US President Donald Trump speaks during National Design Studio launch event for America.gov, a new AI-powered government website, at the Mellon Auditorium in Washington, D.C., US, September 29, 2026.
President Donald Trump has a deep, dark fear, according to a journalist who has spent years studying the man — and it is that people will discover he is quite literally stupid.
"Trump’s fear of this is so great, Michael Wolff tells the Inside Trump’s Head Podcast that the president’s college transcripts may very well be what Russian President Vladimir Putin holds over him," reported The Daily Beast's Sarah-Jane Collins on Sunday. "Wolff says the theory is not just his, adding that former Trump adviser Steve Bannon raised the same possibility."
During the podcast, Wolff observed that “Steve Bannon and I were talking about what Putin might have on Trump, and Bannon went through all the things dismissing them. He said, what I think he has on him are his college transcripts.”
Wolff's co-host, Joanna Coles, pointed out that despite numerous efforts from journalists, the public has yet to see either Trump's high school transcripts or his college transcripts.
“We haven’t seen his high school transcripts. We haven’t seen either of his college transcripts,” Coles told Wolff. “They have been so successful in locking that stuff down. And, you know, if they were good, he would have floated them out there immediately.”
Wolff continued, “I think top of his list, top of the things that plagues him is being seen as stupid, for one reason: Because he is stupid.”
Coles added that the purpose of this speculation is to understand Trump, not to shame him for his potential intellectual deficiencies.
“We should say that the point of going through these fears is to understand why he is as he is, because actually, he’s a man that’s been created through his fears,” Coles said.
Trump has often fixated on his supposed intelligence as a way of boasting to voters. In September, when Trump was criticized for not supporting AI regulations, he pointed to his brain as a reason why voters did not need to worry.
“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform, “and the USA has that, in spades!”
Also in September, Wolff said that Trump's intellectual insecurities explain why he repeatedly hires incompetent people to staff his administration — namely, so that he won't feel inferior to them.
"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 at the time, noting of Trump's Secretary of Defense 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."
Wolff 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.”
He continued, “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.”
In August Wolff also said 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.”
When AlterNet reached out to the White House in May regarding a letter signed by three dozen health professionals alleging that Trump is mentally incompetent, a spokesperson attacked the credibility of the signatories.
“If it quacks like a duck, it may actually just be a Democrat hack doctor,” Davis Ingle told AlterNet. “President Trump is the sharpest, most accessible, and energetic president in American history and any so-called medical professionals engaging in armchair diagnosis or false speculation for political purposes are clearly breaking the Hippocratic Oath they’ve sworn to.”
