Trump biographer says genuine 'mental illness' is driving his biggest obsession

19 July

President Donald Trump reacts as he speaks to members of the media on board Air Force One en route from Scotland, Britain, to Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, July 29, 2025. REUTERS Evelyn Hockstein

President Donald Trump appears to be more and more consumed by his obsession with the 2020 election and his false claims about election fraud, and according to his one-time biographer, this fixation seems to be the result of a genuine "mental illness" separating him from reality.

Trump's 2020 obsession entered a new phase this week, as he used a primetime address on Thursday to claim that newly uncovered documents proved that there was outside interference in the election that he lost to Joe Biden. Closer examinations of these materials by reporters, however, showed that they proved nothing of the sort. Trump also seems stuck with no way to push his election fraud obsession forward, given that the SAVE America Act remains stalled in the Senate without enough votes to pass.

Michael Wolff is a longtime reporter and author, best known for his extensive insider-sourced coverage of Trump's political career. In the latest edition of his Daily Beast podcast, "Inside Trump's Head," he touched on Trump's unending 2020 fixation, claiming that it is by no means a bluff from him to try and create the pretense for election rigging, but rather a genuine belief that the race was stolen from him.

“I think everyone around him understands, in fact, that he absolutely believes this,” Wolff explained to his 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 added further: “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.”

When pressed by Coles about why Trump would bother "reopening this wound" when there are so many other pressing concerns at the moment, Wolff said that it is "because he’s a nutter," and the election fraud idea is "an obsessive thing in his mind." This obsession with something that has no political upside at a time when he and the GOP overall are floundering, Wolff argued further, is more proof that Trump is mentally unwell.

“Again, this is another description of why you have to see this as an illness: that he can’t get away from this,” Wolff said. “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 a recent post to Substack on the same topic, Wolff detailed personal encounters with Trump that drove home how much his thinking about 2020 is driven by a kind of "delirium."

"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.”

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