Trump ended up alone: An insider breaks down the president's complete isolation

President Donald Trump is literally isolated, according to a Trump biographer, in large part because he is on distant terms with both First Lady Melania Trump and his daughter Ivanka Trump.

“An old-time monarch could only dream of the total absolute isolation on display inside the gilded fortress of the executive mansion,” explained The Daily Beast’s Michael Wolff on Sunday. “Now at eighty years old, Donald Trump sits utterly alone.”

On an immediate political level, Trump is isolated from much of the government he purportedly runs, from avoiding important meetings and spending long periods of time away from senior staff to weakening relationships with key US allies.

"Melania remains vacant, Ivanka Trump has distanced herself, and the remaining children function more like his elite corporate employees," Wolff said. "The daily court is populated solely by professional sycophants, retainers, and parasites whose closeness is strictly transactional."

He added that Trump’s children behave more like employees at a corporation than like kids interacting with a parent. Specifically he said that the adult children who remain close to Trump, including Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, act “more like his elite corporate employees” who depend on the president for transactional rather than emotional reasons.

The author added that sometimes Trump has even weaponized family estrangements to his advantage. He alleges that, when Trump decided to divorce his first wife Ivana, he kept that development in the news in order to make sure he would not lose fame he had acquired as a tabloid celebrity. Wolff has not independently corroborated that claim.

Others have pointed out Trump’s unusual family relationships. Ex-Republican presidential adviser Steve Schmidt wrote in April that First Lady Melania Trump — despite being notoriously cold toward her husband — decided to defy the First Amendment by calling for a comedian who criticized the president to be fired.

“Melania Trump’s demand to fire Jimmy Kimmel seems unsurprising from the first third wife to become an American First Lady in our 250-year history,” Schmidt said on Tuesday. “Severe, unsmiling and brutally indifferent Melania is a perfect match for her husband, who recently declared that he isn’t a rapist or pedophile on ‘60 Minutes.’”

The First Lady demanded Kimmel’s firing after he joked about their marriage and the president’s age in a comment made prior to, and which had no relationship with, an assassination attempt on the president. Schmidt’s “rapist or pedophile” comment involves Trump’s longstanding friendship with the late child sex trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein.

“Melania Trump’s demand is un-American,” Schmidt wrote. “The former model, who was reared in a Slovenian backwater under a communist government, seems ill-acquainted with the First Amendment to the Constitution.”