite as much. In fact, you can see Gavin Newsom now, you know, chasing to catch up to some effect, I think. But Donald Trump's remarkable ability to stay on top of the medium that delivers him to an audience, to the public, has been crazy.
How does his talking all the time? How did that impact him on the apprentice? Well, yeah. And remember, and always go back to this.
And I think it's key. He was the star of a top-rated reality television show for 14 years. And the nature and people who worked on the apprentice have described this to me as, you know, the apprentice was a reality show and reality shows aren't supposed to be scripted, but they are scripted. Yeah, of course, I scripted.
Yeah. Except for that show, because he could never learn a script. You know, again, he would be given a printed matter and would be lost outside. I pushed it to one side.
Yeah. So in order to, so what the show had to do is just run the camera constantly and run the sound, the audio constantly. So that they would amass this, essentially a monologue that went on for all of the hours that they were filming this. And out of that, they, out of 10 hours, they would construct a tight, whatever it was, 50 minutes.
Well, it was very well edited, then, because you absolutely can't tell. I also feel resistant sometimes to a script. I'm feeling more and more sympathetic to Donald Trump, which isn't what you're saying. No, I mean, but give that some, I mean, there are two questions here.
Donald Trump as the performer in the communicator, and then there's Donald Trump as the human being, as the human being, somebody just speaking to you constantly. And who he speaks to is, doesn't matter. It's undifferentiated. You know, once I sat with Trump and Melania at dinner at Mar-a-Lago, and he would talk, he would just the story that he, or the line of thought that he began as you sat down, and then he would continue, it would just, he would just turn his head to whatever new person came up to him and keep going uninterrupted.
He certainly wouldn't begin again. So it doesn't matter who he's speaking to. And as the people around him remind, always point out, he says the same thing to everyone. This is one of the reasons.
It's very easy to track what he's thinking. But exhausting to be around, isn't it? Totally. I mean, everybody is on their knees.
But the other side of that, the performer side of that, the communicator, you know, I mean, if in contrast to every other politician, the most guarded people in the world, the most phony people in the world, the most scripted people in the world, the most in their public guys, in human people, or not, I mean, the whole thing is to remove their human. And to not say anything. Exactly. And so then suddenly Trump comes out and it just comes, you know, whatever he says, it's spontaneous, it's absolutely reflective of what he thinks, feels, what's on his mind.
There are no filters. And it's why people like him. It's why people vote for him because they, I mean, even if it's phony and he's pretending to be on their side when he's not, they love the fact that he doesn't speak like a regular politician. I was, I was just over the weekend, I was with a democratic politician who is, I guess, may or may not run for president.
And you know, a totally reasonable person, a person whose ideas you can admire. But every question was a policy paragraph. The whole world was, he related to it through the lens of issues, without understanding people don't care about it. But issues really are not.
They say they care about that. But that is not the principle thing. What the principle thing is, what kind of connection? Do I have a connection to you?
Are you speaking to me? And Trump has completely mastered this. Yeah. And they also speak in jargon.
I mean, I've interviewed a lot of politicians over the year and apart from Yeltsin, actually, Boris Yeltsin, who was then president of Russia. And the Trump. Well, I was going to say he was drunk. He was drunk.
So the first, like I said, you know, what are you doing here? He was addressing the European Parliament. And I said, what are you doing here? And he said, I've no idea.
I don't know why I'm here. I don't know what I'm doing here. And it was the most wonderful opening to an interview because normally you talk to people and that by the end of their first line, you're just like, oh, and you can't, you can't get anything human out of them because they've just been trained with a centimeter of their life that you cannot actually be human. It's very strange what we've done to politicians and why everybody's so afraid and given the chaos out there on their own.
And that is part of a media thing. Politicians became very afraid that every word was going to be recorded and used against them. And then Trump broke that paradigm. And because the other thing that happened is that the premium became breaking through the media clutter.
How do you do that? Attention, attention. And you do that by saying these outrageous things. Instead of that sinking Trump, which everybody thought, grab them by the pussy, John McCain's a coward.
You know, suckers and losers. All his far mothers, you know, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Instead of that sinking him, that made people pay attention to him. That's extraordinary.
All right. So let me ask you about Melania's letter to Vladimir Putin. She grew up in Slovenia. She's Eastern European.
She grew up under the mantle of the Soviet Union. What did you make of it? I think that this latest letter is actually a diss, a diss at Trump. She's Eastern European, obviously has long experience and feelings about Russia and Russians and Putin.
And she probably sees, you know, her husband bowing down to Putin and it rangles. I mean, it's like, you know, fuck him. Interesting. So it's sort of passive aggressive gesture towards her husband because it let it didn't really say anything.
