U.S. President Donald Trump attends a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 10, 2025. REUTERS/Nathan Howard
Donald Trump's ability to control political realities and combat his own rising unpopularity is faltering, according to his one-time biographer, as he has become increasingly unable to "get anything right" with his messaging and is further risking a "midterm election rout."
Michael Wolff is. a veteran reporter and author, best known for his 2018 book, Fire & Fury, which used inside sources to document the chaos and dysfunction of Trump's White House during his first term. In the most recent episode of his Daily Beast podcast, "Inside Trump's Head," he touched on Trump's ability to control his own narrative, and argued that the recent State of the Union was the latest example of the president forcing the rest of the country into his own reality.
"The State of the Union was Trump reality, which was, by the way, largely, ‘The state of the union is utterly perfect,'" Wolff said to co-host Joanna Coles. "Let’s see the world the way we want to see it, even though everybody else sees it differently and knows that it is different."
While the president reiterated his past claims that the U.S. is "the hottest country anywhere in the world" and that the economy is "roaring," the true reality of the country for most residents is the complete opposite. This disconnect is increasingly clear in Trump's "plummeting polls," The Daily Beast explained. A recent NPR/PBS/Marist poll found that 60 percent of Americans feel that the economy is worse off now than a year ago, with another poll from YouGov finding that an increasing number of people now miss the economy under Joe Biden.
According to Wolff, this could represent a major "inflection point" for Trump, as he continually fails to control his own narrative and his presidency spirals further.
“He can’t get anything right. He can’t even find the rhetoric now to create a kind of, a kind of consistent opposition to all of these things that are going wrong on a palpable basis for most Americans,” Wolff said.
Wolff also argued that this messaging issue was present around the recent deportation surge in Minnesota, which saw Trump lose a huge amount of support from voters on immigration, an issue that had otherwise been seen as his strongest.
"They sent in the troops to Minneapolis and basically lost their own issue there," Wolff added. "Could no one think in a political straight line there? Apparently not... What happened in Minneapolis is hugely unpopular, incredibly unpopular, maybe one of the things that will result in the midterm election rout. Could not be less popular.”