A Trump biographer believes the president's latest overture to Moscow is the opening move in a plan reaching far past his term.
Michael Wolff said in a Tuesday episode of "Inside Trump's Head," the podcast he co-hosts with Joanna Coles, that President Donald Trump's recent deal to buy Russian diesel is the "first stage" of an effort to cash in on his relationship with Vladimir Putin and fund an "alternative White House" at Mar-a-Lago after he leaves office.
Wolff argued that a close bond with the Russian leader has been Trump's goal "from the beginning of his political career," and that Putin offers him a template for both power and profit.
"I think Putin provides a model of the kind of politics or the kind of authoritarianism that he understands," Wolff said. "If I want it, I should get it. If I say, it should be true. And also a model of the oligarchy that he imagines. I should be able to make money out of this. You become the president of the United States, you should be paid for it handsomely, which he has been, but even more handsomely."
Wolff said Trump's ambitions were stymied by the Russia investigation in his first term and by Ukraine's successful resistance in his second. With the midterms approaching, he suggested, those constraints are falling away.
"He doesn't even have to look toward keeping the Republicans in the House or the Senate happy, because they're not going to have any power," Wolff said. "Likely what he is looking toward is now two years to make this relationship with Putin, to bring it home. And this is the first stage of it."
Wolff predicted Trump would "leave the White House, return to Mar-a-Lago," where he expects the president to build a shadow operation financed by oligarchs.
"The oligarchy, I think, is going to be very important to him," Wolff said. "That's what's going to fund this alternative White House that I believe he's going to set up in Mar-a-Lago."
Coles asked whether Trump was also stockpiling resources to fight the investigations likely to follow him out of office. Wolff brushed that off, saying, "I don't think it's a very big issue with him," and argued Trump already has "billions more where that came from."