Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan Give Inside Look At Trump's 2nd Term In New Book — The View

[0:00] Two New York Times journalists who have spent the last decade covering you-know-who [0:04] are giving you a riveting behind-closed-doors look at his second term. [0:09] And baby, when you talk about jaw-dropping, jaw-dropping. [0:15] In their new book, Regime Change. [0:17] See, regime change. I did say that. [0:20] Please welcome co-authors Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swann. [0:25] First of all, welcome back, Maggie. [0:33] And Jonathan, welcome to the show. [0:34] We mentioned both of you spent years reporting on him. [0:38] But in this book, you zero in on his return to power for 2.0. [0:47] When you put the book together and you read it without all the hoopla and the craziness, [0:56] did your jaw drop open when you realized all the stuff that you all had collected [1:00] and then put it in one place? [1:02] Because I was like, what? [1:03] I was like, I could not catch my breath. [1:09] Thank you for that. [1:10] You're welcome. [1:11] This book nearly killed us to do, seriously. [1:14] I mean, it was incredibly exhausting. [1:17] And there is a reason that you have not seen this much inside the room reporting this time [1:22] around, you know, you had to really be devoid of eyes and ears to not have some piece of news in term one. [1:28] Yeah. [1:29] This is not 2017. [1:30] This is not 2020. [1:32] It is a much more controlled White House. [1:35] They actually are pretty good at keeping secrets when they want to. [1:38] So this took us a really, really long time. [1:41] We're reintroducing ourselves to our families. [1:44] And so when we look at it all in one place, we were very proud of this work. [1:50] We did believe that we gave people an understanding of how their government functions. [1:57] Or doesn't. [1:58] And what that could mean for the next few years. [2:02] Well, I have worked with the both of you for over a decade. [2:04] And when I'd get a call, Maggie or Jonathan are working on a story. [2:07] As a communications staffer, a chill goes down your spine. [2:09] You would often know things I didn't even have access to and wasn't privy to yet. [2:13] So the sourcing in this book is incredible. [2:15] Thousands of interviews with senior officials. [2:17] But the epilogue got me at the end. [2:19] So in March, you sat down with the president and interviewed him a number of the times you talked to him. [2:23] Just 17 days into the war with Iran. [2:26] And he, you had about an hour long meeting in the Oval Office. [2:29] And it turned into kind of a stunning conversation about how he views himself. [2:33] Can you tell us about that? [2:35] I've had a few encounters with Donald Trump over the years. [2:39] This was the most astonishing. [2:43] We're sitting across the table from him in the Oval Office. [2:47] It's the 17th day of the war with Iran. [2:49] He has not a map of the Middle East, but photographs of maple trees on the table. [2:55] And he says, you know, I'm buying maple trees for the White House and what have you. [2:59] As one does. [3:00] As one does. [3:01] And then we asked him a question. [3:03] He had told Tucker Carlson, we had this in our reporting earlier in 2025, that he was the most powerful American president there ever has been. [3:12] We asked him about that. [3:13] And he's got this young woman who works for him called Natalie Harp. [3:18] They call her the human printer because she just prints. [3:20] So he's Natalie, Natalie, go fetch me the thing. [3:23] And she runs off. [3:24] And in about a minute, she's back with these printouts. [3:27] And he hands them to us. [3:28] And he's like watching us while we're reading them. [3:31] And he says, this is from a historian. [3:32] And the document compares him favorably in terms of his power to Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Napoleon, Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, the Caesars. [3:46] And he thought that was a good thing among the top ten. [3:49] There was no moral dimension to it. [3:51] It was just about the metric of raw power. [3:53] And he was sitting there. [3:55] He said, Napoleon, that's very interesting. [3:58] Hitler, Mao, Stalin. [3:59] And we were sort of sitting there going, OK, it turned out the historian was actually a former golf caddy for Gary Player. [4:08] Not a historian. [4:09] But it was illuminating in a different way, which is that Donald Trump in this term is taking these giant risks that he didn't take in term one. [4:18] He wouldn't have gone to war in Iran, given the same circumstance. [4:22] He wouldn't have gone in and snatched a sovereign leader out of his bedroom in his pajamas like he did in Venezuela, start a trade war with the whole world. [4:29] He, as he made clear to us, is trying to be a Napoleonic type of figure, a capital G, great man figure of this era. [4:39] That's his mindset for this term. [4:41] I think it's called megalomania, I believe, is the diagnosis. [4:45] I've read about that. [4:45] He also seems hyper-focused on his renovation projects. [4:50] So in the book, you dig into this, which is delightful. [4:54] Not only do you claim the president engaged in design wars with Melania, they're arguing about design. [5:01] OK. [5:01] She