The Trump administration has been scrambling to identify the leakers behind recent stories about his Air Force One ruse, but according to his longtime biographer, there is an "easy answer" as to who leaked the most recent "catering truck" story.

This week, the Washington Post reported about a new wrinkle in President Donald Trump's Air Force One switch-up. Prior reports had revealed that Trump flew out of Turkey last month on an older model Air Force One, due to the new one lacking security features needed in the face of alleged threats from Iran. According to the Post story, the Secret Service had gone a step further, sneaking Trump out of Air Force One on a catering truck and flying him to the U.K. on a military craft, prompting concerns about the lack of care shown for the safety of reporters left to fly out on the legacy craft.

Michael Wolff is a longtime journalist and author, best known for his extensive coverage of Trump's political career, including several books about his first term based on purported insider sources. In the latest episode of his Daily Beast podcast, "Inside Trump's Head," Wolff touched on the catering truck situation, and suggested that the answer to the question of who leaked to the Post was simple: Trump himself.

"No one knows about it, and no one knows about most of these things that the Secret Service does for a very good reason,” Wolff explained. “These are all security precautions... If people know about them, then they’re no longer part of the security protocol and no longer a safe part. So people don’t know about this. The Secret Service certainly would not leak this. So who leaked it? This is an easy answer.”

"Donald Trump leaked it," co-host Joanna Coles suggested, which Wolff confirmed.

“He has a method here. And the method is, more attention on me,” Wolff added. “And also, there’s a theme here. The assassination theme has worked very well for Donald Trump. And I think that he wants people to know he’s the target. ‘I’m the main target. I’m the guy.’”

Wolff and Coles also wondered how the assembled reporters on the "decoy" Air Force One did not notice anything odd about the flight, given Trump's proclivity for talking to them, and insulting them for attention.

"They literally were on the plane," Coles said. "And they must have thought, ‘Why isn’t the president coming back to talk to us?’ Because he always goes back to talk to them because he loves it. He wants them. He loves to insult them. He knows that will be the next story."

Biographer Michael Wolff walked through the knots the White House staff must untangle as they try to get President Donald Trump to focus on tangible outcomes in meetings with foreign leaders.

Over the past week, Trump welcomed China's leader, Xi Jinping, and it appeared their activities were centered around the president showing off his construction, his military and what appeared to be his first trip to the National Archives as president. Meanwhile, the visit from Xi was said to be a "summit," which would focus on trade, avoiding a crisis with Taiwan, discussions over minerals, market access, guardrails for artificial intelligence and arms control.

Trump’s approach to meeting foreign leaders puts his aversion to detailed briefings on full display at a time of high-stakes diplomacy. It's a "difficult moment for a president" who must hold a lot of information in their brain about customs and gestures all while remembering the specifics about policy and intelligence about the country.

"You've got to know what you're talking about," said Wolff. "If you don't know what you're talking about, you know, you're giving away the store."

Wolff told The Daily Beast's Joanna Coles, "Trump goes into these meetings. He can't — he refuses to look at the briefing books, refuses to have extensive conversations about the issues at hand. Doesn't care, I suppose. Doesn't know what he's talking about.
It's all, 'I can handle it. I'm good.' He is always saying, 'I'm really good with this.' And then he goes into these meetings and all it is, is flattery. Him flattering the other side and the other side, I think very clearly, taking — understanding what they can get by this guy."

He confessed, "I'm trying to circumvent using the word buffoon, but I think that's what they see him as. I think they're like, oh my God."

Traditionally, there would be weeks of preparation for such an event.

"But if Trump is an information phobe, as you say, then how did they slim it down?" Coles cut in to ask. "How do they whittle it down to the one or two points?"

Wolff said that it's exactly what is done. They simply give him two points. "And even that usually doesn't register with him. I mean, this is something I don't even know how people — how you can get people to appreciate this. How do you get people to appreciate that the presidency has — the workload of the presidency is extensive. And if you don't do it, if you adamantly don't do the work, can't do the work, what happens? What's the effect? That's really hard to make clear to voters and to the American people."

"So, I mean, first, it's incredible. So, he doesn't do the work. He can't do the work. The president of the United States does not know what he's talking about in these situations. How do you begin to explain that to people? And within the White House itself — and they have had the people within the White House have had to explain it to themselves, what do we do here? But that becomes for them, a kind of, well, it's Donald Trump. You know? He's been elected twice. He must know what he's doing."

