President Donald Trump has reportedly been frantically calling aides and allies seeking a “big thing” to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, and he's purportedly considering a major geopolitical move to turn the page politically.
Trump biographer Michael Wolff told The Daily Beast's new podcast "Inside Trump's Head" that the president has been making "relentless" phone calls demanding ideas to get him past questions about his longtime relationships with the late sex offender and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.
“Let me go back about a week or so, or 10 days, when Trump started to say to everyone who would listen — and everyone listens to Donald Trump — to staffers and on the phone calls, the relentless phone calls that he’s constantly making, he said, ‘I need a big thing, I need a big thing,'" Wolff told the podcast. ”What’s the ‘big thing?’ And everyone understood that this was code for I need a distraction from Epstein. What’s the thing that will move us beyond that?”
Trump considered turning New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani into a MAGA villain and reportedly called his chief rival Andrew Cuomo to discuss the plan, but Wolff said that option "didn't get that traction," so he next moved on to deploying soldiers and federal law enforcement in Washington, D.C., before landing on something else to distract his base.
“That is what he got to,” Wolff said. “‘I’m going to have to do Ukraine.’”
Wolff claims the president will pull the U.S. out of any involvement in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, which Trump believes will appease the isolationist MAGA base, after he meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin this week in Alaska.
“He’s going to sacrifice Ukraine for Epstein,” Wolff said. “Essentially, this is, in his mind, a trade. It is the MAGA people who have pressed this Epstein issue constantly. I mean, they’re the threat.”
White House staffers were caught off guard by Trump resuming his direct involvement in reaching a settlement in the conflict, and they aren't sure what he will do, but Wolff said “nobody in the White House can see this turning out so well for Ukraine."
But the author ultimately thinks this distraction will fail to silence questions about Epstein, who described himself in an interview with Wolff as Trump's "closest friend."
“The Epstein drumbeat is real,” Wolff said. “It is unceasing and it is threatening, most of all, to Donald Trump.”