Q&A: Maggie Haberman & Jonathan Swan on “Regime Change"

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, in your new book, "Regime Change," you describe President Trump as, quote, "the most consequential and feared president of our lifetimes." Why do you say that? [00:00:30] Speaker 2: It seems pretty indisputable to us as we were reporting out this book that it occurred to us, and this is part of the reason for the title "Regime Change," we're covering a presidency that is completely unrecognizable to term one, but also we can't think of a historical analog of another American president using power this way, expanding power this way, ignoring an extremely pliant branch of Congress, largely ignoring the Senate. And he has used threats and bullying of various industries. He has shown that the post-World War II world order is on its last legs if it's going to survive at all, and we both have a lot of questions about that. So, I can't think of a more consequential and impactful person of the last 20 years. I think he will be, based on everything we know, going forward for many years to come, but anything that I missed there? [00:01:28] Speaker 3: The premise of the title was we, pretty early on covering this second term, felt like we were covering a form of regime change in our own country. You know, we're so used to talking about regime change overseas, and it's sort of written about all the time, you know, usually in the context of should the US be involved in trying to bring about regime change overseas. It's much more uncomfortable and in some ways more challenging to cover it when it's right in front of your face. Maggie laid out in broad strokes, but just to go a little deeper, I mean, when you look at the way he's used power and compare it to his recent predecessors, it's quite striking. So take, for example, foreign policy. You know, when George H.W. Bush went for the first Gulf War, he went through the UN Security Council. There was a vote in Congress, which is, of course, the branch of government under the Constitution that's responsible for declaring war. And then they went to war. When his son took America to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, it went through Congress. Trump didn't even talk to Congress before he took America to war in Iran. He didn't talk to Congress before he authorized the Delta Force to go into Caracas to take a snatched head of state and bring about regime change in Venezuela. He unilaterally started a global trade war. And one thing that we write about in the book that I think is a very important dynamic, is that even when he is checked by the Supreme Court, and that's really the only institution that has shown any ability to check him, it's the only institution that they've really respected. It takes a while. You know, the facts on the ground get changed. And then the court system, which is not built for someone like Donald Trump, who acts so quickly on so many fronts, it's not really built for him. So the trade war is a great example. He used tariff authorities that the Supreme Court deemed illegitimate. But a whole lot of economic turmoil and chaos was unleashed before that process could catch up to Donald Trump. [00:03:44] Speaker 1: So in a sense, though, isn't his actions in his second term a reaction to what he learned in his first term? [00:03:54] Speaker 2: Largely, yeah. I mean, part of what we write about at the beginning of the book, and this became clear to us, I just want to note that, I mean, we started thinking about this book and reporting for this book in 2023. And so at that point, we were in the middle of a primary campaign in which Donald Trump was indicted four times. He was being sued in civil court for fraud by the New York Attorney General, and also by E. Jean Carroll, a New York writer who had accused him of sexual abuse. And he was written off by a lot of his party, except for the most hardened members of the party, who also realized they needed his support in order to win their primaries. And he didn't beg off. He didn't act as if he was a pariah. They were hoping to sort of non-person him. He was kicked off of social media websites. He also was under investigation for the first year of his last term, and in the special counsel investigation that started after he fired the FBI director. And that was a hot stove that he touched, and it did really impact a lot of what he did going forward. Remember, this is somebody who had never run for city council so much as president before. And he wins the first time. And he has a theory of the case in his mind of how executive power works. And it looks much more like a Democratic Party machine and boss in New York City, which is where he learned about power and became this multi-decade student of power than it does what we have seen over many years of checks and balances in the federal government and processes that are supposed to be in place. And what he and a small group of aides, Stephen Miller, who is the most powerful domestic policy advisor that we can think of, arguably, in the last many, many decades, Russ Vogt, who is now the head of the Office of Management and Budget, the Office of Management and Budget, and then a handful of other advisors, they looked for pockets of independence throughout the executive branch that they could eliminate. They learned that they could declare, particularly Stephen Miller on this one, if you declare emergencies, you can unlock sweeping powers and very quickly. And they don't go through a process at an agency. And they learned what, in their minds, they term as loyalty. And that is a really key factor that we write about throughout the book. But Trump was stymied throughout his term, in term one, by a federal bureaucracy that he didn't understand. He was convinced. And sometimes there were, in fact, people trying to slow down actions he was taking. But he also was infuriated by senior level aides like John Kelly or Jim Mattis, who really, really opposed his worldview and believed that the country needed to be protected from Trump. And so all of these lessons, combined with what happened in this interregnum period, inform this presidency that you're seeing now. And I just want to add on to what Jonathan was saying about Congress and not taking any of these policy matters to Congress for a vote. Congress is also supposed to engage in oversight. And this is a Congress that, with very rare exception, Epstein, Jeffrey Epstein, would be an area. The president's own personal money-making would not be. This Congress has generally begged off of performing oversight functions and treats itself as something of an appendage to the executive branch. What