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The Real Reason Trump Backed Off Greenland: Wolff

Michael Wolff unpacks why Trump’s latest global threat was never going to be realized.

Donald Trump backed down from his demand to acquire Greenland because he just cares about the drama and attention it has brought him, his biographer says.

Author Michael Wolff told the Inside Trump’s Head podcast that the president’s threat of military invasion and tariffs on European countries wasn’t going to happen. Trump, after a fiery speech in Davos, Switzerland, to other heads of state, ended up agreeing to a compromise that wouldn’t bring Greenland under full U.S. ownership.

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How Much TACO Trump Crumbled on Greenland Deal Revealed

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“We are some of the few people who said from the beginning this means nothing,” Wolff told co-host Joanna Coles. “He is not going to take Greenland. He is not going to apply these tariffs. This is meaningless.”

“The only meaning here is that this is a new Trump chapter, which will close,” he said. “He’s going to squeeze this for all of the attention he can get... and it is really an offering to him because it’s attention.”

The focus on Greenland, Coles added, distracts from the Epstein files, the economy, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement—all areas where polls show Trump underwater.

“I think people understand this,” Wolff continued. “He distracts from whatever happened yesterday. He distracts with whatever happens today. But the distraction in itself—whatever he does—also has this value to him, which is attention. That’s what he wants. He is one more day at the center of the world.”

Wolff then described what one of Trump’s aides revealed to him about what the 79-year-old president actually enjoys about the drama.

“One of his aides said to me, ‘You know, he sets these fires constantly, but it’s really not the fire that he focuses on. What he focuses on is the fire engines rushing to put the fire out’,” Wolff recalled.

When reached for comment, the White House questioned Wolff’s credibility.

“Michael Wolff is a lying sack of s--t and has been proven to be a fraud. He routinely fabricates stories originating from his sick and warped imagination, only possible because he has a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain,” White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said.

In a second statement, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said: “If this deal goes through, and President Trump is very hopeful it will, the United States will be achieving all of its strategic goals with respect to Greenland, at very little cost, forever. President Trump is proving once again he’s the Dealmaker in Chief. As details are finalized by all parties involved, they will be released accordingly.”

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Wolff expressed similar sentiments after the United States captured the ousted Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro.

“He has done what he always manages to do, which is to change the subject through a fundamental reordering of the narrative, of the drama that we’re living in,” Wolff said on Inside Trump’s Head earlier this month.

“The thing about Epstein, and we might trust this, is that it never goes away. It always comes back,” he continued, noting that approximately 5 million pages from the Epstein files still haven’t been released.

“What’s the status there? And I don’t know the status,” Wolff said. “I’m not sure anyone does because the status is in the hands of the Trump White House, which has now distracted everyone from this job. The job of releasing the Epstein files has been preempted by the job of running Venezuela.”

Find and subscribe to Inside Trump’s Head with Michael Wolff and Joanna Coles on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes of incomparable insight into the psyche of the world’s most talked-about man drop every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday evening on YouTube and Wednesday and Friday mornings on other podcast platforms.

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