Trump's White House, behind the scenes: Haberman & Swan reveal details

[0:00] Why the two of you titled this book Regime Change? [0:06] Yeah, I mean, we sort of a couple of months into the presidency realized that we weren't [0:14] just covering a transition from a Democratic president to a Republican president. [0:18] And in fact, it was nothing like what we covered in the first term in the way he was using [0:23] executive power. [0:25] The premise for the title Regime Change was that we're used to talking about regime change [0:31] in foreign countries and covering regime change in foreign countries. [0:35] It's a much more uncomfortable and challenging task to think about a regime change in our [0:43] own country. [0:44] And when you look at what he's done as president, the way he's used executive power, it's like [0:49] nothing we've seen in our lifetimes. [0:50] You can go across the gamut. [0:52] When George W. Bush went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, you know, as flawed as the decision [0:58] making was, there was a process of getting approval by Congress, the branch of government [1:03] under the Constitution that has the power to declare war. [1:06] Trump didn't even talk to Congress. [1:08] He just went to war. [1:10] When he went and snatched a foreign sovereign head of state out of his bedroom in his pajamas [1:15] in the middle of the night and forced regime change in Venezuela, he didn't talk to anyone [1:20] in Congress. [1:21] When he started a trade war with the whole world based on authorities, which, you know, [1:26] once the courts caught up to it, you know, were invalid, again, there's no consultation. [1:31] So it's unilateral expressions of power like we haven't seen in our lifetimes. [1:35] And what we wanted to do in the book was to really emphasize what's in front of our own [1:41] eyes and try to dig deeper and show people how it's working in there, how this country [1:46] is being run by the very small group of people that are in charge of this country. [1:52] Yeah. [1:52] And you do that very effectively. [1:53] New details about one of his closest aides, Natalie Harp. [1:57] Maggie and Jonathan report on how she became the president's gateway to information, supplying [2:02] him with positive news stories and pro-Trump social media posts. [2:06] They also write how she would often read the materials out loud to the president and later [2:11] give him physical copies from a portable printer that she kept on her. [2:15] According to the new book, Harp, quote, wrote Trump adoring letters that she left in his [2:19] personal spaces, including one that read, you are all that matters to me. [2:24] Trump's chief of staff, Susie Wiles, told others that she remembered thinking, where am [2:28] I? [2:29] And that Trump had taken to telling his staff that Natalie was the only one who loved [2:33] him as much as his wife and his kids, adding, all of you will go off and make money and she'll [2:39] never leave me. [2:40] I mean, Maggie, obviously, those of us who cover the president know Natalie Harp. [2:44] Obviously, she's typically by his side all the time. [2:47] For people at home, though, and as you're looking at the realm of figures that are surrounding [2:52] him in this second term, what does this say to you? [2:56] So a couple of things, Caitlin. [3:00] Natalie Harp became omnipresent in the campaign, and we write about that. [3:04] She was not one of the original people in 2021 in this very small group of people who [3:09] was there. [3:10] But, you know, at some point in 2022, she became somebody who was constantly with him [3:15] on the golf courses when he was in Florida. [3:18] Again, they would refer to her as the human printer because she had this portable printer [3:22] where she would hand him pieces of positive information. [3:26] What it says is that he wants to keep people around who either, you know, make him happy [3:31] or feed him information that he prefers to hear. [3:35] I mean, one of the scenes that we have in the book is him demanding the, quote-unquote, [3:41] real numbers during a tariff discussion when he is being told by his own staff what the [3:49] actual numbers are. [3:49] And he wants Natalie to go get him some different set of numbers that just didn't comport with [3:56] reality. [3:57] And he is more interested in information that he wants to hear and in seeking out something [4:03] that validates what he believes, you know, that he has always been interested in that. [4:08] It was just harder for him to get. [4:09] But this time, it is much easier. [4:11] And Natalie Harp is one of the people who took over posting duties to the president's [4:17] truth social post in this term. [4:20] And that makes her fairly significant. [4:22] Yeah. [4:23] I mean, Maggie, that part really stood out to me because basically, you know, he was talking [4:27] to the Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary, Scott Besson, the Treasury Secretary. [4:31] I mean, this passage of the book talks about what he's hearing from all of these staffers. [4:35] And he's telling Natalie, go find the good numbers that she had pulled up for him. [4:40] I mean, it kind of takes you into how he equates his staff in terms of experience and whether [4:46] they're in the cabinet or a staffer who follows him around. [4:49] No, that's right. [4:51] I mean, one of the things we used to hear in term one a lot, Caitlin, and in this way, [4:55] you know, this is a sort of more of a pure Trump aspect. [4:59] And we describe Steve