Why Creepy Trump Keeps Hiring Melania Look-alikes

The Daily Beast Podcast

The Daily Beast

News

4.6 • 8.4K Ratings

🗓️ 20 July 2025

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Michael Wolff joins Joanna Coles to unpack Donald Trump’s ever-expanding harem of lookalike aides, surrogates, and “comfort blanket” women inside the presidential bubble. With Melania absent, Trump has surrounded himself with younger clones — from Natalie Harp, the so-called “human printer,” to bikini-clad attorney Alina Habba, to Melania doppelgänger Margo Martin. Wolff, an accomplished Trump biographer who has observed this dynamic firsthand in the West Wing and beyond, explains how Trump’s obsession with appearance, loyalty, and media control manifests in the women around him — many of whom are fighting viciously for his attention. Wolff also reveals how one of these Melania clones controls most of the information that reaches the president and why jurors in Trump’s criminal trial were “creeped out” by his Stepford-like entourage. Wolff explains how Trump’s fixation on TV-ready staff masks a deeper insecurity and clear isolation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	In effect, the whole Trump presidency is a break from the presidency.
0:07.8	I'm Joanna Coles. You're listening, watching or jousting to the Daily Beast podcast,
0:12.8	and I'm here with Donald Trump's brainworm. Yes, the obscenely bestselling author Michael Wolf,
0:19.4	who is deep inside Donald Trump's brain,
0:21.7	and will be bringing us more explanation of that very strange grey matter. But today we're
0:29.1	talking about one of my personal obsessions, and that's the women around Donald Trump,
0:33.3	the women in the White House, who look very Stepford wifie to me. They all look the same.
0:38.3	And yet they have very distinct roles.
0:40.6	So I'm fascinated by Natalie Harp, aka the human printer,
0:45.2	because she literally drives around the golf course with a Wi-Fi printer,
0:49.3	printing our good news for the president.
0:50.9	And of course, Laura Luma, her new best friend. So let's get into it.
0:59.0	Michael, welcome back. Last time you were on the podcast, as many people commented on YouTube,
1:05.7	you talked about this fascination that Donald Trump has with a sort of bygone era.
1:13.0	And part of that bygone era, a sort of white America where white men were supreme,
1:20.5	is the women who are around him and what they look like.
1:24.5	And I wanted to get into it because with Melania in Absentia and Ivanka disappeared,
1:33.6	he's still nevertheless got a group of women around him who look like younger versions of them.
1:39.8	They all look remarkably similar.
1:41.6	And they all feel like contestants from the competition he used to own
1:47.0	Miss Universe. Well, let me do a curious, slight backstory here. Because when I was, when I was
1:56.2	writing in my first book about, about Trump, Fire and and fury i was in the white house for
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Daily Beast, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Daily Beast and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.