did you say about personal money-making? This president and his family members and some members of his administration have made a lot of personal wealth during the course of this presidency. President Trump and his sons and Steve Witkoff and his son, Steve Witkoff being Trump's all-purpose envoy, set up a cryptocurrency company in 2024, which is also unheard of to do in the middle of a campaign. Whenever those conversations actually started, it gets unveiled in the fall of 2024. And then as president, Trump is taking actions that involve regulating that very industry. There was a secret deal that the Wall Street Journal unearthed where foreign nationals from the Gulf nations, one in particular, one in particular, the Emiratis, took a 49% stake in that company a few days before the inauguration. Look, there have been presidential relatives who have made money, obviously, and who have embarrassed White Houses. Hunter Biden, obviously, is a recent example. Roger Clinton comes up. There were various Bush family members who had problems. This is a scale unlike anything we've ever seen. And to listen to Republican lawmakers, you would think it's not happening. [00:08:47] Speaker 1: Is there something illegal going on in your view, Jonathan Swan? [00:08:51] Speaker 3: Well, it's an interesting question because Trump himself was granted sweeping immunity, as all presidents were, with the Supreme Court's immunity ruling in 2024. So, Trump is essentially beyond the reach of the law in terms of actions. I mean, it hasn't been tested, so we don't exactly know what the boundaries of it are, but it's hard to imagine something that he's done so far that would defy the bounds of that ruling. We also have reporting in the book that Donald Trump has told senior advisers in the Oval Office that he's going to pardon anyone who came within 250 feet of the Oval Office. He sometimes says 200 feet, sometimes says 29 feet, some number of feet. So, there's a sense among Trump and his allies and his inner circle that, with a very friendly Justice Department run by Trump's own former personal lawyer, with sweeping immunity from the Supreme Court, with an intention to use the pardon power more expansively, potentially, than any president has ever used it, I don't think that they feel any real concern about illegality. [00:10:09] Speaker 1: What's the role of Boris Epstein? Am I pronouncing that correctly? Epstein, yeah. What's the role of Boris Epstein in President Trump's life? [00:10:18] Speaker 2: It's a great question because, you know, we have a lot of reporting about Boris Epstein in the book, and he is somebody who we have both followed for a really long time. Trump, historically, likes having people around who will fix a problem quickly. Whether that is a government official like Stephen Miller, who says, "I can get this done very fast." Whether it is people who have worked for Trump at his company, who, you know, will go talk to an official who's giving the Trump organization a hard time, or an elected official with whom Trump is engaging on a project. Epstein is Trump's lead personal legal advisor. He is not a government employee, and yet he is at the White House a decent amount, according to our reporting. One of the most interesting scenes in the book that we learned of was Trump as part of his retribution agenda -- and I assume we'll talk about this at another point in this conversation -- but he has a list of people who he believes are his perceived enemies and he wants to use the power of government to go after. A big driving engine of this administration is payback and the feeling that they were prosecuted unfairly, Trump and his advisers, but were recipients of subpoenas and so forth. And, you know, Trump said it himself on the White House lawn, on the North Lawn, "I was the hunted and now I'm the hunter." But there's this remarkable moment where they're in the Oval Office and it's a small group of people, and Boris Epstein is there and Stephen Miller is there. And they're talking about various things and Trump says, they start talking about Chris Krebs, who ran the cyber security agency that oversaw the election safety in 2020, and in Trump's mind his sin was saying the election systems were safe. And Trump can't even remember his name. It's, "Who was that guy?" And so Boris Epstein looks him up and it's Chris Krebs and all of a sudden there's a presidential memoranda just targeting Chris Krebs directly. That Trump reads out during an Oval Office event. And A, that spoke to how sort of ad hoc a lot of this is, but B, it was really representative of this inside-outside game, I shouldn't say game, this inside-outside approach that Trump has in terms of targeting either individuals or industries. Stephen Miller is on the inside. He oversees a tremendous amount of policy, of executive orders, of what ultimately will go through the paper process and then go to Trump's desk. But Boris Epstein handles the outside piece. And Boris Epstein works, at least we demonstrate in one scene here, he can speak for himself about how he would characterize it, works or has worked with Bob Jufra, who is with a storied firm, Sullivan and Cromwell. They're representing Trump in his appeal of his criminal conviction from 2024. And one of the areas where you see this inside-outside factor was early on with these executive orders targeting law firms, which have not fared well under judicial scrutiny. But they did enough damage to these firms, both in terms of PR or their ability to represent clients. And so what we tried reporting in the book was laying out how Trump uses these various levers to wage essentially a bullying campaign, whether it's against people who he doesn't like, whether it is industries like media, ABC News, CBS and others. They have found ways that if there is some kind of government oversight or lever over, you know, educational institutions, Harvard, and again, we lay this out, they're willing to use it and press and squeeze. And so Trump has various mechanisms that he has shown he has no compunction about deploying. [00:14:26] Speaker 1: Well, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, how much time did you spend looking at the legitimacy of some of President Trump's grievances? I mean, a lot of this can go back to Russia, Russia, Russia in 2016, can it? [00:14:40] Speaker 3: Sure. I mean, but when you look at the law firms, for example, that Maggie was just talking about, the grievances are because the law firms hired people like Robert Mueller, who was appointed as special counsel to oversee the Russia investigation, or Mark Pomerantz, who was hired to help investigate Trump in New York. It's people