How Trump Secretly Knifes Cabinet Suck-Ups: Wolff

The Daily Beast Podcast

The Daily Beast

News & Politics

4.6 • 7.9K Ratings

🗓️ 5 December 2025

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Michael Wolff joins Joanna Coles to discuss a president oscillating between boredom and sudden, theatrical fury; a man who now demands ever-greater flattery from aides who are running out of new ways to praise him. Joanna presses into the Hegseth Venezuela debacle that Trump is suddenly trying to disown, the strange Kushner–Witkoff Moscow overture supposed to “solve” Ukraine, and the inner-circle panic over Trump’s fixation with who is—and isn’t—sufficiently servile. Along the way, they track the “moronocracy” shaping U.S. policy and ask: if flattery no longer works, what happens next?

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Transcript

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0:00.0	If we're suddenly in a political moment of which a more complicated, naughty, draggy political moment,
0:09.9	the stimulation is going to go down.
0:12.9	And I'm not sure that he knows what to do with that, except his head droops and then lists
0:17.9	to the side because he is fundamentally bored.
0:22.2	The whole flattery sycophant thing is he wants it, he needs it, he demands it, and then it starts to
0:32.3	irritate him.
0:34.4	And again, irritate him because he's not getting enough of it
0:37.7	and irritating it because now he sees through it.
0:42.1	So Pete becomes an ass lick.
0:49.1	Michael.
0:50.7	Joanna.
0:52.2	And you are in...
0:53.8	I'm in Los Angeles and you cannot believe how I have construed my podcast studio to talk to you today.
1:02.4	My computer is balanced precariously, I will say. So if I suddenly go this way, you'll know why.
1:08.4	On the trash can, because I was trying to improvise in the room to create studio and reasonably flattering lighting, because last time we did this, you said that it was a disaster.
1:19.0	So I got up incredibly early to build a studio around myself.
1:24.7	Possibly too much information.
1:27.7	All right.
1:28.6	Well, at least I'm not falling asleep, like the president did yesterday in his cabinet
1:35.3	meeting.
1:35.8	We have a lot to get through.
1:36.8	We've got to get through Hegseth.
	...

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