Donald Trump’s aides are scrambling, with no clear way out of the war against Iran and a president in denial about his deepening political crisis, according to his biographer.
White House staffers are obsessively gauging the Iran war’s political fallout by calling out the price of oil on a “moment-by-moment basis,” author Michael Wolff said on the Inside Trump’s Head podcast.
“Everybody within the White House and within the Trump political team... they don’t know what to do about this,” Wolff said. “They literally do not know what to do.”
He added, “They don’t know how to get us out of the war, and they don’t know how to manage this on a political basis.”
Frustration over the war and Trump’s overall job performance is mounting among Americans less than six months before the midterms, polls have shown.
Americans are reeling from the conflict’s ripple effects, with average gas prices in the U.S. at $4.48 per gallon on Tuesday, according to the AAA auto club, up nearly $1.50 since Trump launched his war on Feb. 28.
Trump, however, has insisted on a near-daily basis that all is well.
Citing his “most recent discussions with White House people,” Wolff said, “there’s an acknowledgment this is a problem, but that he’s in denial about it.”
Trump, whose favorite argument is that oil prices haven’t climbed as much as he expected, said Tuesday that the soaring gas prices are “a very small price to pay” for what he described as stopping Iran’s nuclear threat.
Assessments by U.S. intelligence suggest the timeline for Iran to assemble a nuclear weapon has not budged since Trump first bombed the regime’s nuclear facilities last June, despite the fresh blitz he launched this year, according to a Reuters report.
“He has gotten himself into a situation he cannot get out of. He’s kind of screwed at this point,” Wolff told Nico Hines, the Daily Beast’s global editorial director, who filled in for co-host Joanna Coles.
“It is just caught in this vise of not looking forward, of not seeing what might happen, of the kind of hubris that so often accompanies foreign adventures,” the author added.
Hines noted the war’s overwhelming unpopularity among the American public marks a break from past U.S. conflicts, which have generally begun with a “rallying around the flag” before declining in popularity over time.
Trump’s two-month-old war, on the other hand, is facing overwhelming disapproval that rivals the anti-war sentiment seen during the Vietnam War and the peak of the war in Iraq.
The latest Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos poll found that 61 percent of Americans believe that the U.S. using military force against Iran was a mistake. Just 36 percent believe it was the right decision.
The same poll found that disapproval of Trump’s performance in office has climbed to 62 percent, the highest level seen in either of his two terms.
“The run that Trump had... for most of the first year of this administration has now come strikingly to an end,” Wolff said. “The economy, ICE, the war, tariffs, the clowns in the administration that surround him, nothing is going well for them. Literally nothing.”
When reached for comment, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung sent the Daily Beast a recycled statement:
“Michael Wolff is a lying sack of s--t and has been proven to be a fraud. He routinely fabricates stories originating from his sick and warped imagination, only possible because he has a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain.”
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