Donald Trump’s Republican allies are already inching away from him, and none more visibly than the sitting vice president, according to the author who chronicled the earliest chaos inside Trump’s White House. On the “Inside Trump’s Head” podcast, released Monday, biographer Michael Wolff described Trump as caught between two pressures: an opposition-controlled Congress and Republican presidential hopefuls trying to distinguish themselves from him ahead of 2028.

Wolff told co-host Joanna Coles that the 80-year-old president faces a pair of unforgiving realities once the November midterms are behind him. Democrats are expected to reclaim control of the House, a shift Wolff predicted would turn the legislative branch into a daily source of misery for the White House.

Congress, he said, will become “an incredible noose around his neck, a burden on his shoulders.” According to Wolff, Democrats will attempt to frustrate and humiliate Trump at every opportunity, though he acknowledged such tactics may backfire as they have before.

A Party Drifting Away

The more surprising threat, in Wolff’s telling, comes from inside Trump’s own coalition. He pointed to the Save America Act, legislation the president has pushed hard, as evidence that Republicans are no longer reflexively bending to his will. Despite holding majorities in both chambers of Congress, the party has so far declined to pass the measure, leaving Trump visibly frustrated.

Wolff framed the stalemate as a signal of a broader retreat. Trump’s own party, he said, is beginning to move “further and further away from him,” and that drift is already underway. Lawmakers keep telling the president they cannot deliver the bill, Wolff said, calling it a clear rebuff regardless of the stated reasons.

The comment landed against a backdrop of open grumbling among Trump loyalists over Congress heading into recess without acting on his priorities — the kind of friction that tends to widen, not shrink, as a president’s clock runs down.

Vance and the 2028 Calculation

Wolff reserved his sharpest observation for Vice President JD Vance, 41, whom he cast as the most conspicuous example of a Republican positioning for life after Trump. Vance, he argued, is not merely hedging but actively separating himself from the president as the 2028 presidential race takes shape.

The evidence, Wolff said, came from Vance’s recent appearance on podcaster Joe Rogan’s show. On that program, Vance said the administration had been “guilty” of mismanaging the Jeffrey Epstein files controversy, breaking with a White House that has struggled to contain the fallout.

Wolff described Vance as “basically publicly proclaiming his distance from Donald Trump” in the interview. Wolff predicted the maneuver would become a template. Every serious 2028 contender, he suggested, will eventually try to carve out space from the president, whether they admit it or not.

To sharpen the point, Wolff reached back to the last presidential cycle. He recalled that after President Joe Biden abandoned his reelection bid in 2024, advisers pressed then-Vice President Kamala Harris to put more distance between herself and the outgoing president — advice she largely ignored. Vance, in Wolff’s reading, is doing the opposite, and doing it early.

The Numbers Behind the Retreat

Wolff argued that the political math gives ambitious Republicans every incentive to keep their distance. He cited Trump’s approval rating of 37 percent, alongside public disapproval of his management of the economy and the Iran conflict, as conditions that make loyalty a liability rather than an asset for anyone eyeing the next race.

White House representatives did not provide an immediate response when asked to comment on Wolff’s latest claims. It has, however, made no secret of its contempt for the author. White House Communications Director Steven Cheung has previously dismissed Wolff as a fraud and accused him of fabricating stories, language the administration has deployed repeatedly to blunt his reporting.

That hostility is nothing new. Wolff first drew the administration’s fury with “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” a 2018 book in which staffers reportedly likened the president to a child. In an interview at the time, Wolff said aides described Trump as someone who “does not read, does not listen.” He also told PBS News that people closest to the president were “afraid” — for their careers and for the country.

The book was branded “trashy tabloid fiction” by then-White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, and Trump’s attorney Charles Harder demanded its publication be halted. It topped best-seller charts anyway. Before turning his attention to Trump, Wolff had written for New York magazine and Vanity Fair and produced a 2008 biography of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, “The Man Who Owns the News.”

Whether Wolff’s forecast proves prescient or, as the White House would have it, another product of his imagination, the underlying tension he describes is real enough. A president in the final stretch of his term, an emboldened opposition and a successor-in-waiting testing his own footing — those pressures rarely wait for a biographer to name them. New episodes of the podcast, hosted by Wolff and Coles, drop every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday evening on YouTube and every Wednesday, Friday and Sunday morning on other podcast platforms.