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."

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.'"

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 is once again looping back to one of his earliest second-term "fixations," and according to his one-time biographer, it all comes down to his complete inability to shake an obsession once it takes root in his mind.

On Friday, the Kennedy Center board — which Trump previously restaffed with loyalists — voted once again to amend the institution's name, this time to add "Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump" to the end of it. The board also approved a motion to rename the site of the building to "The President Donald J. Trump Plaza."

This came after a judge shot down their previous attempt to rename it, "The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts," citing the lack of approval from Congress. Trump's overall effort to impose his will on the center has resulted in a mass boycott by artists.

In the latest episode of his Daily Beast podcast, longtime reporter and author Michael Wolff touched on this development and argued that it shows just how helpless Trump is to move on from something once he becomes fixated on it. Wolff has covered Trump's political career extensively in the past, including in a series of books about his chaotic first term.

"I was saying that, you know, he’s obsessed [with] the Kennedy Center because he wants the validation of the artistic community, something he’s avoided,” co-host Joanna Coles said. “And you immediately jumped in and just said, ‘No, no, he’s fixated about the Kennedy Center.’”

"It is literally that things just get into his head," Wolff responded. "He can’t get them out of his head and has to have them happen... He baldly tried to contradict this and put his name on the Kennedy Center. The court came along and said, ‘No, you can’t do that.’ So there is no way for him to do that. But he can’t stop. He literally can’t stop himself,” Wolff said. “So now the proposal is that, in big letters, it will say ‘The Kennedy Center refurbished, rehabilitated,’ who knows what else. In very large letters, it will say this.”

He continued: “So this is an example of two things: that he has to get what he wants. That if he doesn’t get what he wants, he can’t move off. He can’t go forward. He’s stuck in place,” he added. “And then the second thing is that all of the people around him, what they have to do is figure out some way for him to get what he wants in some way that satisfies him. So I can see days and days and days of people sitting around talking. ‘How do we get his name on the building?’”

Wolff also noted that Trump has long held a particular fixation with comparing himself to former President John F. Kennedy. This is not just because of the obvious assassination comparisons, but also because of a desire to connect himself to the same of "glamour" and "adulation" that Kennedy experienced.

President Donald Trump is not focused on what might happen if he were to die suddenly in office, but, according to his one-time biographer, doing so might actually give him exactly what he wants for his legacy.

Michael Wolff is a longtime author and reporter best known for his extensive coverage of Trump and his political career, including a series of books exposing the chaos of his first term. In the latest episode of his Daily Beast podcast, "Inside Trump's Head," he touched on the looming possibility of Trump's death, responding to a conversation from one of the outlet's earlier podcasts, in which an author suggested that his death could become the subject of "deep-state assassination" conspiracy theories and inspire a "terrorist uprising."

Wolff has noted in the past that Trump is very much fixated on his own mortality, but also stressed during the most recent podcast episode that he is not focused on planning for a possible death while in office. Despite that, Wolff suggested that a sudden death during his second term would inevitably do something for Trump that he has always wanted, especially given his recent obsession with legacy and his place in history.

"If he died suddenly and in office, that might well transform Donald Trump into an iconic historic figure," Wolff suggested.

Trump's fixation on his own importance as a global political leader has been abundantly clear during his second term, most notably through his obsession with construction projects that would impose his own personal vision on the White House and Washington, D.C. Reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan also recently revealed that when they spoke to Trump for their new book, Regime Change, he showed them a piece of writing which argued that he was the most powerful and influential person of all time. While the president claimed that this was written by a notable historian, it was actually written by the golf caddy of an associate of his who claimed to be a history buff.

In response, co-host Joanna Coles asked whether that was something Trump would actually want, given how obsessed he is with being important and remembered. Wolff said that dying in office was certainly not the only possibility that Trump is entertaining, and definitely not the one that he is actively planning for.

"He's thinking that the options are he's going to go on indefinitely," Wolff explained. "He's going to leave office, he's going back to Mar-A-Lago. And then, he is no doubt already plotting how, from Mar-A-Lago, he continues to be the dominant figure in American politics."

Wolff also suggested that, whenever Trump passes away, especially if he were to do so in office, the nation would feel a major weight lifted off its shoulders.

"It’s like when you remove any dominant figure, dictators," Wolff said. "I think people breathe a big sigh of relief. I think it’s like the world clears, and with Trump, the quiet will be extraordinary. People will breathe again. History starts over again.”

President Donald Trump is building another army of MAGA "buffoon" candidates for the coming midterms, but according to his one-time biographer, his absence from the ballot is setting up the perfect conditions for a GOP disaster in November.

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 the latest edition of his Daily Beast podcast, "Inside Trump's Head," he echoed the growing sentiment that many voters simply will not show up for the midterms, all because the president is not at the top of the ballot, leaving his army of "buffoons" missing the support of their "ultimate buffoon."

“There’s an interesting pattern of men who won’t admit to their wives that they are voting for Donald Trump, and then they vote for Donald Trump,” Wolff said. “The dynamic is different in this midterm election because he’s not on the ballot. So, you know, the buffoons who are running in his name don’t have the luxury of being the ultimate buffoon, as it were... You might like to vote for the greatest buffoon of all time. But the mini-buffoons, you don’t really want... Ken Paxton. Do you really want to vote for Ken Paxton?”

Wolff's co-host Joanna Coles put forward another theory for why Trump overperformed expectations in 2016 and 2024: many people do not like to admit they like him, especially when pollsters come knocking. It also seems that this same dynamic does not apply to his many MAGA-friendly endorsements.

“I think a lot of people don’t want to admit that they support Donald Trump,” Coles explained. “They don’t want to admit they like his party, so they don’t admit it. And then, right up in their final run to the privacy of the voting booth, they can finally admit they do like him. Yeah, no, they would prefer him to the other candidates.”

Wolff added later that the different sort of presence Trump has on the midterm ballot will prove to be a net-negative for Republicans, given the growing voter disdain for his leadership.

“Donald Trump is not on the ballot, but Donald Trump is all over the ballot,” Wolff said. “He is the subject... We’re in a situation where the specter of Donald Trump is on the ballot, and that’s a negative, rather than Donald Trump in person being on the ballot, which turns out, inexplicably, to be a positive.”

Trump himself has acknowledged this theory about his effect on turnout when he is on the ballot, and is reportedly fond of the idea, even as it leaves the GOP adrift without him. He has, in recent statements, urged voters to act as if he were on the ballot this year, though it remains unclear if and how well those pleas will work out.