A US journalist and biographer who had unprecedented access to Donald Trump in the early 2000s says the US President is "the luckiest man on the face of the earth".
Timothy O'Brien spoke to The AM Show on Friday just after Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani told reporters the campaign had evidence of voter fraud in the US election.
The incumbent President has been fighting to prove he is the rightful winner of the November 3 election, with legal action launched across the United States.
On Friday, O'Brien, who is the author of 2005 book 'TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald', said Trump has a "strange belief that he knows almost everything about any subject that's put in front of him".
"In fact most of the time what's going on in his mind is he's thinking about golf, he's thinking about food, he's thinking about money, he's thinking about sex, and he thinks about very little apart from that."
O'Brien said he believes Trump has always had "rings around him" which protect him from the consequences of his mistakes, and normally allow him to get away with things.
"He was born into a wealthy family and his father's wealth gave him cover for his ineptitude as a student, then for a number of disasters including a brush with bankruptcy when he was a businessman. Then he became a celebrity and he got this halo of stardom around him which allowed him to engage in predatory behaviour...
"Then he becomes the President of the United States and he gets all of these series of legal protections which allowed him to trample some of the guidelines of the constitutions which weren't written into stone... And now he's waging a war on the process of the US election simply because he can.
"I think one of the lessons from Donald Trump's life is he is the luckiest man on the face of the earth. Although he has been running probably the longest con in modern history, he's been protected from the consequences of that for quite some time."
He told The AM Show he believes Trump believes more in "his own performance art" than telling the truth because "he wants the world to believe whatever he believes about himself".
"He's an emotionally and psychologically troubled man who doesn't have the normal remorse or regret that normal people do about lying or exaggerating or spinning reality in his own favour," O'Brien said.
"It's disastrously troubling in a leader but for his own needs and devices, it works. It's why he's been a survivor for so long, a lot of bullets bounce off his back."
However O'Brien admitted Trump appeals to a lot of US voters.
"I was surprised when he became President because he doesn't have the ability, the discipline, the strategic thinking, the intelligence or the selflessness to become a good leader," he said.
"But we also have to remember he is a reflection of the needs and interests of a lot of voters in the United States and a lot of unsettled problems in the US economy around income equality, the racial divisions that still haunt the United States...He is the culmination of a lot of very intense social processes."
He admitted Trump is a good communicator, and understands how to get his messages across to his audience.
"The strange thing about Trump is he is probably the most transparent President of the modern presidency because he is on Twitter non-stop because he likes to be in front of the media non-stop, he gives briefings more regularly than other presidents. So, to a certain extent, what you see is what you get."
