Journalist and author Michael Wolff, who has reported extensively on President Donald Trump’s political career and says he has multiple inside sources in Trump’s White House, argued that Trump is increasingly fading into the background—and is likely furious about it.

“It’s all about attention because A: he can’t resist the idea of it, and B: because the idea of someone else getting the attention is anathema to him,” Wolff said while speaking with podcast co-host Joanna Coles about Trump’s effort to launch what Wolff called a “Trump-a-Palooza” in Dallas.

Wolff said the event may also serve a longer-term political purpose. “Trump does not want the Republican Party to ever imagine life without him,” he said.

“Remember we are going into this other phase,” Wolff continued. “In a president’s second term, after the midterms, the president begins the ‘long goodbye.’ His possible successors come to the forefront. Okay, that’s not going to happen here, and you can see this convention’s announcement of that. ‘I am not going away. I am going to play this in the total opposite of that.’”

Wolff’s description places the planned gathering in the broader transition he associates with a president’s second term: after the midterms, potential successors typically begin receiving more attention. His argument is that Trump is attempting to resist that shift by keeping himself at the center of the party’s public profile.

In another episode of the “Inside Trump’s Head” podcast, Wolff and Coles discussed what they described as Trump’s awareness of mortality following a recent series of celebrity deaths.

“Eighty is a seriously mortal moment,” Wolff said. “You’re in your 80s. This is your 9th decade.”

Wolff, who is known for several books about Trump’s first term based on purported insider sources, described Trump as a morbidly overweight octogenarian confronting the deaths of other celebrities and, in Wolff’s view, his own mortality.

“When I see people who are my age who go down, I register it. I think everybody does,” Wolff said. “Everybody does, but in particular a 300lb pound man who stuffs himself with poison and who hasn’t done a lick of exercise ever might have an even more immediate reaction to other people’s mortality at his age.”

Wolff said Trump’s apparent response to the prospect of his own mortality was to reject it publicly and forcefully.

“The cult of personality is going to go into hyperdrive now,” Wolff warned.

“Ugh,” Coles responded.

“He’s saying ‘I’m not going to allow the party, the country or the world to get me, Donald Trump, out of its head,’” Wolff said. He added that Trump understands “that his talent is getting inside other people’s heads and staying there.”

Coles suggested that Trump could also resent having to compete for public attention—even for one day—with the deaths of thousands of Americans on the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks.

“How is he going to react when the 9-11 event on Friday, because he’s a New Yorker, and he’s not going to be there,” Coles said. “The other presidents are going to be there, so George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, the Clintons will all be there, and he won’t be there. They’ve automatically upstaged his RNC-palooza.”

“Oh, he’s hoping his Trump-a-Palooza will upstage 9-11,” Wolff replied. “That’s what this whole Trump-a-palooza is all about. I’m sure he’s been stewing about that, saying ‘I should’ve been there. I should’ve gone down there. I should’ve gotten some pictures of me there [at the tower collapse].’”

“Exactly,” Coles said. “Where are the pictures? There would have been pictures had he been there, but there aren’t. There are just hilarious fake AI videos of firemen carting him out … and tweets of him as a heroic figure, when people were literally jumping from the buildings.”

“It’s unspeakable. It’s unconscionable,” Wolff said. “But Trump sees this and he’s triangulating it. It’s not just happenstance. This whole idea of a mini convention. He demanded this. He ordered this into place [to upstage it].”

Source: Alternet