Trump doesn't like. So there's not some sort of great mystery to be discerned here about the selection process of how they went after various law firms. It was law firms either represented people he didn't like, like Jack Smith, who was appointed as a special counsel, special prosecutor to investigate Trump over the classified documents and the January 6 conspiracy, or because they employed people he didn't like. And he used government power to coerce them into making significant pro bono commitments to the government. [00:15:43] Speaker 1: Well, I want to quote from the book about the decision making process, the daily schedule. By midway through the year, a picture was emerging of how the Oval Office operated in Trump's second term. It was of a president spending his days at the Resolute desk in a series of rolling bowl sessions accompanied by a core group of intimates. These were supplemented by a rotating cast of extras. And on any given day, they could be Republican lawmakers, titans of industry, former pro wrestlers, country musicians, golf royals, crypto bros, or friends of felons seeking pardons. They would enter, exit the frame, with some invited to stay for meetings they had no business attending. The conversations ran fast, often straying far from the point or from anything visitors imagined when they arrived at the White House. The president's sentences often began on one topic and ended far away. How does that affect the decision making process in the Oval Office? Well, we write, we write that sort of, it's this very interesting juxtaposition. [00:16:51] Speaker 3: We write that time is a flexible concept in Trump's White House. Previous presidents, George W. Bush being one example, Barack Obama being another, previous presidents used to schedule their time in 10 or 15 minute increments. I mean, that's how organized they were, you know, the adage that a president's most valuable commodity is his time. The Trump White House to the outside looks like this hive of activity, this incredible machine that's just pumping out, you know, activity. But for people who actually go in and see him, it can often seem like he has all the time in the world. And, you know, when we went in, for example, to see him for an interview. [00:17:31] Speaker 1: This is March 16th. March 16th. This year. Perfect example. [00:17:35] Speaker 3: Unhurried. It was the 17th day of the war in Iran. There'd been American casualties. The war was not going so well. You could imagine a president under huge duress and stress and maps and whatever. He was the picture of relaxation. And in fact, when we walked into the Oval Office, on top of the Resolute desk were photographs of maple trees. And he held it up and he said, you know, I'm buying maple trees for the White House. Turns out I'm good at buying trees. Underneath were more pictures of his ballroom, of the columns. He spends very considerable amounts of his time on decoration, design, rebuilding monuments and refurbishing Washington, D.C. The meetings are unstructured and rolling, as we say. There often isn't a sort of delineated endpoint. But there's also something else that's true, which we write in the book, which is for important topics, for things that they actually do want to keep secret, they're very good at keeping secrets. Much better than the first term. And what I think people will understand when they read the book is this is nothing like the first term. This is a country being run by five or six people, a tiny group. And most people in the government, even at a very senior level, at various agencies, State Department, Pentagon, have no earthly idea what's being said in this room and what's being discussed and what's being planned. So we try, I mean, one of the hardest things that we had to accomplish as reporters, you know, for this book was breaking into those rooms and trying to get out that information. Because if this was the first term, it was like anyone could get a leak. It was leaking three, you know, constant stories every day, stream of consciousness. So he now has true loyalists around him. And the leaking is just far less prevalent. [00:19:41] Speaker 1: Well, you've got the core group of Trump intimates, as you say. Susie Wiles, Stephen Miller, Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance, Steve Witkoff, Natalie Harp. Who am I missing on that list? [00:19:54] Speaker 3: Hegseth, Cain, John Ratcliffe. John Ratcliffe. If it's economic matters, you'll get Scott Besant in there. But it doesn't go much beyond that. [00:20:01] Speaker 2: And I'm not even sure that I would call all of the people we just described intimates. You know, Besant, for instance, the Treasury Secretary, and Chris Wright, who Trump, you know, has had -- Energy? Energy Secretary, who Trump has had a lukewarm approach to at best, and emotions about -- they weren't even in these meetings that we describe about the lead-up to the Iran War. The people who would have to manage the fallout of a global energy crisis from this war were not part of the planning meetings. Because this White House is so concerned about leaks. But that's typical of any White House. [00:20:37] Speaker 1: No, it's not. I mean, not like this. Are you kidding me? [00:20:40] Speaker 3: We went to war in Iran. We went to war in Iran, and the Treasury Secretary and the Energy Secretary were not involved in any of the planning meetings to talk about the potential closure of the Strait of Hormuz, to talk about the economic consequences. No, that's not normal. [00:20:53] Speaker 2: The concern about leaks is not unusual. It is the extreme measures that they take to try to avoid them, which is also part of what made reporting this, in addition to the fact that, as Jonathan said, this is not term one, you know, where you had to be, to paraphrase a colleague of ours, you know, absent your senses to not get a story at some point. Because they have set up all of these efforts to try to avoid leaks, this was a really, really, really hard book to report. And we're humble about the fact that there's probably more to learn about certain episodes here, but this was our best attempt. [00:21:27] Speaker 1: Those who knew her well attested that underneath the grandmotherly vibes and reassuring manner was an operator who could so deftly wield a knife that her targets rarely saw it coming. Trump nicknamed her the Ice Maiden. Who are we talking about here? [00:21:45] Speaker 2: That would be Susie Wiles and not much to add to the description we had in the book. One of the interesting things about Susie Wiles is she was with Trump at Trump's lowest point, which was 2021. But he was with her at her lowest point. And I