Trump may be literally unable to comprehend that he lost: insider

US President Donald Trump speaks to members of the media as he departs the White House en route to Kansas, in Washington, DC, US, October 19, 2026. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

President Donald Trump's biographer believes that when the Republican leader attempts to overturn elections that he loses, it is not because he is an aspiring dictator, but because he is psychologically incapable of understanding the mathematics of how he could be defeated.

"It is a numbers game," Trump biographer Michael Wolff told journalist Joanna Coles for his podcast with The Daily Beast, Inside Trump's Head. "Donald Trump is, among other handicaps here, is his inability to pay attention. He is functionally innumerate. I mean, he reverses numbers. He can’t grasp numbers. Even when, when you’re talking to him, and I spent a fair amount of time talking to him about specifically about 2020, the numbers morph. I mean, in, within the same minute, he will repeat a number once and then transpose it within the same minute."

Wolff added, "And of him trying to reverse it. I think the general feeling is that Trump is a despot. He was willing to steal the election back."

He then said that he has "always felt that actually he, he doesn’t understand what ha - what happened there" in terms of his defeat. "Everybody else around him does. Everybody in the White House understood. He didn’t understand that he was so wrapped up in, in the numbers because, because people, uh, people only bring him good news because he doesn’t functionally understand numbers. And then he went on to believe, I believe."

Wolff is hardly the first expert to say that Trump seems to be delusional, although others push back against the idea that it is appropriate to diagnose someone you have not personally met.

"I don't think he has a psychotic illness," psychologist Dr. Alan D. Blotcky told AlterNet in October. "I think he's a malignant narcissist who thinks that if he thinks something or believes something, that he can convince the world that it's the truth. So no, I don't think he has a delusional disorder. I don't think he's psychotic. I think he knows what he's doing."

Also in October, psychiatrist Dr. Henry Abraham told AlterNet that "it's not simply that he can't sleep, or that he's awake or supercharged by some medical explanation like stimulant drugs or coffee or too much Diet Coke — I mean, any number of explanations here. But he's pathologically hyped up and manic. In fact, the noun for this is maniac. He's a maniac at night, but he's not a maniac during the day, generally. So it's a nocturnal form of mania which remains to be explained."

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