President Donald Trump is more and more beholden to a “dangerous addiction,” according to his one-time biographer, and it is one that has both defined his entire political career and could endanger his future.
Michael Wolff is a longtime reporter and author, best known for his extensive coverage of Trump’s personal and political dealings, including a series of books about the inner workings of his first administration. In the latest edition of his Daily Beast podcast, “Inside Trump’s Head,” he touched on Trump’s appearance at the latest NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, and argued that his conduct there reveals the addiction that most defines him: attention.
“He’s not about policy. He’s not about accomplishments. He’s not about ‘America first,’ he’s certainly not about cooperation, which is the nature… of NATO,” Wolff explained. “It’s just about attention… He arrives there, and it’s, ‘What do I do to claim all of the attention? Then coming back to Greenland, then coming back to dismissing everyone, dissing Europe. So essentially, how could he not but become the center of attention here?”
Wolff even suggested that Trump might have allowed his recent ceasefire deal with Iran to disintegrate in order to better steal the spotlight at the summit. His visit was marked by attacks against a parade of long-established U.S. allies, including. Spain, France, Germany, Italy and the U.K., taking aim at them for refusing to participate in his war, for allegedly not spending enough on NATO and for opposing his calls to annex Greenland.
“You have to understand that there is no meaning beyond that. It’s not about anything else,” Wolff continued. “What has this 10 years of the Trump era been about? It has just been about what gets him attention.”
“I mean, it is strange when you hear earnest and utterly sincere journalists trying to make sense out of what he does,” Joanna Coles, Wolff’s co-host, said, further suggesting that his attention-obsessed nature must stem from a lack of it in his childhood.
In response, Wolff countered: “He has always gotten too much of it, and that has created an addiction which obviously has to be… satisfied with ever more attention.”
He added: “Our foreign policy is not to cooperate with our allies because… our allies are irrelevant, we are the focus, we must be the focus, and by we Trump means ‘I’ must be the focus. That then becomes… the profile of America’s place in the world… No other interests matter, no other nations matter, no other leaders matter.”