It talked about children and how children should be allowed to run free and have their magic agents. But clearly addressed to the Russians and to Putin and to the fact that, you know, who suffers mostly in war is children. And also, let's remember that I think one of the subjects that Trump is probably the least interested in and the most adverse to his children. Well, he sounded irritated this week when he said he, I think he was talking to Zelensky.
Zelensky presented a letter from his wife, former Lania. Trump immediately started to open it and Zelensky went, no, no, it's actually for the first lady. But he said, oh, she loves children. She loves Baron.
She loves Baron even more than she loves me. And again, they're sort of bringing it back to him that, you know, outrageous that a mother would love her son more than she would love Donald Trump. Yeah, no, no. I mean, again, I just think and we have no way of, we're not going to prove this.
But if reading between the lines, between the AI lines, I think it's, she's sending a message. I mean, it's always hard to tell. She's always seems to be sending a message. You just can't ever decipher it.
But that's my effort at deciphering. I'm sending message to Donald. Well, maybe they really don't speak to each other anymore. So they have to triangulate via Putin.
Well, they certainly don't speak often to each other. And not the only spouses to do that. So one of my many vivid memories, but of was about a month into the administration, the first administration, that was that was a moment that I got my first phone call from Donald Trump. And it was that kind of thing, you know, the, you know, the, you got to call them.
Is this Michael Wolff? This is the White House. I have the president for you, which at that moment actually was, you know, when is electrifying. Hey, imagine it's always electrifying and it should be as the president.
Well, it's less as time goes on. But that was, that was, then he came on and he came on the phone and then he started to talk and I was, yes, Mr. President, yes, Mr. President, I never actually gotten to say that before.
So that was, I enjoyed that. But then it kept going on. And I kept looking at the, at the clock thinking what was going to end any seconds in the United States. And he went on and on.
And then at some, at some point I just put him on the speakerphone and every my children, my wife, it's just the voice is just blasting through the house and it doesn't end. It literally goes on for, I mean, I had to bring it. I mean, I'm just, I'm, I'm feeling the guilt. I'm holding the world up.
One month into his administration. And then finally, you have more important things to do. Yes, finally, literally I brought it to an end, but it would have gone on and on and on. And it did go on.
And that is, you know, I mean, I have now grown accustomed to that because I speak to quite a number of people who receive these phone calls from him regularly. And it's one of the ways I can follow exactly what's going on in his head. And we're going to take a break with some ads. And we're back.
Of course, I'm talking with Michael Wolf. This is the inside Trump's head podcast and we are discussing what else Donald Trump. So just to be clear, when he called you or when he's sitting behind the Oval Office desk, he's just what is he talking about exactly? Is it that?
No, you couldn't possibly be able to say, I mean, he is, it's a, it's a train, it's free association. It's whatever is on his mind at that moment in time, which is not the same as the next moment in time, which is also reflected in this in a call. So I mean, I mean, it's, it's very important to understand that not only is he talking all the time, most of what he's saying might appear to be nonsense. So and has that got worse when you're talking to people who spoke to him in the first administration who are still receiving the calls and a lot of them obviously have dropped off that, that calling roster?
Do they think he's gotten worse? Not particularly. It's always been like that. It's always, yes.
I mean, it just goes on and on and on and on and on and on and filling the space. And you just have to not make the mistake to try to have a conversation with him. I mean, it's very reminiscent of how dictators behave. You think of Stalin who would talk for hours on end.
You think of Fidel Castro who would literally deliver seven hour lectures to the people. Kim Jong Un who plays in his house in America. No, no, no. And in Trump, if you've ever seen a Trump rally, and there are really two important points to make about Trump rallies.
You know, the New York Times description is always kind of darkness at noon when in fact, it's kind of everybody's having a great time, you know, tailgate party like. But the other thing is- Because he's an entertainer. And he's having a great time. Right.
And the thing that you can see is always a sense of disappointment, reluctance when it has to end. And this goes on. You know, he'll do 90 minutes, two hours, no problem. He's like an old stand up comedian who just wants an audience, right?
He wants the energy from the room. He wants to work the room. Yeah, no. And you can see the way he does it.
He's constantly just throwing out things, throwing out looking for the response. And when he gets the response that he wants, then he just repeats it and repeats it. I mean, the level of repetition is extraordinary, which it would be if you have to fill all of this space. And when you're speaking to him one-on-one, you can hear the same things in the same conversation.
I use the word conversation loosely, the same monologue three or four times. You know what he should do when he leaves the White House? He should have a podcast. No.