think that gets really missed in terms of understanding the dynamic between them. So in 2018, at Trump's request, Susie Wiles is a longtime Florida operative, lobbyist, very well known, you know, has bipartisan respect and admiration in Florida. She was very involved in Rick Scott's Senate campaign in 2010, which was also the same ticket that Marco Rubio ran on. So this was the rise of the Tea Party. And so she's had a real firsthand look at how the Republican Party has changed over time. She was not somebody who you would organically think about as, you know, a flamethrower, right, of the of the of the of the MAGA variety. But she's a little harder to put in a box than people think. However, just a neat, clean political box. In 2018, at Trump's request, she went to go help Ron DeSantis save what was a flailing gubernatorial campaign. And he won. And he then DeSantis started targeting her, making all kinds of accusations about leaks and money, all of which she denied. But he really DeSantis set out to try to ruin her career, according to our reporting and according to people in Florida. [00:23:20] Speaker 1: What was the issue that they had? [00:23:22] Speaker 2: I don't know that we'll ever totally know the breakdown here, but we know that he accused her of various types of impropriety. I mean, the DeSantis's are also very, very secretive and also very paranoid, at least in our experience of covering them. And I think, frankly, everybody's experience of covering them in Florida. But she did that at Trump's request. And then DeSantis went after Wiles to Trump ahead of his 2020 campaign, saying you shouldn't hire her. So Trump didn't. Some members of Trump's staff protested and he brought her on over DeSantis's objections. He credits Wiles with why he won Florida in 2016 and has for a long time. You know, there's a famous story about, famous in a small circle, about him being pretty abusive to her on one night in October 2016 in front of a whole group of people. And she took it and she didn't flinch in his presence. Part of the whole ice maiden thing. But he stuck by her over DeSantis's objections in 2020. And so in early 2021, when he asked her to run what was this pretty shapeless post-presidential period at Mar-a-Lago, she said yes. And it was a period of time where, and again, we write about this in the book, most people didn't want to be around him from his old world. Everyone now will say, I was always with him. I never left. I always believed he would win. And we can confidently tell you that is not true. But she was with him and she did actually believe that there was a clear path for winning. [00:25:00] Speaker 1: Jonathan Swan, you all started this book in 2023 when he was out of office. Yeah. What was the shape of the book? Did you think he was going to win again? I did. [00:25:09] Speaker 2: Jonathan never wavered on that. She can vouch for that. He never wavered on it. [00:25:12] Speaker 3: But it didn't matter. When we decided to do this book, we decided that we wanted to cover the final act of Trump, whatever that act looked like. So the book evolved a lot. We just started reporting. That's all we could do was report the heck out of it. And was it going to be a campaign book? If he lost the campaign, could it be a book that ended with him going to prison? We were just following the story with an open mind as to where it could go. We've both covered Trump for a long time. I've covered him. This is my 11th consecutive year of covering Donald Trump. Maggie's covered him for even longer than that. So we just followed the story. And then when he got into power, came back to the presidency, I would say about three or four months in, we realized this was such a consequential first year of a presidency, like nothing that's happened in our lifetime, that the focus of the book really needed to be his return to the presidency. And we made a pretty painful decision, which still hurts me deep inside, which was we jettisoned, we threw out, metaphorically, it still exists somewhere, thousands of pages of reporting and work from about a year and a half period, from sort of almost two, no, not two year period, a year and a half. All through 24. You know, and this is us working, barely seeing our families seven days a week, killing ourselves, tons of behind the scenes stuff. Because we decided the reporting just didn't meet the bar that we wanted for this, like the only material that you'll find in the book from the 2024 period is material that we feel helps illuminate what we're living through for this presidency. So we were incredibly ruthless about what we included and what we didn't. So the cutting room, every book has a big cutting room floor. This one was like a freaking warehouse of our cutting room floor and it still, as you can tell, hurts me. [00:27:13] Speaker 1: Now, you sat down in March for a formal interview with the president. You've both interviewed him in the past. But my guess is you both have a cell number. Yeah, sure. And if you called him right now, we're not going to make you do it, trust me. I wouldn't say yes. [00:27:27] Speaker 2: I don't think Jonathan would either. [00:27:28] Speaker 1: Good. But he would pick up probably or call you back. Is that correct? [00:27:33] Speaker 2: I don't actually, I don't think so. Maybe. I mean, we really have not, we personally have not really talked to him very much other than day to day, which we write about when we're covering him during this term. Because of the book? Because a couple of things. But, you know, we made a concerted effort to get him to sit with us for this book. And it didn't look like it was going to happen. And it was becoming clear to us that we were going to have to go to him directly to ask because we had tried through the front door of the White House and that wasn't getting us very far. And this is a book where he's the subject. We wanted to give him the opportunity to answer direct questions. But we also did not want it to just sort of be open mic night and, you know, sit down and has the news of the day, sir. And there is, clearly news has come from people calling him in the last, you know, however many months it's been. There have been very revealing comments he's made. One about how, you know, to Michael Shearer of The Atlantic about how, you know, America first means whatever I say it means. Last year, when he was first involved in an incursion into Iran, which was the 12-day war, there have been other pieces of news that have emerged. But in general, these calls, when people make them, they last about two and a half minutes. He dictates the terms of the discussion. And it's a way to appear and make a display of