was in absentia. [5:02] He was just taking items from the center hall in the residence that she had wanted, left there, according to our reporting, and moving them either to the Oval or to his bedroom. [5:13] I see. [5:13] But he also, and this is disgusting, he has a carpeted bathroom. [5:17] Now, that is a germ magnet. [5:20] That is disgusting. [5:22] He's even been caught doing some of his decorating by hand. [5:26] Explain that. [5:28] Caroline Levitt, the White House press secretary, walked into the Oval Office one morning last year and found the president holding a tube of superglue. [5:36] And affixing one of those gold items to the mantle of the fireplace in the Oval Office. [5:47] As one does. [5:49] So he hung those himself. [5:50] Does he have Play-Doh also? [5:53] This didn't make it into the book, but we were told that they can't use the fireplace now. [6:00] Because if you turn it on, it'll be interesting. [6:03] It'll catch on fire. [6:04] Because of the glue? [6:06] And glue. [6:07] And whatever else. [6:08] But yeah. [6:08] So he's very into his renovation projects. [6:11] Once he sort of covered every aspect of the Oval Office, he started gluing gold challenge coins to various places. [6:18] We had heard about this right before we went in to see him for this meeting in March. [6:22] And we looked up and there they were on the wall. [6:26] But he does, I mean, if you sort of had a pie chart of Donald Trump's mind, a pretty substantial slice is devoted to interior decoration. [6:36] I mean, that's true. [6:37] When we walk into the Oval Office, he has the plans of the ballroom. [6:39] He wants us to see them. [6:41] We have a scene in the book where he's in the Oval Office and he calls Emmanuel Macron, the president of France. [6:48] And he says, Emmanuel, tell me about your arch. [6:51] And it's the Arc de Triomphe he's asking about. [6:54] And he's asking about it. [6:55] He goes, do people jump off it? [6:56] Is there a viewing platform? [6:58] And he's really just asking about, because he's building his own. [7:02] And they call it in the White House, they call it the Arc de Trump. [7:04] But he's truly, he's building this in Washington, D.C. [7:07] Why doesn't he build it in Florida? [7:09] Yeah. [7:09] It's just, he's building something else in Florida. [7:12] I'm sure he's building stuff there, too. [7:14] He's building his library in Florida. [7:16] I echo what Whoopi said and all of my co-hosts. [7:20] This book is just phenomenal. [7:22] It's so well reported. [7:23] And, Jonathan, you know I've always, I've been a fan for so long. [7:26] But you, the part of the book where you explain in detail the administration's concerns about the Epstein files. [7:32] And crisis meetings held in the Situation Room, which is supposedly the most secure location in the United States, reserved for meetings concerning national security. [7:45] The White House is reportedly looking for leakers and are concerned that there are audio tapes of the meetings inside the Situation Room. [7:52] Now, we have Vice President Vance here on our show. [7:55] And I asked him about the meetings in the Situation Room and intimated that there may be tapes. [8:01] And he did not appear to refute that when I asked him. [8:05] What stands out to you in terms of the importance of what you uncovered about those meetings and the Epstein files? [8:13] So, without getting into sourcing, obviously, I would note that, and we watched the Vice President on the show, that he really didn't dispute the reporting and the accuracy of what we described in these meetings. [8:26] So, the Epstein, the handling of the files, it became this massive self-inflicted wound for this administration. [8:36] There are a number of people, Vance, Dan Bongino, who was the Deputy FBI Director, Kash Patel, who is still the FBI Director, who had spent years in the MAGA media ecosystem saying there is a massive conspiracy. [8:50] There are files of, you know, explaining these rings of pedophiles around Jeffrey Epstein. [8:55] We are going to get to the bottom of it. [8:57] They come into government. [8:59] Pam Bondi has this blunder where she says that, you know, it's sitting on my desk, which indicated a client list existed. [9:05] Right. [9:06] This became a foaming issue among Trump's own base. [9:12] Trump wanted nothing to do with it. [9:14] He didn't want to hear about Epstein. [9:15] He didn't want anyone talking about it with him. [9:17] And he would snap at people. [9:18] Now, you know, Trump had a falling out with Epstein at some point. [9:21] There's various reasons that have been given as to why. [9:24] I'm not sure we will ever really know why. [9:26] But they were clearly close friends for years and years and years. [9:30] Lots of photographs. [9:31] Yes. [9:32] And Trump was mentioned in the New York Times more than 38,000 times. [9:36] Him, his family, my life. [9:37] So, you know, it was pretty awkward. [9:39] Yeah. [9:39] And so he just wanted this to go away. [9:41] Yeah. [9:42] And so in order to get rid of this issue, the FBI and the DOJ put out this memo that had no one's name attached to it, [9:49] saying, we've done this exhaustive search. [9:52] Jeffrey Epstein, you know, died by suicide. [9:55] Case closed. [9:56] Case closed. [9:56] We're not prosecuting anyone. [9:57] That