He thinks a considerable part of the country focuses on that idea. He anticipates that the U.S. will ultimately see the impact of that. In some ways it already has.

The meeting resulted in a two-month extension of the trade deal they currently have. They also agreed to lower tariffs on about $30 billion worth of goods. China agreed to put new export controls on two fentanyl precursor chemicals, the White House claimed. They also said that China made commitments related to American agricultural products, Boeing aircraft and access to U.S. beef facilities. There was no movement on Taiwan, AI or Iran.

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Michael Wolff, one of the biographers of President Donald Trump, revealed that he will begin telling his long tale of trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and the relationships he had and the stories he told.

In a kind of introduction, Wolff likened the "fog of war" to a similar "fog" in the ongoing Epstein scandal.

"The Fog of Epstein" is similar in that his story can be "shaped to fit almost everybody’s view, right-wing or left, of what has gone wrong with our time, and to confirm the depravity of virtually anybody you don’t like," wrote Wolff on his Substack Friday.

The problem, he explained, is that anyone who had an up-close view of Epstein's life had every reason to want to hide it because by sharing it, they were making a confession, Wolff said. They risked becoming part of the cover-up or the conspiracy. It means the majority of the stories come from the accusers.

"So," he explained. "What I am going to try to do is tell the story as I have been privy to it. All battles for truth seem to end up creating even greater fog. My intention is not to engage with the battle, but to offer a personal version of the story—I will tell it only according to what I have seen."

He prefaced it by saying, "This is a story I inadvertently walked into. In the beginning, it did not appear much different from other stories of grandiosity, wealth, and opportunity that seemed to regularly present themselves in Manhattan. I stayed, in part, because the story seemed to unfold as a heightened, purer version of that tale of life in the city during the years of its greatest avarice."

The story Wolff had, he explained, was never told by journalists, survivors or prosecutors, much less Epstein's friends, in large part because he controlled the story. To Epstein, his story wasn't all that interesting or unique, and there were others he could tell.

They seem to all be about "greed and aggrandizement and entitlement; what’s more, Epstein, like his friend Trump, was too vulgar, excessive, and not of our class, to take seriously," said Wolff.

All of these stories, he teased, will unfold on Monday.

All eyes have been on Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio as the names most likely to chase after Trump's "MAGA crown" after his second term. However, a one-time biographer with inside sources this week claimed that a new name has been circling the "lame duck" president, looking for his own shot at being the successor.

Despite his earlier teases and musings, Trump is constitutionally barred from seeking a third term in office, setting the stage for an unprecedented fight for his place as the 2028 GOP presidential nominee and, in effect, the new leader of the Republican and the MAGA movement. As vice president, Vance has long been seen as the most obvious candidate, but due to his historic unpopularity, other names have also been under serious consideration.

Michael Wolff is a veteran writer and journalist, best known for his tell-all books about the chaos behind the scenes of Trump's first term, based on sources he maintains close to the White House. During the latest episode of his Daily Beast podcast, "Inside Trump's Head," Wolff explained that the president's plummeting approval and the suspected drubbing coming for the GOP in the midterms mean that his "lame duck" era is fast approaching, and will see "power starts to ebb because other people start to step up” as “the party begins to think beyond the current presidency.”

In this search for the next MAGA leader, Wolff revealed one name within the administration possibly angling for a shot: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. His chances, however, are strongly dependent on whether or not both Vance and Rubio flame out on the path to the nomination.

"Is Pete Hegseth somehow, because he’s a performer, because he seems shameless, because he’s pro-military in some comical way, does this make him someone who can be a number two or three, and then number one and two fall, and he rises? Unlikely, but not impossible," Wolff said.

He also mentioned a name outside of the administration, making serious considerations about mounting a run for president, one who has emerged as a vocal critic of Trump in recent months: Tucker Carlson.

"I’ve had this discussion on quite a number of occasions with Tucker about his desire to run for president,” Wolff said. “And he has done the deflecting, but not the denying.”

Former congresswoman and Trump-ally-turned-critic Marjorie Taylor Greene has also purportedly been pushing for a Carlson candidacy, potentially priming herself to be his running mate.