transparency, which we've described. I mean, this administration is very good at making shows of transparency. Caroline Levitt constantly says he's the most transparent president in history, which is just simply not true. I'm not rating him against other presidents. He's just not a—this is not a transparent administration. But so those calls allow him to maintain that veneer while really dictating the terms and not answering much at all. [00:29:31] Speaker 1: But when he has an Oval Office meeting and says, "Do you have any questions?" You could ask him anything you wanted, correct? If I'm in the pool. If we're in the pool, which they— [00:29:40] Speaker 3: The White House now decides who's in the pool. Exactly. So, yeah, if I'm selected in the pool, sure. But the composition of the pool has changed from what it used to be. There are more friendly reporters there. It is true—let me be clear about something. He answers more questions than Joe Biden. There's no question. He's more available to—I mean, there are reporters in there asking him questions, you know, when they're in the pool. There's no question about that. But Maggie and I just find that the type of reporting that we do in this book, there's many different types of reporting. But when we want to try and get inside a room, the Oval, the situation room for the most sensitive conversations, the way to get that is not to call Donald Trump on the cell phone for three minutes. It's just—it's not that useful. [00:30:23] Speaker 1: And Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman, in regime change, you have—you're in the Oval Office, you're in the sit room, and you have quotes. You have conversations going on. Are we looking at audio tapes? Are we looking at transcripts? Is it legal for you to have potentially national security transcripts in your possession? [00:30:44] Speaker 2: We're just not going to discuss sourcing at all. You know, we have an extensive note about sourcing at the beginning of the book, and we describe how we conducted more than a thousand interviews. We describe how we made decisions about using direct quotes, how we decided to use things as background discussions. And we describe the process by which we did interviews, which was on the journalistic understanding of deep background. But other than that note, we're just not going to discuss any of this. [00:31:11] Speaker 1: The president had a reaction to your book, as I'm sure you've seen, but we want to show our audience this. Based on a very quick and boring briefing concerning the Maggot Hagerman book about me, it is mostly made up fake news, largely fiction, as have been most of the things she has written about me for so many years. She is a third-rate writer and intellect who has made a first-rate income because of your favorite president, me. And they don't have the audio tapes that they imply they have just another Margot Khan job, and Iran will never have a nuclear weapon, President Donald J. Trump. Do you think he typed this out himself on his phone? [00:31:53] Speaker 2: I don't know. The Margot bit is a bit of a confusing ad. But since it was 12:15 at night, it was either him or there's a very small group of aides who it could have been. Natalie Harp would be one of them because she often, you know, either sends him material or posts something on his behalf, according to our reporting. Sometimes, without other aides knowing it. So I don't know. [00:32:18] Speaker 1: Are Susie Wiles, Stephen Miller, available to you on a regular basis as New York Times reporters? [00:32:26] Speaker 2: We just wouldn't discuss. We're not going to discuss or so. [00:32:29] Speaker 1: What do you think motivates Stephen Miller on the issues that he cares about, particularly immigration? [00:32:35] Speaker 3: It runs pretty deeply for Stephen Miller, much more deeply than it does for the president. What we try to do in the book for all the main players in this administration is give readers a deeper understanding of them and their characters and how they grew up. And Stephen Miller is a really interesting example. He grew up in California. Santa Monica. Santa Monica. Very liberal environment, in his view, oppressively so. And he, from a very early age, was highly ideological. He was obsessed with the right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh. He would listen to him all the time. He would call into another right-wing radio host, Larry Elder. He would call into his radio show when he was in high school. And he was a sort of provocateur at his high school. You know, there's a clip online you'll see if you look it up, where he's giving a speech about why can't the janitors clean up our trash? You know, you get the idea. So he came to his anti-immigration views at a time in California where, even though California was overwhelmingly liberal, the politics of immigration during his high school years were very explosive in California. And so he kind of grew up in that environment. And during university, he got his first taste of real national celebrity, a celebrity in that small world. He was at Duke University. And there were, you probably remember, I'm sure people remember, there were lacrosse players who were accused of rape. And before we really knew what was going on, Stephen Miller became one of their most vocal advocates and defenders. Turns out that Stephen Miller was right. They were falsely accused of rape and vindicated later than that. But that got Stephen Miller on Fox and he became this, you know, aggressive, conservative ideologue on Fox. And that just sent him to Capitol Hill where he was this sort of fringe, at the time, kind of almost a gadfly type of figure. He would call reporters late at night, very focused on his fashion. He used to wear a silver pinky ring with black diamonds, you know, very focused on his ties and the fabrics of his suits and the collars and all of this stuff. But when Trump ran for president in 2015, Stephen Miller described to others being electrified by that first speech that Trump gave, where he talked about Mexicans being rapists and hordes coming across the border. And based on our reporting, it seems like Stephen Miller in that moment, he'd been looking for a vessel for his ideology. And he saw, I think, in Donald Trump, somebody who had the charisma and the star power to take Stephen Miller's ideas and really elevate them. And, frankly, to crush the old Republican Party, which Stephen Miller has absolute contempt for. The George W. Bush compassionate conservative, you know, welcoming immigrants, utter disdain and contempt for that party and wants it to be gone. He saw Trump as a vehicle and became one of his most valued