Bannon referring to Donald Trump that way and how much pure Trump [5:05] was coming through. [5:06] You know, he often would assign multiple people the same job, but not quite like this. [5:13] He really is just bringing in, you know, sort of direct people who will do what he wants. [5:19] You're seeing that with Bill Pulte, who is now the director of national intelligence, [5:23] despite having no intelligence experience, no intelligence community experience. [5:28] We have a lot of detail about Bill Pulte's efforts to try to push Trump toward evidence [5:35] that he believed could help lead to prosecutions of Trump's perceived enemies in the book. [5:40] The fact that he is now the director of national intelligence, I think, [5:43] speaks to exactly what we're talking about with Natalie Harp in a different context. [5:49] Yeah. [5:49] And, Jonathan, you know, as Trump was speaking in the Oval Office today with the NATO secretary general, [5:53] I thought about a part of your book that I had read in terms of the president's aging [5:58] and what White House staffers have noticed, not even what other people have noticed. [6:02] I mean, obviously, he turned 80. [6:05] And the two of you write in the book that the president was having trouble hearing. [6:08] He was asking people to repeat questions they had just asked, [6:11] that joint press conferences with world leaders were more often held in the Oval Office [6:15] than in the spacious East Room, in part because the acoustics were better [6:18] and they didn't have to stand for an hour. [6:20] You're also right that some of Trump's aides began to say privately [6:23] that for the first time he was beginning to seem old to them. [6:27] Those who spent time with him could see the signs, the moments of fatigue, [6:30] the cupped hand behind the ear. [6:32] But Trump's personal dominance in any room often papered over what his body [6:36] could no longer fully conceal. [6:39] I mean, what did you, what was the sense you picked up on from these staffers? [6:43] Well, it's a very difficult area of reporting, as you know, Caitlin, [6:51] because all of us cover the president. [6:53] It's something that they keep very well concealed. [6:56] I'm not even sure that his most senior aides have a clear picture of his health, [7:01] about all the aspects of his medical reports. [7:05] They often talk about how they're the most transparent White House, [7:08] the most transparent president. [7:10] It's manifestly not the case. [7:13] They put out very incomplete medical information. [7:17] Recently, they said he saw 22 specialists. [7:20] We have no indication of who those specialists are or what their specialties are. [7:25] They haven't released all the imaging results. [7:27] You can go down the list. [7:29] Look, he's 80 years old. [7:31] We can see for ourselves that he sometimes has trouble staying awake in the afternoons. [7:36] We can see the swelling around the ankles, the chronic venous insufficiency. [7:41] And there's a lot of unknowns. [7:43] So we didn't manage to crack. [7:45] That was one area that, as a reporting task, feels very incomplete to us. [7:49] And we're still very much continuing the reporting on that. [7:53] But there's nothing beyond what is publicly available. [7:56] But I think we actually know very little, frankly. [8:00] Yeah. [8:00] I mean, Maggie, the two of you, as you reported out on this book, [8:03] and everyone really should read it because it goes into so many different facets of this second Trump term [8:08] and so much that has happened from, you know, the Kennedy Center to the president's health to the dynamics. [8:15] You actually sat down with the president inside the Oval in the final stages of your reporting for this book [8:20] to go over the material that you had learned. [8:22] And the president kind of went off at one point. [8:26] He told you, they illegally indicted me. [8:27] They impeached me. [8:29] They did everything. [8:29] They shot me, I guess you could say. [8:31] But I won the election in a landslide. [8:33] Nobody else could have done it. [8:35] And there's only one thing you can say about me that anybody believes, and you know what it is. [8:39] He said, essentially, I won every effing time. [8:43] Maggie and Jonathan, it's actually interesting to talk to you now. [8:46] Now, every day there's a new story, but the one that's broken today is the self-enrichment by Donald Trump [8:52] to the tune of about $2 billion in crypto and other dealings. [8:58] And your book has dealt, as some critics have called, with the administration's colossal financial corruption. [9:06] Maggie, tell me about how you dug into that. [9:09] And are you surprised by today's $2 billion news? [9:11] So, Chris John, and thank you for having us. [9:14] We have basically scratched the surface of what is there, and we write about it and focus on it inside the book. [9:22] We learned, you know, new details about not just how Trump and his family are operating, [9:27] but also how even, you know, wealthy cabinet members end up trying to survive inside the government [9:32] by making their own donations to the Trump library, like Howard Lutnik did in recent months. [9:37] In terms of the Trumps themselves, this is the first, this filing that came out yesterday, I believe, [9:43] is the first concrete evidence of how much money is being made by President Trump. [9:51] And again, it only deals in ranges in some cases. [9:54] What we do know is that his net worth is off the charts bigger than what it was prior to this