Wolff also predicted that, no matter who ends up on the GOP ticket, Trump will try to sabotage their run in some way.

“He will hobble anyone trying to be the nominee. But whoever is the nominee, he will then undermine,” he suggested. “It’s part of the story to be told, and that I trust we will be telling, how he reacts to all of this over the next two and a half years. It won’t be pretty.”

Donald Trump's pursuit of Greenland appears to be winding down for the time being, and according to his one-time biographer, this particular obsession was always "meaningless" and doomed to go nowhere.

Michael Wolff is a veteran reporter and author best known for his book Fire & Fury, a behind-the-scenes account of the tumultuous first Trump administration. In a recent episode of his podcast for the Daily Beast, "Inside Trump's Head," he argued that the president's bluster about Greenland was never actually about achieving anything tangible or gaining territory for the U.S., but rather it was about feeding his desire for attention.

“We are some of the few people who said from the beginning this means nothing,” Wolff explained to his co-host, Joanna Coles. “He is not going to take Greenland. He is not going to apply these tariffs. This is meaningless.”

He continued: "The only meaning here is that this is a new Trump chapter, which will close. He’s going to squeeze this for all of the attention he can get... and it is really an offering to him because it’s attention.”

For most of the new year so far, Trump has escalated his assertion that the U.S. must annex Greenland from Denmark, giving various vague rationales based on "national security" concerns that critics said did not make any real sense. In the face of fierce opposition to this campaign from European leaders, Trump threatened to levy new tariffs against any nation that did not back his plan to take Greenland.

Despite all that, after meeting with several leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this week, Trump backed off these plans and said that no tariffs would be issued, claiming that a tentative agreement had been reached on a deal to give the U.S. more presence in Greenland. Reports indicate that this might include granting the U.S. sovereignty over certain pockets of land on the Arctic island for defense purposes.

Wolff argued further that this push for Greenland acted for Trump as both a way to distract people from less flattering stories, like the Epstein files, and to help keep him at the center of the global political conversation.

“I think people understand this,” Wolff said. “He distracts from whatever happened yesterday. He distracts with whatever happens today. But the distraction in itself—whatever he does—also has this value to him, which is attention. That’s what he wants. He is one more day at the center of the world... One of his aides said to me, ‘You know, he sets these fires constantly, but it’s really not the fire that he focuses on. What he focuses on is the fire engines rushing to put the fire out.'"

President Donald Trump is staring down a defining political weakness that "cuts across" political divides, according to his one-time biographer, and he has run out of time before the midterms to meaningfully turn things around.

Michael Wolff is a longtime reporter and author, best known for his extensive coverage of Trump's political career, including several books about his chaotic first term. In a recent episode of his Daily Beast podcast, "Inside Trump's Head," Wolff broke down why Trump has created his own political problems as the midterms loom ever closer.

"Donald Trump... has screwed himself, which he does over and over and over again," the author told co-host Joanna Coles.

"I know people talk about his comeback and his winning the second administration, as if this was the biggest political comeback, which certainly was a big comeback, and unexpected in some quarters," Coles responded. "Trump is self-destructing with his own policies."

"He came into office with this... whole first year of catching everyone off guard because of him charging ahead, and [saying] 'I can do what I want because I am the president,'" Wolff continued. "'I will do what I want, no one will stop me, and I'm going to do it as fast as I possibly can.' Which he did. But the problem with all that is that that means nothing is particularly thought out. Do this, do this, do this. And [that] means that a year and a half later, you're reaping the benefit, or reaping the opposite of the benefit, of not having thought out the cause and effect here. You do this, it's going to have that effect. And that is all now biting him in the a—— as we approach the midterms in seven weeks."

With fewer than seven weeks left until the midterms, Wolff argued that the economic conditions battering most Americans continue to be the biggest issues Trump and the GOP are facing, especially since voters trusted his 2024 promise to "end" these issues swiftly. This could be especially damaging, he added, because high prices are an issue that every voter, no matter their political persuasion, is going to feel stung by.

“There’s no ideology attached to that, no partisanship,” Wolff said. “It’s just things are... way more expensive than people believe they ought to be... and when that happens you look for someone to blame; there’s one logical person to blame... and that’s the president of the United States... It is not just Donald Trump [taking the blame], but... the buck stops here because he is the president.”