aides. Very smart guy, relentless, has a vision and sticks to it, and was as well prepared as anyone for this second term. [00:36:19] Speaker 1: Maggie Haberman, what's it like to be on the receiving end of a true social post like this or a call out in the Oval Office telling you you're terrible and awful? I think I'd melt. [00:36:33] Speaker 2: Maggie Haberman: I don't think you would, first of all. But secondly, this is not the first time that he's attacked me, nor is it the second, third, fourth, or fifth. Jonathan has also been attacked by him. It doesn't impact the way that we're doing our job one way or the other. I mean, he's also -- the attacks come far more frequently and, frankly, far more similarly to most of the mainstream media at this point. And not mainstream media. It's just what he does. And he can say whatever he wants. That's fine. I mean, he's perfectly entitled to. [00:37:05] Speaker 1: From your book, "Policy is Whatever the President Said Last." Maggie Haberman: Accurate. [00:37:12] Speaker 2: Yes. And in fact, you're seeing it most visibly recently on this bipartisan housing bill where this was one of the few times I think -- you know, we have been struck and we talk about this obviously a lot in this past hour or however long we've been here. And part of the impetus in writing this book, as Jonathan said, was how different this term -- how unrecognizable this term is from term one. But there was a moment of familiarity in recent days when you had top advisers to the president talk about -- and they've been trying to get him to focus on affordability and cost of living for average voters for some time. Maggie Haberman: One of the documents that we got our hands on in the reporting of this book was private polling inside Trump's world, where -- [00:38:04] Speaker 1: Tony Fabrizio? [00:38:05] Speaker 2: Maggie Haberman: Tony Fabrizio. Maggie Haberman: Tony Fabrizio, who has polled on and off for Trump actually since the '90s, which is its own side story. But Trump's team really, really believes in Fabrizio's numbers with reason. He accurately called to the margin of error the swing states in terms of Trump's victory margin in 2024. It was pretty remarkable. And so, you know, whenever -- when I say on air that, you know, Trump won overwhelmingly or whatever, okay, it's true he did not win the majority of the popular vote. He's also the first Republican to win the popular vote in 20 years, so -- or was at the time -- as well as a sizable electoral college victory. So it was a definitive win that he did not have in 2016. So putting that aside, Fabrizio has this memo that he circulates, and he circulates polling to a small group of people around Trump on a fairly regular basis. But this one that we got was in -- a particular one was in December of 2025. And it was after Trump had done a speech that was supposed to be about affordability. And instead he -- Trump referred to affordability as, you know, I think a con job in that same speech and a hoax. And if I'm -- if I'm describing words he didn't actually say at that event, it's because he had said them elsewhere. And Fabrizio's polling memo says that unless the White House and the GOP are honest -- honest as in all caps with voters -- they're going to have real problems with his midterms. And so you've seen an effort by the White House to try to get Trump to focus on this as opposed to his redecorating projects, as opposed to monuments to himself, or, you know, beautification projects around D.C., or revamping a golf course that doesn't actually belong to the federal government and so forth, as far as we can tell. But he -- there was a bipartisan housing bill that was widely seen as something that would advantage people right now in their financial crises. And Trump, after his own aides had touted it as promises made, promises kept, torpedoed signing it, because he wants instead the Senate to pass a bill that the Republican senators have made clear there is no majority to pass, which is a voting bill called the -- he's calling it the Save America Act, that would put massive restrictions on who can vote and how. And, you know, there are already laws about only Americans can vote in elections. That felt like term one, where aides would go out on a limb and say something, and he would pull it back. But you've seen a lot less of that this time, in part because his aides are really reluctant to get ahead of him. And so, yes, policy is whatever the president says it is and whatever he last said. [00:41:04] Speaker 1: Is J.D. Vance usually in the room for decisions? Yeah, he is. [00:41:09] Speaker 3: How would you describe their relationship? It's -- so Trump loves a convert, right? And there are plenty of them around him. You know, it's funny, like, the people around Trump, a couple of them in the most senior roles, almost no one has said worse things about Trump. You know, Rubio has called him a con artist. Vance privately compared him to Adolf Hitler. But Trump loves a convert, so that's number one. So that's number one. Number two, he came into Trump's orbit largely through the Donald Trump Jr. Tucker Carlson channel, as an anti-war, populist, MAGA to the nth degree, right? More MAGA than Trump, in terms of actually believing in the principles of, you know, anti-interventionism, more hardcore on immigration, et cetera. He got Trump's blessing for his Senate race and then ran a pretty aggressive campaign with his allies to become the vice president. [00:42:17] Speaker 1: Including Donald Trump Jr. as an ally. [00:42:19] Speaker 3: He was huge, huge. And Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk and all of them. Trump thought he was brilliant on television. You know, he would see him in the debates, in his Senate debates. He would love seeing him go into combative environments, like when he goes on CNN. Trump would comment how handsome he was, you know, good-looking guy, as he often does. And that Trump was impressed that he got into Yale without having a rich daddy, right? That being said, there are people in the White House who have observed that Trump has a warmer personal chemistry with Marco Rubio. And Trump, as we document in the book, really likes to mess with Vance and brings Rubio in. So, you know, when he selects this young guy as his vice president, of course, the natural observation is, well, he's anointed his heir, right? The 2028 candidate. But Trump has gone out of his way to make clear that he doesn't necessarily view it that way. And he's often pissing them against each other, asking people who they prefer. We have this wild scene in the book where Rupert Murdoch comes to the White House for dinner. It's