Donald Trump’s choice to raise up incompetent sycophants across his administration is an intentional one, according to his longtime biographer.
Appearing on theInside Trump’s Head podcast, author Michael Wolff said that the second Trump administration’s overwhelming ineptitude stems from the 80-year-old president’s need to be the smartest in the room.
“People have a very hard time… understanding the full sense of a man who is the President of the United States, who is—as he has said about so many other people—dumb as a brick himself,” Wolff told host Joanna Coles. “All of these issues, he does not have the information or the intelligence to appreciate and to cope with and to address. He just doesn’t.”
“And couple that with the fact that he doesn’t give anyone else around him who might, the independence and the wherewithal to deal with those issues,” he added.
Coles brought up Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and his questionable decisions to fire seasoned military leaders amid the nearly six-month quagmire that the president’s war with Iran has become.
“What could possibly be in it for Pete Hegseth to fire these people?” she asked. “I understand wanting to bring your own team in, but it’s not like he comes in with a ton of four-star generals that he wants to put in place.”
“Look at it this way—you’re in this job. You’re underqualified. You’re unqualified to hold this job. Everybody knows it,” Wolff explained. “And many of those people who you have to rely on treat you as someone who is unqualified to hold this job. So you are yourself in a constant state of absolute insecurity and unhappiness.”
“So what do you do? Well, you… get rid of the people who think you’re a lummox and who… almost borderline openly talk about your stupidity and your… failure to be able to do this job,” he said.
The author said that the issue is “binary”—saying that one either quits or gets rid of everyone who believes them to be unqualified.
“That’s one… of the management reasons why it is very bad to put someone into a position who… does not, and will not, have the respect of the people who work for him,” he explained.
Wolff said to think of Hegseth “as a kind of mini Donald Trump,” in that the secretary’s staffing decisions mirror the president’s for the exact same reason.
“Because he can’t have people who are clearly smarter than he is. He can’t have people, as in the first administration, who went around saying, ‘My God, what an idiot,’” the author said. “He understood that undermined him, to say the least.”
Reached for comment, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told the Daily Beast in a frequently recycled statement: “Michael Wolff is a professional scumbag and serial liar whose brain has been completely warped by his severe and incurable disease known as Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
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