He added later: “This is of his own making. The war is of his own making; tariffs are of his own making. They are the kinds of things that contribute to raising prices,” Wolff said.

In his 1513 political treatise "The Prince," Italian philosopher and statesman Niccolò Machiavelli wrote that truly great leaders surround themselves with the best and brightest advisers they can find. Indeed, he famously summed up his perspective by saying that “the first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.” More than four centuries later, a Republican president named Dwight Eisenhower was rumored to have privately made a similar observation, reportedly saying that "the greatest leaders are the ones smart enough to have people smarter than them around them."

By contrast, according to a journalist with multiple inside sources into President Donald Trump's White House, America's current chief executive has the different philosophy — he surrounds himself with incompetence.

"Speaking on the Inside Trump’s Head podcast, Trump biographer Michael Wolff said, 'This is not a secret,'" reported The Daily Beast's Erkki Forster on Thursday, describing a conversation between Wolff and co-host Joanna Coles. Wolff pointed to Trump's Secretary of Defense, telling Coles that “Pete Hegseth is a... blithering incompetent... yes-man, a suck-up, a man who... knows nothing, and no logic would say he would know enough to run the military-industrial complex."

He added that Hegseth's "primary qualification is that he was... a weekend television co-host. So what in the name of God would he know about running... the United States military... at a moment... in which we are in the middle of a, basically, a revolution in terms of munitions, logistics, and supply.”

Wolff concluded, “Pete Hegseth is in this job because Donald Trump is intimidated by competence. It’s not just that he doesn’t want to be bossed around by people; it’s that he can’t deal with people who know things because—for the obvious reason—because he doesn’t know things.”

This is not the first time Wolff has observed that Trump seems to actively avoid smart people. In August he observed that “he’s filled the administration of the second term with unqualified people, morons of one variety or another, because he can’t have people who are clearly smarter than he is.”

Similarly-famed entrepreneur and investor Jason Calacanis said earlier in September that Presidential Rule No. 1 should be "don't start a never-ending war in the Middle East. Americans have PTSD from them. Presidential Rule No. 2: it's the economy, always has been. Leadership Rule No. 1: Surround yourself with competent people who tell you uncomfortable truths – not sycophants or loyal incompetents. The sycophants will do you in every time. Never get high on your own supply.”

President Donald Trump seemed more than pleased with the praise and attention lavished on him during the recent GOP midterm convention, but according to his one-time biographer, he seems to have no idea that he helped stage his own "political funeral" in the process.

While parties typically reserve conventions for presidential election years, at Trump's insistence, the GOP held an unprecedented midterm convention in Dallas this past week, aiming to help bolster their chances as polls continue to show a Democratic wave coming to wipe out their congressional majorities. Many observers, however, argued that the event might make things worse for Republicans, given how much of it was dominated by Trump at a time when voters hold an increasingly toxic view of his leadership.

Michael Wolff is a longtime reporter and author, best known for his extensive coverage of Trump's political career. In the latest episode of his Daily Beast podcast, "Inside Trump's Head," he suggested that the convention actually served as a preview for Trump's potential successors within the Republican Party, with appearances from the likes of Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Vance, in particular, was at one point met with cheers of "JD 48," in reference to him potentially becoming the next president.

Wolff further suggested that Trump might not have been aware of the extent to which the event turned into a funeral of sorts for his time in politics.

“It suddenly gave a platform to the people who are going to be running to replace him,” Wolff explained. “And I wonder if he actually realized that. As we go past the midterms into the final two years of this presidency, the one thing that is going to most bedevil him is the idea that someone in his party would actually want to and believe they can replace him.”

Wolff also noted that "the JD machine is now gearing up” and “getting into position now" to launch his own 2028 campaign, even as polls often show him with historic unpopularity for a vice president. He argued that this dynamic going forward is not going to sit easily with Trump and reiterated his past point that Trump will not go quietly to make things easier for his successor.

“Let me repeat my position because I really think it’s the only context in which you can see this,” Wolff said. “The idea that a Republican might become president and overshadow Donald Trump would be the tragedy of his life. Therefore, it’s not going to happen.”

He added: “The Donald Trump presidency is going to continue, if not in the White House—because I don’t think he’s figured out how to pull that one off—but therefore it will continue in Mar-a-Lago. He will be the president in exile with billions of dollars at his disposal to finance this administration in exile.”