Donald Trump was accused of behaving like a ‘crazy uncle’ in Washington on Wednesday, after a foul‑mouthed lunchroom clash with a senior Republican senator prompted his long‑time biographer Michael Wolff to claim that even the former president’s closest allies now quietly accept that Donald Trump is ‘crazy’.
The latest flare‑up came during a closed‑door Senate Republican lunch at the US Capitol, where Trump confronted Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy over Cassidy’s support for a war powers resolution aimed at curbing US military action against Iran. Cassidy told reporters afterwards that the 80‑year‑old president had called him a ‘lunatic’ and used language more suited to a playground than a policy meeting, before rapidly softening his tone after a subsequent high‑level briefing in the Situation Room.
Cassidy, 68, said he had stood up in the lunch and challenged Trump over the length and purpose of the Iran operation, telling colleagues: ‘You have not told the American people what’s going on. It was supposed to last four weeks, it’s lasted four months. Our original objectives have not been achieved, and I want to know what’s going on.’ Hours later, following what he described as a ‘thorough briefing’ from special envoy Steve Witkoff and vice president JD Vance, Cassidy rowed back, an about‑face that neatly illustrates the odd gravitational pull Trump still exerts over his own party.
Michael Wolff Says ‘Everybody Knows’ Donald Trump Is ‘Crazy’
The news came after Wolff used his podcast Inside Trump’s Head to argue that Trump’s bizarre conduct, including the spat with Cassidy, is no longer a dirty little secret inside Republican ranks but an accepted truth that no one wants to confront in public.
‘I think what’s going on in the bubble over their heads is, “Yeah, this guy is, this is a crazy guy”,’ Wolff told co‑host Joanna Coles. ‘And how do you treat a crazy guy? You try to humor him. You try to avoid head‑to‑head conflict with him.’ He then drove the point home: ‘Everybody knows he’s crazy.’
Wolff, who has chronicled Trump’s rise and presidency for years, painted a picture of a party trapped in what he called a specific ‘Trump ecology’. Republican lawmakers, he suggested, are constantly weighing their own electoral survival against the risks of crossing a leader they regard as volatile but still electorally useful.
When Coles pressed him on why, if everyone is so alarmed, they do not simply act to rein him in, Wolff was blunt. Some Republicans, he said, will be voted out in November, but many ‘continue to need him’ after a bruising primary season in which Trump’s endorsement and wrath have both proved decisive. Without a realistic prospect of invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office, he argued, they are reduced to coping strategies rather than solutions.
Wolff went further, describing what he sees as a ‘manic depressive display’ in Trump’s second administration. The first year of this term, he said, was ‘all mania’, a blur of rapid‑fire decisions and headline‑grabbing moves that left Washington struggling to keep up. Now, Wolff claimed, ‘all of that stuff catches up with him’, leaving a president slipping into a more depressive phase in which ‘nothing is working, everywhere he goes, he gets pushback, can’t accomplish anything’.
White House Fury As ‘Crazy Uncle’ Trump Label Sticks
The characterisation of Donald Trump as a ‘crazy uncle’ did not go unanswered. Asked for comment, White House communications director Steven Cheung issued a scathing statement attacking Wolff personally rather than engaging with his analysis.
‘Michael Wolff is a lying sack of shit and has been proven to be a fraud,’ Cheung said, in remarks shared with the Daily Beast. He accused the author of routinely fabricating stories from a ‘sick and warped imagination’ and claimed Wolff suffered from ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ that had ‘rotted his peanut‑sized brain’. It is language more often seen in online flame wars than official presidential communications, but then that is the Trump era for you.
If Wolff sees a manic‑depressive pattern, some clinicians have been willing to go much further. The article notes that medical experts have publicly raised concerns over Trump’s mental state during his second term, pointing to frequent rambling tirades and increasingly grandiose pet projects. Clinical psychologist Dr John Gartner told the same outlet that ‘tangential speech is one of the diagnostic criteria for dementia’, adding that Trump’s fixation on anything that reflects glory on him is ‘a function of malignant narcissism’. Those are heavy labels, and while they are not diagnoses in the formal medical sense, they show just how far the conversation about a sitting president’s mind has shifted.
Celebeat cannot independently verify these medical claims, so take everything lightly.
In the meantime, the political stakes are grindingly real. Republicans are braced for a rough midterm season as Democrats, energised through the primaries, try to claw back control of both the House and the Senate. If they succeed, Trump could face his third impeachment, a once unthinkable sentence that now reads like just another paragraph in America’s ongoing Trump saga.
That looming threat helps explain why, as Wolff puts it, so many in the GOP treat Donald Trump like the volatile relative at a family gathering. ‘Everybody treats him like he’s the crazy uncle,’ he said, suggesting that this dynamic only feeds Trump’s frustration. The more he senses people humouring him, Wolff argued, the more ‘agitated’ and unhappy he becomes, deepening a sense that nothing is going right.
Recent events have supplied plenty of ammunition for that view. This week, Trump has been publicly raging over the disastrous £12.6 million, or $16 million, renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, a project he personally ordered to have the water painted blue ahead of the 250th anniversary of US independence. After the work, the pool developed its worst algae bloom in years, turning into what critics have called a swampy mess. Trump has blamed ‘leftist’ vandals for the spectacle, despite photographs of National Park Service staff battling the algae after his directive.
Put that alongside the shredded White House South Lawn and the fractious lunch with Cassidy, and you get a presidency that sometimes feels like a running argument with reality itself. Whether Wolff’s ‘crazy uncle’ frame is fair, politically smart, or wildly irresponsible is another debate. What is striking is how many people in Trump’s orbit, on his own side of the aisle, now speak about him as if the label is at least half‑true, even if they only say it off the record.
The question, as ever with Donald Trump, is not whether people are talking. It is whether anyone is actually prepared to do something about it.
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