presidency. [10:01] He is wealthier than he has ever been in his life, personally. [10:04] And so when he says, and he and the White House say there's no conflicts of interest, [10:09] it strains credibility, to put it mildly. [10:12] Even the New York Post has criticized the two Trump sons, Don Jr. and Eric, [10:17] for the amount of money that they are making. [10:20] It's impossible to look at it through any other lens of the fact that Donald Trump is overseeing policy, [10:25] such as cryptocurrency regulation, from which he benefits. [10:28] And again, he's not the first politician in history in the U.S. to benefit financially from being in office. [10:35] This has been a problem with Congress, certainly, over many years. [10:38] But the scale and scope is just astonishing. [10:42] And again, to stress this, we are only scratching the surface now, as we did in our book, on what is there. [10:48] But I suspect we will learn more as time goes on. [10:51] What we tried showing is just how condensed and compressed a period of time this was [10:57] for them making money primarily through this cryptocurrency vehicle. [11:03] Yeah, I'm glad you made that distinction, that it's not the only example of politicians capitalizing, [11:09] but the scale of it and the fact that it's the president. [11:12] We know many other presidential sons and others have also been tied to other sort of financial things, [11:18] but never a president on this scale. [11:21] Jonathan, let me ask you something. [11:23] Why did you decide to write this book? [11:28] You know, Maggie did this amazing book in the first term, and you guys have been covering him for so long. [11:34] Why, at this point in his second term, did you want to write this book? [11:41] Well, we decided to write the book in 2023 on the final act of Trump, whatever that would look like. [11:46] And, of course, the contours of that story were not visible, then they couldn't have been. [11:52] We didn't know what was going to happen. [11:53] It could have been covering Donald Trump losing an election and potentially heading to prison. [12:00] So we kept our minds open. [12:01] We just reported the heck out of it, like we've been doing for the last, you know, for me, it's 11 consecutive years. [12:07] For Maggie, it's even longer. [12:08] But when this presidency began, I would say within a month, Maggie and I realized that we were covering something that was quite unrecognizable, [12:20] not just to his first term, but to any presidency that we've seen in our lifetime, [12:25] in some respects different from any U.S. presidency that we've ever seen. [12:29] And so our task became much more focused, much more urgent, that we were covering the first year his return to Washington [12:37] and trying to capture this presidency. [12:39] The title that we have for the book, Regime Change, actually has nothing to do with foreign regime change. [12:44] We came up with the title before he went into Caracas with Delta Force and snatched Maduro out of his bedroom, [12:50] before he went into Iran on the Netanyahu regime change mission. [12:54] It was that it occurred to us that we were covering a form of regime change in our own country. [13:01] And I think sometimes as a reporter, the most challenging thing to do is to actually see what's in front of you [13:07] and to describe it clearly and to report it accurately. [13:11] And that became our mission with the book. [13:16] Yeah, and the subtitle is inside, I mean, I'm paraphrasing now, I don't see the book in front of me, [13:20] but inside the imperial presidency, and you report how Trump really, with nearly unchecked power, [13:27] hell-bent on retribution, is trying to remake not just the presidency, but also to cement his legacy. [13:34] And you indicated that one of the reasons he might have, you know, [13:36] or maybe the only reason you discovered that he wanted to run again was to stay out of prison [13:41] because of, you know, the trials and things he'd been through before. [13:45] So you mentioned Iran. Let me talk to you both about that because, again, that's massively important [13:50] and it's in the news. [13:51] And Trump went to war against another country where we from the outside clearly see [13:57] that there was clearly not enough war planning and war gaming of all the issues [14:03] that could come and bite the United States and Israel. [14:06] You have incredible scoops on this. [14:08] Maggie, take me through some of the Situation Room reporting that you were able to do. [14:14] What it led to, what it told us. [14:17] So one of the first excerpts that we put out in the New York Times, actually it was months ago at this point, [14:23] was reporting for this book about how the U.S. went to war in Iran. [14:28] And it still remains, you know, immodestly, the most expansive look at how this took place. [14:35] And there were a series of remarkable meetings inside the Situation Room, [14:39] but one was on February 11th when Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Prime Minister, [14:44] goes down to the Situation Room complex, which is something of a secure, you know, [14:51] sanctuary for national security and for foreign policy and for classified information. [14:56] And this is a very small group of some of his advisors, top officials in the U.S. government, [15:02] President Trump, Netanyahu across the table from each other. [15:05] Trump was not in his normal place at the head of the conference table in that large conference room. [15:10] He was sitting directly