President Donald Trump has circled back to one of his earliest second-term "fixations," and according to his one-time biographer, the pattern comes down to his complete inability to shake an obsession once it takes root in his mind.

On Friday, the Kennedy Center board — which Trump previously restaffed with loyalists, purging much of its traditional membership in the opening weeks of his second term before installing himself as chairman — voted once again to amend the institution's name, this time adding "Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump" to the end of it. The board also approved a motion to rename the site of the building "The President Donald J. Trump Plaza."

The votes followed a judicial rebuke: a judge shot down the board's previous attempt to rename the venue "The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts," citing the lack of approval from Congress — the body that created the institution in 1958 as the National Cultural Center and rededicated it as a living memorial to Kennedy after his 1963 assassination. The ruling left any formal renaming of the memorial itself in Congress's hands. Trump's broader effort to impose his will on the center has resulted in a mass boycott by artists, a wave that has included the producers of "Hamilton" pulling a planned run and Issa Rae calling off a scheduled appearance.

The latest development was taken up on the newest episode of Michael Wolff's Daily Beast podcast. Wolff, a longtime reporter and author who has covered Trump's political career extensively — including in a series of books about his chaotic first term, beginning with 2018's "Fire and Fury," an early inside account of the West Wing — argued that the renaming push shows just how helpless Trump is to move on from something once he becomes fixated on it.

Co-host Joanna Coles recalled the exchange on the show: "I was saying that, you know, he's obsessed [with] the Kennedy Center because he wants the validation of the artistic community, something he's avoided. And you immediately jumped in and just said, 'No, no, he's fixated about the Kennedy Center.'"

"It is literally that things just get into his head," Wolff responded. "He can't get them out of his head and has to have them happen... He baldly tried to contradict this and put his name on the Kennedy Center. The court came along and said, 'No, you can't do that.' So there is no way for him to do that. But he can't stop. He literally can't stop himself. So now the proposal is that, in big letters, it will say 'The Kennedy Center refurbished, rehabilitated,' who knows what else. In very large letters, it will say this."

He continued: "So this is an example of two things: that he has to get what he wants. That if he doesn't get what he wants, he can't move off. He can't go forward. He's stuck in place. And then the second thing is that all of the people around him, what they have to do is figure out some way for him to get what he wants in some way that satisfies him. So I can see days and days and days of people sitting around talking. 'How do we get his name on the building?'"

Wolff also noted that Trump has long held a particular fixation with comparing himself to former President John F. Kennedy — and not only because of the obvious assassination comparisons, but also because of a desire to connect himself to the same "glamour" and "adulation" that Kennedy experienced. Trump has touched that same legacy in office, ordering the release of the remaining government files on the 1963 Kennedy assassination during his second term.