October last year. And they're in the Blue Room, which is this very ornate, opulent room in the White House residence. And they're all sitting around the table. And it's Rupert Murdoch, Trump, a few aides, Vance and Rubio at the table. And Trump's in there and he says, Rupert, you know, I like both of them. They're both great. What do you think of JD? And Murdoch, Murdoch, who had gone out of his way to try to prevent Vance from being the vice president. He says, you know, JD has the potential to be great. And Vance is like, oh, gee, thanks, Rupert. You know, it's a sort of funny moment, but very loaded, awkward moment. And Trump says, and what do you think about Marco? And Murdoch just stone cold, doesn't miss a beat. He says, Marco's brilliant. And so that was this moment where Trump literally in front of them while they were sitting there with the most powerful proprietor of conservative media in American history, gets him to essentially do a beauty pageant of his successor. So that's the dynamic. Let's just say it's complicated. [00:44:52] Speaker 1: Well, you report also that Marco Rubio has basically moved into the White House so that he can be the last one in the room in a sense. Is that fair? [00:45:01] Speaker 2: I mean, Marco Rubio primarily works out of the White House, at least in our experience. Now, I think that people around him might contest the exact number of hours that he spends there versus the State Department. He has told some advisers, you know, look, he does try to start his days at the State Department. But, I mean, I can just tell you based on experience, and Jonathan has had the same experience as we cover this White House, at least back in the day when you could walk up to Upper Press, which is where the press secretary's office sits. It's now limited unless you have an appointment. But Rubio would be running around. I mean, he would run from one office to the next. And what was striking was he clearly seemed to be enjoying his role and enjoying being in this particular milieu. What exactly Rubio wants long term, I don't think that either of us really feel like we can say it. He's certainly not doing any of the things one would do if they were running for president. In fact, we write about how supportive he was of Vance in 2024 when Vance had that, what I think Vance says now, described as an ill-advised, you know, single cat ladies comment or whatever it was that he said, childless cat ladies. Rubio was very supportive of Vance. And they do have an actual friendship. That doesn't obviously always mean anything in politics. But Rubio is around Trump a lot. Trump likes talking to Rubio, as Jonathan said. And it is, I think, not just the personal chemistry, but I think it's the way he presents information to him. [00:46:32] Speaker 3: Well, it's another thing, which is, I mean, he's a secretary of state who barely travels. Correct. Right. Which is highly unusual. But it's also smart because he understands, Rubio understands, that if you're not in the room with Trump, if you're not literally there, you're just out of the loop. Correct. The whole universe is in that little oval office. And Trump makes the decisions. There's really no, I mean, I don't want to be too sweeping, but there's not much of an interagency process. Let's put it that way. There's not a huge amount of coordination across the agencies. It is a very small group. And if you're not in the room, not only do you not have an opportunity to weigh in on the issue, you may not even know about a decision that was made. He's making decisions very quickly, in many cases impulsively, on the spot. And so if you're not there, you're not there. [00:47:24] Speaker 1: The tariff issue seemed to be almost ad hoc in a sense. Not almost. [00:47:29] Speaker 2: It was. The way you're reporting it. Yeah. Actually, a colleague of ours texted me, I think I forgot to tell you this, who's reading the book, texted me last night and said, I was going to wait until I finish the book to tell you what I thought, but I just finished the tariff scene and I can't get over this. And my jaw is on the floor just about how revealing this was. And, you know, we have this very detailed inside the room reporting about how this formula for this global trade war that Trump was about to bring onto the world. And Trump, his advisers will talk about, and they're right, that he has been talking about tariffs for many, many decades. But literally just the word tariff. It's in the context of other countries ripping us off. It's not a long-held economic theory of the case and how it might work. And it was something that he wanted to do in his first term. And he didn't do it for a variety of reasons. But one of them was that he had aides like a Gary Cohn whose economic credentials, his economic advisor at the time, whose economic credentials Trump really respected or at least acknowledged were substantial. And Cohn was really willing to get in Trump's face and say, don't do this. As we have said, there is a lot less of that this time. But this is something that Trump has wanted to try for a long time. And so this formula for these tariffs was essentially done the night before. And it was largely, not entirely, but largely by Peter Navarro, who is Trump's protectionist advisor and who Trump likes a lot for a variety of reasons. And then this formula became unexplainable for the government. And we describe how two things were going on. One, Trump was in many cases just coming up with an increased tariff rate off the top of his head. You know, put them in for 10, in one case, as if this was sort of a ledger, as opposed to a trade formula. The other is, it was really stunning to us as we were reporting it. And then as we were re-reporting it in preparation for the book and to stress test information. The people around Trump were so alarmed at how this was going. Not all of them, but many of them. Either they didn't think that he was going to really go through with this tariff regime, or they thought that he would allow more carve-outs and he started to get angry. But he really took the global economy to the brink. And it was really only when the bond markets were at the point of meltdown that he pulled back. So Liberation Day, the tariff war day, begins on April 2nd. A few days later, April 6th I think it was, you had the Treasury Secretary and the Commerce Secretary in the cabin of Air Force One with Trump on a flight back from Florida saying, "We really do need to pull back. There's warning signs." It still took another two and a half days until that happened. [00:50:24] Speaker 1: Steve Witkoff seems to have several jobs in the White House, but is not an official