The Daily Beast Podcast

Michael Wolff joins Joanna Coles with a new window into the volatility inside the West Wing, describing what he says was a secret Situation Room tantrum by Donald Trump, a moment when military briefers could not give him the absolute guarantees he demanded, and the meeting spiraled. Wolff connects that flash of anger to the broader pattern he’s reported for years: a president who hates paper trails, avoids email, and warns aides never to “leave a record,” an instinct that now looms large as the Epstein Files fallout engulfs figures like Prince Andrew and Peter Mandelson. Why, Wolff asks, do so many powerful men have receipts—while Trump seems not to? From the chaos-as-cover strategy to the Iran briefings where strength is performative, and doubt is intolerable, this is a portrait of a leader who equates uncertainty with humiliation and reacts accordingly.
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Liz Oyer joins Joanna Coles to expose what she calls Donald Trump’s “pardon economy”—a system that has transformed presidential mercy into something transactional and lucrative. Oyer, the former pardon attorney under Joe Biden, walks through the eye-popping cases: reality TV stars Todd and Julie Chrisley freed after serving just 18 months; crypto titan Changpeng “CZ” Zhao pardoned after brokering billions into the Trump family’s crypto venture; electric truck founder Trevor Milton absolved before paying back investors; and even former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández released despite a 45-year sentence for massive cocaine trafficking. Along the way, they examine the erased restitution—over a billion dollars owed to victims—golf-course clemency pitches, surprise NFL pardons, and the political fallout inside Trump’s own Justice Department. If pardons are, as one scholar puts it, an X-ray into a president’s soul, what does this one reveal about Trump’s second term—and who benefits next?

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Dr. John Gartner joins Joanna Coles for a bracing deep dive into what he argues are the accelerating signs of cognitive and behavioral decline in Donald Trump—from garbled words and meandering stories to grandiosity, paranoia, and the spectacle of falling asleep at his newly formed Board of Peace. As they dissect Trump’s escalator conspiracy tale, obsession with looks, fixation on naming landmarks after himself, and late-night social media tirades, the conversation widens to the real stakes: nuclear codes, Middle East brinkmanship, the midterms, and what Dr. Gartner calls the dangerous mix of narcissistic injury and unchecked power. With references to Greenland, Gaza, Iran, the Justice Department, and even the shadow of the Epstein files, Coles presses on whether any institutional guardrails still hold—or whether impulse now drives policy.
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Michael Wolff and Joanna Coles climb back inside Donald Trump’s mind at the very moment the Supreme Court humiliates him on tariffs—and he responds not with retreat, but with theatrical fury. From calling his own justices “fools” to turning a legal defeat into prime-time spectacle, they unpack how Trump transforms setbacks into legend, why the State of the Union could become a live-wire showdown with Chief Justice John Roberts, and what those colossal presidential banners draped across Washington really signal about dominance and power. Along the way, they dive into the bro-coded videos of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Pete Hegseth, the strange silence from Kash Patel on Epstein, and the unsettling mystery of a disappearance gripping the country—asking whether Trump governs as a president, a performer, or something closer to a monarch.

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Michael Wolff and Joanna Coles untangle a week where chaos seems to be the point, including the stunning arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor in the widening Jeffrey Epstein fallout. Meanwhile in Washington, Trump gathers his Board of Peace to bankroll his grand vision for Gaza while facing a far more combustible reality: a potential military showdown with Iran that he may neither want nor be able to control. As European partners keep their distance and troop buildups raise the stakes, Wolff and Coles probe whether Trump is orchestrating strategic distraction—or simply caught between looking weak and starting a war. With scandals colliding and global order wobbling, is this all part of a master play, or are we watching events slip beyond Trump’s grasp?

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