He should have a podcast. There's another interesting thing. No, I can't lie. Is that someone described this to me, and I believe actually this is Steve Bannon again, is that he doesn't really acknowledge a reality outside the sound of his own voice.
So everything there is going on. And the things that are outside, going on some other place, are just not germane in the moment he is talking. So I understand that analysis. And you talked about him as the human being, and you talked about him as the performer and the producer.
But as president, there are things outside of the reality he has created. Well, that's why this is incredibly exceptional and dangerous, yes. So in terms of him just trying to understand what's happening with Russia and Ukraine and Europe, is there any of that sort of penetrating him other than what's in it for Donald Trump, possibly a Nobel piece? No, I don't think so.
I mean, yes, he'll get some penetration. I mean, the one way to communicate with him is through the television and through the headlines. So whatever the media blowback, he gets part of that. So he's constantly, you know, the constant refrain.
How's it playing? Yeah, we had a story in the Daily Beast on Saturday, actually, that he'd gone nuts because the coverage was so bad of the first summit with Putin. Right. So that's an input that he takes.
Almost like a former reacting to his reviews. Yes, exactly. But in terms of I'm going to try to independently understand what is happening here and trying to find a context and trying to find the baseline from which to work off and understand Putin, for instance. Or most basically, I'm going into this meeting with Putin, incredibly important, and I'm going to prepare for that.
I should prepare. I have to prepare. He doesn't prepare. So it's always off the cuff, again, in a way like a comedian.
You know, your life is life and governing is a long riff. And of course, we know that Putin prepares. Do we know that? Yeah, I think we do know that.
I think we do know that. Oh, goodness me. All right. Well, Michael, we'll be back next week, next Tuesday and next Thursday to go further and deeper into Donald Trump's head.
You're going to keep making me safe. I'm going to keep making you, I'm totally going to make you keep saying that. So somewhere, what's I can, I can hear some, it's Donald Trump talking somewhere. You will always hear the mutterings of Donald Trump talking.
I now actually envisage him going to sleep on the phone and just talking slower and slower. And then whoever's on the other line can't tell if he's still there or not. Maybe he's snorled. I don't know.
I just can't imagine him going to bed and having that moment you think most people have as they're wrapping up their day and they're drifting off. What can it be like to be inside his head? No, and it's an important point. He is on the phone all the time.
Because he doesn't want to be on his own. I mean, he needs to be connected to an audience. And the ironic thing is the personal audience, the family audience around him that most people have have vanished. Well, if they ever existed, frankly.
I mean, I've often thought for a decade or more, I used to see Donald Trump in New York on a regular basis. I mean, it would seem that every place that I went at night in New York, I would see Donald Trump with the conclusion that he must be always out. Now, he might have thought that about me too. I was in the fair, I can't believe that you had Studio 50.
But it was that thing that you saw someone without living a wholly exterior life. And you began, and I think fairly to doubt, was there any interior life here at all? And this was after decades after decade after decade. And I think it's true.
And I think it's part of what produced this, shall we say, unique person. Oh, we mentioned my t-shirt, by the way. You haven't noticed it. I'm wearing it, not because I went to Harvard, because I didn't go to Harvard.
I'm not one of those people. But because it's got three trigger words on it. Harvard, Kennedy, and school. And it was sent to me by Nell Scavalle, one of our writers at the Daily Beast.
But it's three unlikely trigger words. My son, my four-year-old son, likes all kinds of things. And now has a t-shirt thing. Oh, he does.
He has a t-shirt collection. All right. I'll see if I can find a smaller one for him. But I wonder if they will rename the Kennedy Center, the Melania Center, which they've been thinking about.
Well, they damn well should. All right. That's probably part of the settlement. Part of the settlement, the divorce settlement.
Not the divorce settlement, the Harvard settlement. Oh, the Harvard settlement. I thought you meant the divorce settlement, which I'm assuming is coming at some point. Maybe they didn't need a divorce settlement.
Why would they? Yeah, why would they? Yeah, why would they? They don't live together.
Right. Right. And he's me. He's not going to want to pay her.
I'm going to be dominating the wall of sound that comes wherever Donald Trump is. OK, we'll be back next Tuesday and Thursday. You're making me say it again. Yeah, I'm making you say it again.
To go inside Donald Trump's head. We're going to go back inside Donald Trump's head. We should get danger pay for doing this. So if you have enjoyed this podcast, share it with all your friends.
Please leave us a comment on YouTube and subscribe to Inside Trump's Head on Apple, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts. Michael, thank you. And to our producers, Devin Rodgerino, Assistant Producer, Anna Bonnos and our editor, Jesse Millwood, and as our first lady would have a say, say this to yourself as you're drifting off to sleep tonight. Be Beast.