President Donald Trump’s second term has come to be defined by a seemingly endless series of self-serving grifts, and according to his one-time biographer, there is a particular “demented” fantasy he is using to justify this bottomless greed.
Michael Wolff is a longtime reporter and author, best known for a series of books chronicling the behind-the-scenes chaos of Trump’s first term, based on insider White House sources. During the latest episode of his Daily Beast podcast, “Inside Trump’s Head,” he and co-host Joanna Coles touched on the Trump administration’s recent deal to allow a company partially owned by the president’s sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, to mine tungsten, a key mineral for military projects, in Kazakhstan, with the project receiving up to $1.6 billion in federal funding.
“It’s an extraordinary story,” Wolff said about the deal. “The grift is the grift and the grift is there, but this is… just completely out in the open.”
Speaking further on the matter, Wolff delved into Trump’s motivations for self-serving deals and grifts like this, revealing a personal revenge motive that underpins all of it.
“The really interesting thing is what Donald Trump thinks about this,“ Wolff explained. ”We tend to… see him as he’s completely cynical: ‘Just give me the money.’ I don’t think that’s exactly the case. I think it is that he — profoundly in his mind, in his head — believes he deserves this.”
He continued, giving voice to Trump’s mindset: “‘It’s a fair exchange. I’m Donald Trump, I’m the president of the United States. I should get something out of this.'”
According to financial disclosure documents obtained by the New York Times on Tuesday, Trump took in a “stunning windfall” of around $2.2 billion in 2025, up from just $622 million in 2024, prior to his return to the White House. The report further revealed that the revenue came from a United Arab Emirates-affiliated wealth fund that acquired a major stake in “the Trump family’s main crypto company, World Liberty Financial, a transaction that blurred the line between foreign policy and private enterprise.” The Trump organization has also been “licensing the Trump name to properties in countries that are crucial to U.S. foreign policy interests, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar.”
“It’s not just grift for him. It’s truly revenge — a revenge that he deserves, that he is due,” Wolff added. “This is an important thing and a step beyond… certainly any kind of grift that I’m familiar with, even historical grift. It’s a much more elaborate psychology here in which he deserves it… This is all Donald Trump always against the establishment and the system, and ‘They’ve done me wrong, so I should be paid.’”