Wolff: All White House Staff Thinks Trump is ‘Incapable of Functioning in His Job’
Michael Wolff, whose upcoming book on President Donald Trump’s White House made waves when a series of stunning excerpts were released on Wednesday, wrote that he believes all administration officials have come to believe Trump is incapable of doing the job of president.
In a column penned for the Hollywood Reporter detailing his time observing the Trump White House, Wolff concluded that his “indelible impression” of “Donald Trump’s small staff of factotums, advisors and family” is that “they all — 100 percent — came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job.”
That conclusion is based on yearlong observations of White House officials, including what Wolff described as “a kind of competition to demystify Trump” amongst staffers that developed as the administration ambled through the treacherous summer of its first year.
And their conclusions weren’t pretty: “For Rex Tillerson, he was a moron. For Gary Cohn, he was dumb as shit. For H.R. McMaster, he was a hopeless idiot. For Steve Bannon, he had lost his mind,” Wolff wrote.
Even Sam Nunberg, the longtime Trump staffer who was fired during the campaign but remains fiercely loyal to the president, said “He’s just a fucking fool,” per Wolff — apparently inspiring “palpable relief, of an Emperor’s New Clothes sort” amongst White House staffers.
If that weren’t enough, Wolff seemed to imply that White House staffers believe Trump is losing control of his mental faculties:
There was more: Everybody was painfully aware of the increasing pace of his repetitions. It used to be inside of 30 minutes he’d repeat, word-for-word and expression-for-expression, the same three stories — now it was within 10 minutes. Indeed, many of his tweets were the product of his repetitions — he just couldn’t stop saying something.
If that were too subtle an insinuation, Wolff’s last line should make it clearer:
At Mar-a-Lago, just before the new year, a heavily made-up Trump failed to recognize a succession of old friends.
Read Wolff’s account – it’s very, very juicy — of his time with Trump here.
[image via screengrab]
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