government employee. Is that correct? [00:50:33] Speaker 3: No, he is. [00:50:34] Speaker 2: He is, I think. Is he now? He's an envoy. I don't think that he's a special government employee. Because he couldn't still be in this long. [00:50:41] Speaker 1: So he's working on Russia, he's working on the Middle East? [00:50:44] Speaker 2: Right. He's an envoy for everything. That's what I would say. [00:50:47] Speaker 1: A longtime friend of President Trump? Yeah, going back to the '80s. [00:50:50] Speaker 2: A former lawyer for him, who then became a real estate developer himself. [00:50:54] Speaker 1: There's another character in this book, Natalie Harp. Who is Natalie Harp and what is her role in the Trump White House? [00:51:05] Speaker 3: She's a young woman who used to be a TV host on OAN, which is a far-right network, very involved in the post-2020 conspiracy theories about the election. She was extremely devoted to Trump. And he hired her when he left office. She became this sort of ever-present aide. She would follow him around. They call her the human printer on the staff. She carries a portable printer in her backpack. She's always printing him stories that are good news stories, stories to make him feel good. That was during his low ebb after leaving office. And she would follow him around on the golf course with the printer and show him stories. On foot sometimes. Sometimes on foot. We obtained, in our reporting for the book, some letters that she had written to the president during the campaign. They were very unusual letters, very personal. And they were left in some of his private spaces. And they were included lines such as, "You are all that matters to me," was one of the quotes. The Secret Service became aware of it. And some of the Secret Service agents became quite alarmed by the behavior. But Trump wasn't. Trump would say things like, "She's the only one," you know, he would sort of, you know, sort of joking way. But it's never quite a joke. You know, "She's the only one who loves me. You know, she'll be with me. You guys all go make money. She'll be with me." He, I think, very much appreciates her devotion and loyalty and that she will do things very, very quickly. She represents something larger in his world and something that is, he's always had people around him who are devoted, sycophants, whatever. She is of a different order. And she's also a conduit. When people on the outside want to get information to Donald Trump, and they don't necessarily want to go through any type of vetting or the chief of staff, they can go through Natalie and she'll show it to him. So, she is a conduit. She is a conduit. She is a provider of good news. She is someone who's always there. She sits in the Oval Office with her laptop open, back against the wall, in every meeting. Through most meetings? Every meeting? [00:53:32] Speaker 2: Just about every meeting. [00:53:33] Speaker 3: Almost every meeting, yeah. Just about every meeting. [00:53:35] Speaker 2: And that's Natalie Hall. You asked about Boris Epstein before, and I was thinking about this, actually, when you were talking. Part of Natalie Harp's remit is, you know, established by herself and the president is providing him with good news. The way that Trump describes Boris Epstein in private is, or Epstein, now I can't even actually remember which was the accurate pronunciation, is he would say that, he says things to people like, he's my psychiatrist. He'll say how much he likes that Boris is neurotic. But, you know, and he'll complain that Boris is like, you know, he would say during 2023, when he was facing these indictments, Trump was, you know, if I was about to get indicted, Boris would call me and tell me how it's great for me. But at the end of the day, Trump really likes having Boris around, because as he has said to people, you know, sometimes you just want someone who's going to make you feel good. And we write about that as well. And someone who will do whatever you want. And those two people are represented. I mean, there really is, there are very few people who are in the actual government who will do literally whatever Trump wants. There are some. And I would say so far, based on our reporting, Bill Pulte, who's the acting director of national intelligence, is at least positioning himself that way. We'll see how it plays out, but, and Harper's in the government, but she's sort of a different category. [00:55:04] Speaker 1: This book has been the hardest thing either of us has ever done professionally. Why do you say that? Accurate. [00:55:11] Speaker 3: Well, you would get a better answer if you sat down with my wife. Or my husband. Who's prohibited me from ever writing another book. So we, I mean, look, Maggie and I have covered Trump for a long time. We're both unbalanced in our approach to work, I think it's fair to say. We both work seven. Unbalanced. Yeah. We're a little obsessive. We work seven, we've worked, I've worked seven days a week. Same. You know, 12 hour days for a very long time in my career. But this book, I think, took it to a different level. And by the end of it, I just, it's hard to explain to a reader how hard it is to get inside these rooms and to actually get verified information that you're confident about from inside these rooms. And to do that page after page after page, it's just an immense effort of reporting that basically killed both of us. Yeah. [00:56:05] Speaker 2: I have children who are older than Jonathan's children, but their whole life has been me doing a version of this. And this was not a period where it let up, so. [00:56:17] Speaker 1: Color gold for the cover on purpose? [00:56:20] Speaker 2: It was not our call. It was the design team at Simon & Schuster. Oh, we love it. And I would say, God love them, because it's brilliant. It's genius. [00:56:28] Speaker 3: Yeah. [00:56:29] Speaker 1: If you could sit down with one member of the Trump administration for one hour, unfettered, who would it be? That's a good question. [00:56:36] Speaker 3: We probably shouldn't answer that because they would suggest that we haven't talked to them. Yeah, I don't want a good point. It would help them narrow it down. [00:56:42] Speaker 2: Forget it. [00:56:43] Speaker 3: Don't know. [00:56:44] Speaker 1: Yeah. Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, New York Times, White House reporters, the author of this book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. Thanks for spending an hour with us here on C-SPAN. [00:56:58] Speaker 3: Thanks for having us. Thank you. We enjoyed it. [00:57:01] Speaker 4: All Q&A programs are available on our website or as a podcast on our C-SPAN Now app.