Geoff Bennett:
For one of the most revealing looks to date inside the second Trump White House, we turn now to a new book by veteran reporters, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.
It’s called “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.”
And Amna Nawaz spoke recently with its authors.
She started by asking Haberman why those close to the president were willing to speak with her and Swan and what those sources wanted readers to understand.
Maggie Haberman, Co-Author, “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump”: So I can’t speak to what people’s motives are, but I will say that a number of people took risks to try to help us get reporting accurate, and we want to be very careful here.
I think part of why this book is resonating with people, and we have been very, very gratified by the interest in it, is because there has been so little inside-the-room reporting in this administration. It is really hard to get the level of detail that we got. It is really hard to get inside these rooms.
It is really hard to check and recheck and make sure that you’re confident in the scenes that we are describing. And it is one of the many ways in which this term is just unrecognizable to Trump’s first term. And for in term one, Jonathan has this line about walking around with a slop bucket to people receiving their leaks here and there.
Amna Nawaz:
Yes.
Maggie Haberman:
Because it was just constant in fighting. Everybody was at each other’s throats. Trump was new to Washington, didn’t know most of his government.
This is a very different White House. It is a very different administration. Loyalty is the premier characteristic that they looked for in the transition.
And we tried to show exactly how this government is being run.
Amna Nawaz:
And, Jonathan, the use of the word regime in this case, that’s one we usually use when we’re talking about foreign governments, one I have used a lot as a foreign correspondent previously.
You talk about the remaking of the presidency under this presidency of Donald Trump. Tell us about that.
Jonathan Swan, Co-Author, “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump”: So we actually came up with the title for the book, regime change before Trump launched his regime change operation in Venezuela, before they started what looked like a regime change war in Iran. Didn’t turn out to be.
It occurred to Maggie and I a few months into covering this second term that, A, it was, as Maggie said, unrecognizable from the first term. But, B, it was also unrecognizable from any American presidency in our lifetime and, in some respects, from any American presidency full stop in the way that he was using power.
So it occurred to us that we were covering a form of regime change in this country, in the United States.
Amna Nawaz:
Maggie, you talk about the difference between the first Trump presidency and the second.
And I recall in the first all the conversations about the adults in the room, some of the moderating forces who would sometimes restrain the president’s impulses. This time, you document and report times in which there are people in the room who seem to be pushing him even further, like trying to get him to suspend habeas corpus, for example.
What’s happening in the room now? Who are the moderating forces, if there are any?
Maggie Haberman:
It’s a totally different presidency.
And one thing we wanted to show in this book is how this is a government that is basically being run by a half-a-dozen people who are in these meetings with Trump, give or take a few, depending on the subject matter. But it is a tiny, tiny group of people who are all around Trump.
And if you are at agencies across this government, if you are at the State Department, if you are at the Pentagon, if you are at the CIA, and a number of others, if you are not in the room, you often have no idea what’s going on because the decisions are being made that quickly.
Jonathan Swan:
We both felt pretty strongly that last year we were living through the most consequential year of an American presidency in our lifetime.
And we were trying to capture that history while memories were fresh. And to help people understand, people who are curious about how their country is being run, the purpose of this book is to help pull back the curtain a little bit and to help people understand how decisions are being made.
Amna Nawaz:
There is the Epstein issue, Maggie, which continues to bedevil this White House, and you document how they use the Situation Room, which has been used in President Obama’s term to monitor the bin Laden raid, for example, that is where his top team gathers to try to figure out what to do about this.
What does that say to you about how they’re looking at this issue even now?
Maggie Haberman:
So, a couple of things. It has been just working backwards.
Among the documents that we got our hands on in reporting this book were secret polling memos within the Trump team, political team. They get circulated to about a half-dozen to a dozen people. What they found in those focus groups was that voters were proactively talking about Epstein.
So it has broken through to a degree that this administration absolutely never, or at least most members of this administration didn’t think that it would. But it also was the moment, and we tried to lay this out in the book, when you could start to see Trump losing political altitude with his own base and credibility with his own base last summer, because he wanted nothing to do with Epstein.
There were a number of people in the MAGA movement who had been very vocal about releasing all files related to Jeffrey Epstein. The administration had a president who just wanted the issue to go away. And they found themselves in a series of meetings in the Situation Room.
Now, as you say, this is a place where national security decisions, including in this administration, get made. But, here, it turned into a crisis comms center for one specific issue, which was get us out from under this matter that was beginning to consume them. And we got deep inside some of these meetings.
The president was not part of them, but some members of these meetings would later say that it was just surreal to be discussing some aspects of the Epstein files in this room. And it paralyzed that administration almost as much as the special counsel investigation into Russia did years earlier in terms one, and we tried to lay that out.
Amna Nawaz:
Jonathan, what should we take away about the role of Vice President Vance so far? Because you tell the story in the book about how he does challenge the group on how they should approach the Epstein issue. He speaks out against the potential for war against Iran, but says he will support the president.
You also write:
“He knew the next four years came down to one thing, securing Trump’s blessing as his successor.”
What should we take away from the book about him?
Jonathan Swan:
Well, it’s a nuanced picture, right? It’s not sort of black and white.
What’s true about Vance is, he is ideologically more consistent than Trump and feels more passionately about the MAGA issues than Donald Trump himself does. He’s far more anti-interventionist than Donald Trump. He was the only one in our reporting that in the room with Trump made a vocal case against the Iran war.
There were others on the team — in fact, almost everyone had some level of skepticism about this operation. But Vance was the one who took it to Trump directly. And it cost him. It irritated Trump.
Amna Nawaz:
You have probably seen the president has reacted to the book. He’s come after you and the book, saying…
Jonathan Swan:
We didn’t see that. What happened?
Amna Nawaz:
… it’s mostly made up, is his quote.
And, Maggie, specifically about you, he calls you “a third-rate writer and intellect who made a first-rate income because of your favorite president, me,” as he writes. And we should point out you have covered Donald Trump for years, going back to very early days in New York.
What’s your response to that? And also that man that you covered back then, did you see him becoming the president he is today?
Maggie Haberman:
That’s a tricky question, because there’s a difference between did I see him becoming president and did I see him becoming this version of the president?
Once he had become president, it was actually pretty easy to see him becoming this version of the president, if the conditions allowed. In terms of the response, he’s attacked both of us before. It’s nothing new, and it doesn’t impact our reporting. So…
Amna Nawaz:
Jonathan, what should people take away from year one in terms of what it means for the remainder of the presidency?
Jonathan Swan:
Well, we have seen Trump show people that the checks and balances that we thought existed in this system in many cases don’t actually exist. In many cases, they’re not laws. They’re norms.
And when you have a president who’s willing to blow through them, and even sometimes when there are laws, one thing that people others much better than us have documented in this area, they have ignored tons of legal rulings when it comes to immigration at the lower court level.
They haven’t defied the Supreme Court yet, but this is an administration that is operating without much restraint and a president that is trying to make his mark on the world. So I think, look, we don’t want to start speculating, but it’s pretty clear that he has designs on regime change in Cuba.
I don’t think he’s going to retire quietly into the night and become a lame-duck. I think Donald Trump is going to be very, very active through the last 2.5 years of his presidency.
Maggie Haberman:
And after.
Jonathan Swan:
Yes, I agree with that.
Maggie Haberman:
He’s not ceding the stage and going off to write books and give speeches. Maybe he will give speeches, but he’s not going to disappear.
Amna Nawaz:
The book is “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” the authors, Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman.
Thank you so much to you both.
Jonathan Swan:
Thanks for having us.
Maggie Haberman:
Thank you.
