Haberman and Swan react to Trump's attacks on them ahead of damning book, 'Regime Change'

[0:00] Maggie Haverman, Jonathan Swan, now colleagues at the New York Times have teamed up to deliver [0:05] the most important look inside the Trump White House in the second term under the title [0:10] Regime Change Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. [0:15] They conducted over a thousand interviews for this book with Donald Trump granting them [0:21] an exclusive interview at the very last minute in March of this year as the book was headed [0:27] to publication. The interview was on a Monday in March. And three days before welcoming them [0:36] into the Oval Office, Donald Trump posted this on social media. [0:43] Maggie Haverman, just another sleazebag writer for the failing New York Times, insists on writing [0:50] false stories about me even though she fully knows and understands that the exact opposite [0:56] of anything she says is usually the truth. In any event, I'm thinking of adding [1:00] Maggot and some of her associates into my Florida-based lawsuit against the Times, which very happily [1:07] seems to be proceeding nicely. Thank you for your attention to this matter. And so how were these [1:14] two reporters greeted in the Oval Office just three days after Donald Trump spewed that vile poison [1:23] at Maggie Haverman? Did he use that horrible nickname? Did he call her a sleazebag? No. Trump entered the [1:33] Oval Office from the corridor connected to his private dining room. He was in smiling salesman mode. [1:40] Nice to see you, he said, gesturing for us all to sit down opposite him at the desk. It was the 17th [1:48] day of his war with Iran. 13 American service members had already been killed and more than 200 had been [1:55] wounded. Thousands of Iranians were dead, including the Ayatollah Ali Khomeini. The Pentagon had already [2:01] spent more than $15 billion, and the Strait of Hormuz was largely closed, sending global oil prices [2:06] surging. The day before, Trump had made a demand for an international coalition of warships to secure [2:11] the water waterway, but few nations seemed interested in helping. This was hardly surprising. Trump had spent [2:17] the previous year mocking NATO, bypassing the United Nations, and making clear that alliances were, [2:22] in his view, either protection rackets or obstacles. The nations he was now calling on for help were the [2:28] same ones he had bullied with tariffs, threatened with territorial claims, and cut out of major [2:34] decisions like the one he had just made to wage war against Iran. As he greeted us, the war seemed [2:42] the furthest thing from Trump's mind. On the Resolute Desk, instead of a map of the Middle East, were [2:47] printouts of maple trees. I'm ordering trees for the White House, Trump told us. I know how to buy good [2:54] trees. Maples. Trump held out another printout. The headlines screamed, 339 billion all-time views of [3:03] Trump TikToks. Can you believe it? The president asked us. Then Trump showed us two final printouts, [3:09] rendering from different angles of the grand ballroom he was building on the White House grounds. He was in a [3:16] convivial mood. The structure would have 10 columns on one facade, he said, modeled on the Roman style, [3:22] and the other side would be inspired by Athens. He noted with evidence satisfaction that the columns [3:27] were larger than those of the Supreme Court. Behind the scenes, some of his aides had told us they [3:33] wished Trump was more anxious about the dangers he was courting and about his plunging poll numbers. [3:39] The president's pollster, Tony Fabrizio, summarized findings from two nights of focus groups conducted [3:44] earlier in March. The first fell on the very same day we sat looking at Trump's maple tree printouts in the [3:51] Oval Office. The results were bracing. The war in Iran was unpopular, poorly understood, [3:56] and seen as a broken campaign promise that was distracting the president from the economy [4:01] and health care. The military action lacked a clear rationale and voters saw negative economic [4:07] consequences downstream of the conflict, compounding the affordability crisis that was already their top [4:13] concern about the Trump presidency. Perhaps most distressing for the Trump team, the Epstein files [4:19] came up consistently in focus groups and were a real negative with some of these voters. But Trump [4:27] was uninterested in such feedback to the extent he still cared about polling at all. He was seeing far [4:33] fewer polls than during his first term. His advisers knew he was not receptive to being briefed on harsh [4:39] realities. In his second term, unlike his first, he was willing to take breathtaking risks, risks that could [4:46] throw not only his presidency but the Republican Party and the entire world into chaos and carnage. More [4:52] than ever before as president, he was operating on pure gut instinct. It would take a combination of mind [4:58] reader and psychologist to explain fully why Trump was willing to gamble so much more recklessly now. [5:06] There were obvious theories. He was term limited and no longer had to worry about reelection. He had immunity [5:11] confirmed by the Supreme Court and no longer had to worry about prosecutions. He was more [5:15] confident in his instincts. He had already served a presidential term and had felt vindicated so often. And [5:21] there was the fact that he was a walking moral hazard, rarely saddled for long with the costs or [5:28] consequences of his risk taking and rule breaking. Now was his moment to try things like military adventures and [5:36] overthrowing the global trade system. Joining us now, New York Times Pulitzer Prize winning correspondent [5:43] Maggie Haberman and her co-author, New York Times reporter Jonathan Swan, whose new book is Regime Change [5:48] Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. Maggie, I have to begin with you. And what is going on [5:56] with you and Donald Trump? The world wonders about this because we've seen for years these vicious and [6:04] that last. I apologize for reading that one, but I had to set that stage for our audience. The [6:09] viciousness of that three days before you walk into the Oval Office. Did you already have the Oval Office [6:16] appointment booked when he wrote that? We did. And it was actually the first time that there had been one [6:22] of those in some time. And thank you again for having us, Lawrence, and talking about the reporting for [6:26] this book, which we really broke ourselves working on and are quite proud of. The only way that I can describe [6:33] that action is a hip check right ahead of this interview, he was essentially trying to lay down [6:39] a marker. Some people told us that people we had fact checked different material with had gotten him [6:45] spun up and in a heated mood about what he might get asked about. And so he was laying down a warning [6:50] flag. And we have we've both been on the receiving end of attacks from him. He is, in my view, a subject I [6:57] cover. You know, we have spoken to him in the course of our daily reporting during news events and at [7:06] either press conferences or on Air Force One or so forth. But we have actually spent very little time [7:13] talking directly to him during this presidency. And that is a choice that we have made [7:19] for a variety of reasons. But he has a specific fascination with the New York Times. And you know [7:24] that we've seen it over and over again. And I think just in his mind, he associates me with it. But [7:30] for whatever reason, you know, he never totally closes the door with anybody. And for our purposes, [7:37] we had fact checking questions we needed to ask him and we needed to give him an opportunity to [7:41] respond to. But we did not want it to be sort of open mic night in that kind of an interview where [7:47] he was just going to pontificate. We asked a series of detailed questions and and he answered most of [7:53] them. So when you started at the New York Post, what was your first interaction with Donald Trump [7:58] as a reporter? Yeah, I've actually tried remembering my first one. I mean, the first clip that I have [8:06] a byline on where he's quoted. I don't think it was me who spoke to him. I think it was there were [8:11] three other names on the story. And it was after a Swiss Air plane crash. And he told whoever it was [8:18] among us that had spoken to him that he had just gotten off the phone with one of the people who had [8:23] been identified as having been killed in this crash. And it was I think it was a Swiss watchmaker or [8:30] something. And he said that he was he was just about to start doing a product line with this person. [8:35] Um, I don't know whether that was true. It's obviously can't be verified. Uh, but he was in [8:41] the ether. We you know, he did I was covering the rebuilding at the World Trade Center. And he did this [8:45] plan about how he would unveiled something how he was going to rebuild it exactly like it was he did [8:49] not own anything connected to the the the site, but he did want to be associated with it. Um, when I [8:57] started covering him most rigorously was in 2011, very end of 2010 and beginning of 2011, [9:04] when he was looking at running for president. And that was the year that he started talking about [9:09] birtherism, uh, in the middle of this, this proto campaign or pseudo campaign. And he watched his [9:15] poll numbers take off. And, uh, it's and the year later was the first time that he ever attacked me [9:21] on Twitter. It's just what he does. So it's, it's been a long, very similar ride, Lawrence. But I will [9:27] tell you that I did a piece with Ben Smith when I was at Politico in 2011 about what Trump was doing [9:34] and whether he was serious and whether he might run. And so much of that piece could have run at [9:38] any point from 2011 until 2020. And one of the things that we talk about in this book is, uh, [9:44] how much of this term has become the result of hubris of his belief that he can get through [9:51] any situation because he has before. But what you're seeing right now, particularly with Iran, [9:56] is that he has a, a limited number of, of, of tricks, right? He has a limited number of tools [10:02] in this kit and it's coming up against reality and the limits of what he can bend it to. [10:08] Uh, Jonathan, where were you when you read that social, that true social thing on Friday [10:16] about Maggie? And what did you feel when you were reading that? [10:19] He's done it so much that we were both expecting something. We knew something was going to come [10:28] before the interview. There was no way. I mean, firstly, is it, is it at the point where you laugh [10:32] at this? Is there any sting in it when you read it? I mean, the words are so ugly. [10:37] I, he's been calling me maggot since, uh, my last book came out. I mean, literally since it actually [10:44] hadn't published yet. Um, and so it's been like half a dozen times or something like that. I mean, [10:50] you know, it's, you get a flurry of texts of people saying, did you see this? And yes, [10:55] I saw it. Cause I get alerts for, and you get a lot of threats. You do. I mean, [10:59] after I interviewed him in 2020, it was, you know, an inundation. We don't talk about it publicly [11:04] cause you don't want to encourage people, but you know, we've had, we've had to deal with that. [11:10] There's, there's no question about it.