oddly didn't satisfy a base that had been pushed for a while. [10:01] Yeah. [10:01] And so these Situation Room meetings were about not pushing ahead with President Trump's signature legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill, which had just passed. [10:11] And they put all of their political capital on the Hill into doing this. [10:14] But how do we deal with an issue that the president wants to go away in a way that doesn't upset him? [10:20] So we all remember that image of the tech titans flanking President Trump at his inauguration. [10:26] And you write about their efforts to curry favor with Trump after he was reelected. [10:31] You say Jeff Bezos told Trump that the business people at The Washington Post were terrible. [10:36] And Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave the president a very personal letter. [10:41] Can you tell us about that? [10:42] Yeah. [10:43] So, I mean, the Bezos meeting with Trump, it was a dinner. [10:47] And he was trashing The Washington Post as an investment. [10:51] Now, it's a storied newspaper. [10:53] His folks would argue, look, he's made cuts and therefore it's clear he was just talking about the business side. [10:59] It hasn't been profitable for a long time. [11:00] So if he didn't know what he was getting into, it's a bit of a surprise. [11:03] Yeah, it's a newspaper. [11:03] Right, correct. [11:04] And newspapers are vital in a democracy. [11:06] So you either want to commit to them or you don't. [11:08] And we're very lucky to work for a newspaper that does. [11:10] Um, Zuckerberg had a very, very personal meeting with Trump and one with Stephen Miller separately. [11:19] Ugh. [11:19] And he then sent Trump some kind of a, I don't think it was a holiday greeting, but it was like a letter to the president that his child had written for school. [11:29] And it was about welcoming the golden age of America, which is Trump's slogan. [11:33] Had his kids laid a fireplace in there? [11:35] Well, the reason we know about this is Trump was at his golf club showing off the text. [11:44] You won't believe these guys are kissing my, you know what. [11:47] Yeah. [11:47] Um, and look, bees are sucking, and again, this was like relishing the, um, the groveling. [11:54] Yeah. [11:54] As Elon Musk called it, he showed Musk these tests and Musk said it was quote unquote first class groveling. [12:01] It sort of set the stage for what we have seen in terms of a campaign, not just a retribution, but a bullying of various industries. [12:09] And some people are going along quite willingly, but we have seen it with the Smithsonian, and we write about that in detail in the book. [12:15] We have seen it with law firms. [12:17] We have seen it with individuals. [12:18] We have seen it with media. [12:19] We have seen it against this network, other networks. [12:22] And so what that looks like going forward, I'm not sure, but that is a lot of what has characterized the last year and a half. [12:29] And we get into this in detail. [12:30] And very quickly, because we're running out of time, how do you guys see this Trump administration ending? [12:35] Does he annoy a successor? [12:36] Does he go quietly? [12:37] What do you think? [12:39] No, and no, and no, not that we can make a prediction, but very quickly. [12:44] When I look out at the arc of what comes, and you know this, because usually when you are in the middle of a midterm cycle of a lame duck presidency, which is what Trump is, you can see where it's going. [12:55] Can't see this right now, because there are going to be, even if the House flips, we have no reason to believe that this government is going to go along with subpoenas or anything else. [13:04] So we'll see. [13:05] And it all comes down to what does accountability actually look like? [13:09] Right. [13:10] That's right. [13:11] Congress, when it decides not to do accountability, there's not much left, really. [13:15] He has sweeping immunity conferred by the Supreme Court. [13:19] We have reporting in our book that he's been telling people he's going to pardon anyone who came within 250 feet of the Oval Office. [13:26] He varies the distance. [13:27] Sometimes he says 200 feet. [13:29] Sometimes he says 25 feet. [13:30] But there are some number of feet around the Oval Office in which you will receive a pardon. [13:35] So he's acting with impunity for very good reason, for very rational reasons. [13:40] And I think we should mention that Trump has not been accused of any wrongdoing and denies any knowledge of Epstein's alleged crime. [13:47] Yes, that is true. [13:48] And he has said that repeatedly. [13:49] And we have not, we should also make clear that we don't have any reporting to suggest otherwise. [13:56] Yeah. [13:56] But there is the law. [13:57] Don't forget, we have the law. [13:59] And the law has been on our side, as has with the Constitution. [14:02] Never think the Constitution isn't working for us because it's kicking people in their butt. [14:06] But this book, Regime, changes out today. [14:10] Scan the QR code on your screen to purchase a copy. [14:13] Do yourself a favor. [14:14] Get it. [14:15] I'm telling you, you need to get the book. [14:17] It's worth the read. [14:18] It's worth the listen. [14:19] It's worth the read. [14:20] We'll see you later.