Of all the questions Donald Trump’s biographer gets asked about the president, one refuses to die.
“I get this question all the time,” Michael Wolff said on the Inside Trump’s Head podcast. “It’s asked always in a sincere way. People want to know: Does Donald Trump wear diapers?”
The author, whom Trump granted access to the White House during the opening months of his first term, added that the follow-up question is, “When you are around Donald Trump, is there a smell?”
“And again, this is asked not in a spirit of mockery, but in a spirit of everyone kind of believes this to be true,” he told co-host Joanna Coles.
After Trump’s 35-year-old assistant, Natalie Harp, was spotted several times over the weekend with a mysterious red bag, some online suggested she was carrying his diaper bag.
Wolff, however, noted that there is “no basis” and “no evidence” for the rumor, as far as he was aware—even if there are obvious reasons why such speculation might take root around a “three-hundred-pound man who stuffs... this grotesque diet into himself.”
“I have not been... in proximity to Donald Trump since the campaign, so slightly less than two years, so I don’t know what’s happened and what might have happened in two years,” he said. “But certainly up until that point, the last time I was with Donald Trump... there was no odor... that surrounded him.”
Wolff said that Trump, the oldest person ever inaugurated as president, “looks terrible” and yet remains “the most dominant presence in the world.”
“He... has effectively dominated presidential politics for 10 years. I mean... it’s an extraordinary accomplishment, and I think people look at this guy and say there are laws of nature... which somehow appear not to apply to him—so there must be a vulnerability.”
The Trump biographer, who wrote the 2018 best-seller Fire and Fury based on his time in the White House during the first Trump administration, said the diaper speculation is part of the broader scrutiny of the president’s fitness for office as the years catch up with him.
The Daily Beast has long chronicled the president’s mounting health issues, including his bruised hand, bulging cankles, and the many instances in which he has fallen asleep during public events.
Still, Trump himself repeatedly insists he is in great shape, and often brags about “acing” cognitive tests, seemingly unaware that they are in fact screening tests for dementia.
When reached for comment, the president’s communications director Steven Cheung sent the Daily Beast a recycled statement: “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.”
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