President Donald Trump's longtime biographer says the president is now "out of control" as the reckless moves in his second term backfire.
Michael Wolff, who has written four books on Trump, made the remarks in a Tuesday episode of The Daily Beast's "Inside Trump's Head" podcast after he and co-host Joanna Coles played a clip of Trump at a Nebraska rally suggesting Los Angeles and San Diego could be attacked.
"They can take out a city. Let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego," Trump said in the clip. "This is a very small price to pay."
Coles called it "crazy dangerous rhetoric," and Wolff went further.
"This is self-destructive," Wolff said. "The man is out of control."
He questioned whether Trump has come unglued because he senses a reckoning or simply because he cannot stand being out of the spotlight.
"Is he out of control because he realizes that defeat is coming toward him?" Wolff asked. "Or is he out of control because it's not about him, because he's just inserting himself, doing whatever he can?"
Wolff said Trump stormed back into the White House "with more aggression, more venom, more determination than almost any president, certainly in modern memory," without weighing the political fallout of his agenda.
He described a string of policies "which are now almost every single one of them coming back to haunt him."
Wolff also revealed that Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of Trump's "The Art of the Deal," recently wrote to him saying he could not fathom why the president was so self-destructive.
"It is hard to truly express how bad things are for Donald Trump at this point," Wolff said. "It might be truly that the downfall is in progress dramatically."
He pointed to Hispanic voters as one sign, saying a bloc that once trended toward Trump has dramatically reversed itself "and is in full retreat from Donald Trump."
Wolff compared Trump to the late British novelist and disgraced politician Jeffrey Archer, who was jailed for perjury, arguing that narcissists like them are usually undone by their own risk-taking.
"The anomaly is not that those people exist," he said, "but that one has become the president of the United States."
