The U.S. Navy could spend billions to make ships look more "retro" so that President Donald Trump can get a good night's sleep, biographer Michael Wolff argued Saturday.
Wolff made this bold claim during a video interview with the Daily Beast's Joanna Coles.
"This is not Donald Trump seeing a greater truth!" Wolff declared. "It's a brain malfunction."
The subject of Wolff and Coles' discussion was a bombshell Washington Post report that the Navy might redesign new aircraft carriers over Trump's concerns about the “look."
Trump’s preference would be for the new aircraft carriers to look more like those deployed in World War II, according to the report. Trump also demanded the Navy develop a plan to revert to older steam-powered catapults.
"The cost and time to do so would just be extraordinary,” a former official told the Post.
On Saturday, Coles suggested that Trump's demands for older technology was "insane" but also strategic — he understood modern technology could appear too complicated to people.
Wolff erupted with an energetic rebuttal.
"This is fixation," he said. "It doesn't have anything to do with any intellectual point of view!"
Wolff argued that Trump was literally unable to make himself stop thinking about steam catapults.
"It has to do with something that's gone wrong in his brain," said Wolff. "He can't move off of it."
Wolff asked viewers to imagine a fixation that "keeps you up at night," then drew a comparison to Trump.
"We've all had this at various times... then you think, 'Jesus, I really went a little nuts on that,'" he said. "He can't go off of it."
