No
one has ever gone up to Trump and just told him he lost the election, author
Michael Wolff says in The 600-Word Interview
Nicholas Carlson
Tue, August 3, 2021,
12:39 PM·4 min read
- Michael Wolff is the author of three books on Trump.
His latest is the best-seller "Landslide."
- He says Trump is delusional and won't listen to what he
doesn't want to hear.
- So no one has gone up to him and plainly told him he
lost fair and square to Joe Biden.
It seems as if your
theory of Trump is that he's a not-bright insane person with a gift for reading
a crowd.
Yes. He's like many
actors I have known in my time: not too bright in their own particular reality,
with extraordinary gifts for getting on the wavelength of their audience.
Does he know that he
lost the election fair and square?
He does not know. Now,
whether he has managed to successfully convince himself or whether from the
get-go he was so focused on hearing what he wanted to hear, he is absolutely
certain. Absolutely certain that he won the election and that if he did not win
it, it could only be that it was stolen from him. And that everybody else also
sees it that way. So this is delusional, which is the word I use fairly often
in the book.
You also say he's
mentally deranged.
Yes. I would say that
seems the obvious conclusion.
I kept waiting for
someone in the book to just go out to him and say "You lost."
When you haven't been
in his presence, it's very hard then to actually describe for someone the fact
that he is incapable of listening. He just doesn't hear anything that he
doesn't want to hear. He's unable to acknowledge any deviation, any slightest
departure, any merest qualification of something different than what he thinks
or wants to think.
So no one has just
gone up to him and said, "Sir, you lost this election"?
Exactly so. You cannot
say anything to Trump that he doesn't want to hear. Everybody knows that. So to
do that would mark you as incompetent or a fool or a silly person. It just
doesn't happen.
Now, there's a set of
billionaire types - sort of what passes for friends - who have at least
described to me instances in which they have tried to, if not exactly level
with him, bring him around to a new understanding. But also the feeling that
you come away from those descriptions is that even these people can't get over
the barrier of saying: "You're an idiot. You're a fool. You don't know
what you're talking about."
Partly because it
would require that kind of extreme language. And, given that he was the
president of the United States, and given that everybody knows he doesn't
listen anyway.
And given, of course,
that people who are talking to him want to remain in his favor.
It's almost another
power of his, if every time he encounters someone they can't bring themselves
to be direct about the circumstances.
Completely. But just
think of it as talking to a crazy person, a person whose capacity to parse
reality in some logical way is so diminished that you have to humor them,
essentially. Everybody knows that reality can't get through here, so the best
you can do is work at the edges.
In your first book
about Trump, you called Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump "Jarvanka."
Everyone knows it's "Javanka." Did you hear about that criticism?
Yeah. And I don't know what to say about it. I
know that Steve Bannon invented the term, and that's the term he used with me.
You know, did it somehow change underneath? I don't know. I think I was
probably one of the first people to put it into print. So who knows? I don't
know. I have no knowledge there. I said to Steve, "Is it Javanka or is it
Jarvanka?" And he said, "Javanka, Jarvanka, let's call the whole
thing off." So I don't know.
