Trump INSISTS on carpet in his White House bathroom, new book reveals

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Maggie Haverman and Jonathan Swan, authors of the new book Regime Change, are back with us. Jonathan, I'm reading from an excerpt here that new carpet was laid in the bathroom on inauguration day as before. Trump's preference for a fully carpeted bathroom had posed a challenge for the resident staff during his first term. The portion nearest the shower would often be soaked through. The staff was never quite sure why, but they worried about mold growing underneath. I've never in my life encountered carpeting in the bathroom, but this apparently is a real Donald Trump must-have. [00:00:30] Jonathan Swan: Yes, it was important to him to have a fully carpeted bathroom, and the resident staff's solution to the damp problem or the potential mold problem was to get essentially a small piece of carpet and overlay it as if it was a bath mat on top of the other carpet in front of the shower and then substitute and rotate that carpeting. So we do have some details from inside the residence, including some disputes and tensions between the president and the first lady over the interior decorating and renovating. But that was a detail that, for one reason or other, seems to have stuck with people. [00:01:16] Speaker 1: Yes. Well, I think it's really quite memorable just because you don't encounter that a lot. Let's talk a little bit about Bill Pulte, who is, as of now, the acting national director of intelligence in the United States of America. He oversees all intelligence operations. He is one of these people that seems to have managed to kind of ingratiate himself into Trump by essentially always being there to cultivate Trump's most sort of vindictive worst impulses. Is that a fair characterization, Jonathan, to how Pulte has sort of gotten to where he is? [00:01:55] Jonathan Swan: Oh, there's no question. I mean, we have scenes in the book where, so Bill Pulte was squired around Mar-a-Lago during the transition by Roger Stone. And I'm sure your viewers are familiar with Roger Stone. He was the heir of a home-building fortune, and he got this job at this very little-known agency, the Federal Housing Finance Agency. But what he would do is he would get these massive foam boards printed out, blown up, and he would lug them around and take them into the Oval Office or take them to Trump's golf courses. And they would have images of Trump's enemies on them. And Pulte basically discovered within that agency a way to give Trump an opportunity to go after his enemies. So, for example, we have a scene in the book of Pulte showing Trump a foam board that had this giant blow-up of Lisa Cook's head, the Federal Reserve Bank governor that Trump tried to fire. And over the top, it just said fraudster, right? That's the sort of level of material that he's putting in front of Trump. But Trump, of course, you know, loves it in many cases. Yeah. So now that he's in there at DNI, I mean, I think Trump said today he can declassify anything he wants while he's there in this temporary job. He's obviously—there's been murmurings that he's going to try to do something related to the 2020 election. Hard to imagine what that might be. That's absolutely his role in Trump's mind as hatchet man. [00:03:37] Speaker 1: Maggie, you guys write about the constrained information environment and how, you know, the president's not getting a lot of—there's not a lot of broad inputs coming into him. Mm-hmm. I guess my question to you is, do you think one of two things? Does he not care anymore about essentially what we might call quaintly public opinion? Or does he not actually have connections to public opinion? [00:04:05] Maggie Haverman: It's a bit of both, Chris. One of the things that was shocking to us as we were reporting out this book is two things. One is how he may get that way. It's, you know, it's not that he doesn't care at all about the midterms, but he certainly doesn't care much. He may decide he's going to care eventually, but this is just not something that he's been focused on at all in any major way. We keep—you know, he will do his endorsements, but it's mostly to keep track of his own win tally. We keep hearing about how he's about to go do a bunch of events. It's—we're still waiting for that to happen with any kind of regular cadence. Maybe it will in the fall. It hasn't yet. And he gave a very revealing quote last year about how he was proud that Republicans didn't do well on the ticket when he wasn't on it as well. So that tells you something about the mindset. Number two, we got hold of private polling from his own internal pollster that gets circulated memos to, you know, a group of about a dozen people in his world. There was one poll that showed in December that it was shortly after Trump gave what was billed as a, you know, it was going to be a speech about affordability. And instead, Trump spent much of the time mocking the word affordability, describing it as a Democratic hoax. It was very clear that Trump was in trouble with voters as of December on the core issue that he had won on twice, which was affordability and that he was going to make voters' lives better. And there was a line in the memo about how—and I'm paraphrasing—but that unless the White House and the president and the GOP were honest with the public—the word was honest—about the affordability crisis and how to fix it, it was going to be a very tough fall this coming year. So, that was really striking, but it's not that his advisors don't know it or don't tell him, he's so unreceptive to bad news. So, there's always all of this strategizing about how to get through to him. And his outside inputs are very limited now. Most of his news comes from Natalie—information comes from Natalie Harp, this aide who's referred to as the human printer who sits on the side of the Oval Office in almost every meeting, and who is a supplier of all kinds of good news stories to him. Most of his information on television comes from Fox News, which is far less critical of him in this term overall than it was in term one. Most of his information comes from calls where he reaches out to some ally or—and Jonathan and I write about this—the Mar-a-Lago patio, where he goes and people tell him how fabulous he is, or they stand and applaud him when he walks in. So, he's not out there talking to voters. He's not doing rallies. He is doing these gaggles that you see on screen right there. He is doing relatively few sit-down interviews, long form, and, you know, he is creating his own reality. [00:06:56] Speaker 1: Maggie Harriman, Jonathan Swan, the book is called "Regime Change." It really is a—it's really, really interesting. I feel like I got some real insight into this, even after these 11 years of my one precious life covering this man. Thank you so much for your time. Appreciate it. Thanks, Chris. Thanks, Chris. [00:07:16] Speaker ?: Thanks, Chris.