President Donald Trump made a brief visit to the secluded presidential retreat Camp David in Maryland on Friday, one that Trump biographer Michael Wolff found not only “odd,” but a potentially telling sign of trouble within his administration.
While Trump has been vague on his feelings about the presidential retreat in recent years, in 2017, he gave the property “the equivalent of a bad Yelp review,” The Washington Post previously reported. For Trump to make his third trip to the presidential retreat of his second term, Wolff theorized, “probably means something.”
“This is odd, because Trump hates Camp David. Hates it! Every time that he went there in the first administration, he would come back in a rage; a rage against the accommodations... so the fact that he is at Camp David now actually probably means something,” Wolff said in a video published Saturday.
“And what it means is that he's trying to be presidential. He is trying to evoke, in the middle of a war that he can't get out of and that he can't solve, it's 'I am a serious president.' Now, of course, then he goes to Camp David and it doesn't appear to be serious at all. It's just more of the Trump show, which he cannot not do, but the fact that he is doing it at Camp David is a kind-of sign of some desperation.”
Wolff's remarks come amid a war Trump has struggled to end. Trump has declared ceasefires with Iran multiple times since the conflict began in February, only to see them collapse and resume fighting, most recently in July after Iran struck commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz.
A Quinnipiac University poll published this week put Trump's approval at 32%, an all-time low in the pollster's surveys, with 60% of voters opposed to the war. An AP-NORC poll similarly found approval at 33%.