U.S. President Donald Trump looks up as he participates in a roundtable on antifa September 22, at the White House in Washington (REUTERS)
President Donald Trump is so concerned about Republicans losing control of Congress during the midterm elections that he has engaged in a number of measures to suppress votes, and he's delivered a Thursday speech justifying even further repressions.
Yet as bad as Trump might fear things will become if Republicans are defeated, a journalist and Trump expert argued on Tuesday that his humiliations will in fact be even worse.
Congress “will become an incredible noose around his neck, a burden on his shoulders,” author Michael Wolff said on his podcast Inside Trump’s Head along with his co-host from The Daily Beast, Joanna Coles. “They will do everything possible to frustrate him and to humiliate him and to make him pay for being Donald Trump. And that may be good politics or bad politics. That’s unclear because they’ve done this before and it turned out to be actually probably bad politics.”
Wolff added, “We saw JD Vance this past week go on Joe Rogan and—Godd—— , if he wasn’t basically publicly proclaiming his distance from Donald Trump.”
Wolff pointed out that during his recent "Joe Rogan Experience" appearance, Vance admitted the Trump administration was “guilty” of messing up its release of the files related to Trump’s longtime friend, the convicted child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
By contrast, when Vice President Kamala Harris had to run for president in 2024 following President Joe Biden’s withdrawal, Harris went out of her way to make sure there was no daylight between herself and the Biden administration — even when refusing to do so was politically costly.
“During the 2024 race...everybody was saying she has got to get some more—put distance between herself and Joe Biden. And she really didn’t,” Wolff said. “But in this case, JD Vance was clearly putting distance between himself and Donald Trump. So, I think we will see that across the spectrum of 2028 contenders.”
Wolff added that because Trump’s approval rating is at 37 percent and voters are widely dissatisfied with his handling of the economy and his waging of a war against Iran, Republicans will have all the more reason to distance themselves from his unpopular policies.
The White House has previously launched personal attacks against Wolff’s credibility in response to his observations about the president.
“Michael Wolff is a lying sack of s—— and has been proven to be a fraud,” White House Communications Director Steven Cheung previously told The Daily Beast. “He routinely fabricates stories originating from his sick and warped imagination, only possible because he has a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain.”