Trump stuck in damaging fight due to his own 'screwup': biographer

Author and long-time Trump reporter Michael Wolff said that the first lady's legal battle against him has left the president in a damaging situation, and all because of his own "screwup."

During the latest episode of his Daily Beast podcast, "Inside Trump's Head," Wolff argued that Trump's recent fixation on his own past association with deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein shows that his actions are bothering the president and getting to him. As part of the process for writing his 2018 book, Fire & Fury, about Donald Trump's tumultuous first term, Wolff conducted over 100 hours of interviews with Epstein while he was still alive, with their correspondence captured in some recently released files. It was during these talks that Epstein said he was Trump's "closest friend."

Trump has used the interviews to accuse Wolff of "conspiring" with Epstein to stop him from getting elected.

"Jeffrey Epstein was fighting that I don’t get elected with some author — a sleazebag, by the way — and I’ve been totally exonerated," Trump previously told reporters during a press scrum on Air Force One.

Trump has claimed that these exchanges with Wolff are the only times he is mentioned in the Epstein files released by the Department of Justice. In fact, the New York Times determined that he is mentioned well over 5,000 times.

Wolff, conversely, argued on his podcast that these comments show how much he is impacting Trump.

“He’s kind of focused in on that, and when he focuses in on things, actually, he has an antenna for what is true,” Wolff said. “In other words, when he singles that out, he is saying, ‘Yeah, that could have been harmful to me.’”

Wolff further suggested that he is "under [Trump's] skin with this Melania lawsuit." First Lady Melania Trump threatened to sue Wolff over his comments about her connections to Epstein, particularly that she was an associate of the trafficker when she met her husband.

In response to that threat, Wolff sued the first lady on free speech grounds and has repeatedly pledged to use subpoena powers to question Trump and his wife, and possibly their associates, about their past connections with Epstein under oath.

“This lawsuit is a problem for them," Wolff said. "I mean, they screwed up to get themselves in a position where I could pursue them. They’re not pursuing me. I’m pursuing them... So that’s a screwup, the lawsuit, getting themselves in this position is a screwup with my name on it.”