Author Michael Wolff claims former president Donald Trump and his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, have effectively been running the country for the last several years.
Which is certainly not a good thing, according to Wolff, given that Trump is living "in the land of absurdity" and Giuliani is "most of the time, frankly, drunk."
"Rudy or the president, in my opinion, neither are in control of their faculties," Wolff told CNN's New Day on Tuesday morning in an interview about his new book, "Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency."
Wolff recounted how when he went to Mar-a-Lago to interview Trump for the book, he decided to accept the former president's false claims of election fraud as a premise, so that he wouldn't get cut off. However, when he asked the former president to explain how the election was stolen, "He was entirely unable to do this."
"He just sort of fell back on this weird math that he has," Wolff said. "What you find yourself in is a conversation with someone who lives in a separate reality. Nothing about what he says is subscribed to by anybody around him, is believed by anyone who knows anything, is trusted by anyone who has literally spent time with him, his closest advisers.
"Within days of November 3, he is absolutely alone, and he is fighting this effort to overturn this election, which would be one of the biggest legal efforts in the history of American jurisprudence, which is just him and Rudy Giuliani, who is most of the time, frankly, drunk," Wolff added. "So, that's what going on here. We're not in the land of a new despot of American politics going in some horrible direction. We're in the land of absurdity."
Wolff added while some have tried to pin the failures of Trump's administration on Giuliani, as the "toxic center," it was in fact "Rudy plus the president."
"It's these two men, both of them in their own way, having departed reality, who have been at the center of this country for the last four years," Wolff said.
Asked what he think drives Giuliani, Wolff responded: "To be at the center of attention. This is a man who can't stand the fact that he was pushed out, that he's a non-player, over the hill, he didn't become president, his career petered out, and because of this he was willing to do anything, willing to say anything. The secret of getting along with Donald Trump — it's a very simple secret — is merely saying what he wants you to say. If you do that, he embraces you.
"Trump would go around saying, 'Rudy is drunk. Rudy falls asleep. Rudy should be put out to pasture,'" Wolff continued. "But it doesn't make any difference, because if Rudy was the only person — and in many cases he was — the only person saying what the president wanted to hear, he's back in, he's running the show."
Watch it below.
Michael Wolf on New Day www.youtube.com