across from Netanyahu, whose advisors were beaming in from on screen, [15:16] some of them from Israel. [15:18] And Netanyahu makes this case about not just going to war, but about possible regime change scenarios. [15:25] He plays for Trump a video montage of possible replacement leaders in a new Iranian regime. [15:33] And the U.S. officials found these to be not really, really palatable or believable options. [15:39] There were, they did an analysis overnight, the CIA Director and Secretary of State end up briefing Trump the next day, [15:48] and they explain that Netanyahu's discussions of regime change were, in the words of John Ratcliffe, [15:55] the CIA Director, farcical, in the words of Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, [16:02] it was BS, except he said the word. [16:04] Trump, when in the room with Netanyahu, listened to this presentation about how things could go. [16:10] It was very sunny and said, sounds good to me, which most advisors took to believe that he was really open to this. [16:17] He was still open to this the next day, despite getting warnings from his own advisors. [16:21] He said regime will be, quote unquote, their problem, although it's not, regime change, excuse me, [16:25] but it's not clear who they were. [16:27] Nonetheless, he was clearly impressed with the Israeli military's planning, as laid out by Netanyahu. [16:34] He was impressed by the Hezbollah pager operation many, many months earlier. [16:40] He was impressed by Israel's execution of the 12-day war the following year. [16:45] And Trump was feeling flush with his own power and his own abilities and the U.S. military's abilities [16:51] after that Caracas effort where he sent in Delta Force to grab Maduro shortly after New Year's Day earlier this year. [17:00] Trump was warned, Christiana, we really can't emphasize this enough, what could happen. [17:05] Dan Cain, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, did lay out what could happen here. [17:10] The Strait of Hormuz could close. [17:12] There would be munitions depletion. [17:13] There was no one on Trump's team who thought this was a good idea. [17:17] But the only one, the closest was Pete Hegseth. [17:19] The only person who really vocally got into it with President Trump was J.D. Vance. [17:24] And it cost him with Trump because Trump got irritated with him. [17:27] But in our reporting, and we show this in the book, Trump was always more hawkish on Iran than his own team [17:34] and was always much more receptive to Netanyahu's pitch than his advisors. [17:38] So this idea that Netanyahu kind of, you know, misled Trump or puppeteered him into war, it's just not the true. [17:45] It's much more nuanced. [17:46] Did he advocate? [17:47] Sure. [17:48] But Trump knew what he wanted to do. [17:49] So what do you make of the president's decision praising the Supreme Court decision to expand his powers [17:55] to fire officials within the executive branch of the government, calling it a big win? [18:00] Well, it's one of the few pieces of good news for him, frankly, out of what we've seen in the rulings so far from the Supreme Court day. [18:08] This has been a case that has been long in the making by a number of the president's top advisors, [18:13] a small group of advisors who were preparing for a second Trump term. [18:17] We write about this actually extensively in the book. [18:19] How they had looked at, and Jonathan did extensive reporting on this at Axios even before he was at the Times, [18:24] how they had looked at pockets of independence inside the executive branch, [18:28] how they believe there is no such thing under the unitary executive theory [18:32] that the president controls these so-called independent agencies and has the power to make changes there. [18:40] So this was an expected ruling, but it is an affirmation of how Trump has governed and sought to expand executive power. [18:49] You know, it's interesting because the Supreme Court also said this morning that it wouldn't hear [18:53] President Trump's challenge of that $5 million jury award to E. Jean Carroll for sexual abuse and defamation. [19:01] Are we likely to hear the last of this case from the president? What do you think? [19:05] I'm reluctant to speculate, but based on our reporting, I think it's unlikely that you've heard the last about it. [19:12] There are a few things that he was more enraged about than the E. Jean Carroll case, [19:17] so I don't think you've heard the last of that at all. [19:19] What do you think? [19:21] No, I mean, based on our reporting, and we write extensively in the book about all of these court cases during the campaign, [19:27] he was extremely unhappy about the E. Jean Carroll decision and being there for the second trial during the primaries. [19:35] I assume he will say something at some point. [19:37] And, Maggie, you know Trump. You've covered him and you understand. [19:41] You think he's actually going to write out a check for $5 million to E. Jean Carroll? [19:45] I'm reluctant to speculate as to whether he will actually do it, but I think that if he does it, it will be under extreme protest. [19:54] He may not have a choice. [19:55] I wanted to bring up Epstein. We're going to ask him about Epstein. [19:58] And you really, really bring us inside the White House, inside the Situation Room, [20:02] as White House officials deliberated how to handle Epstein, which is really unusual to be in the Situation Room talking about something like this, right? [20:12] Yeah, the White House Situation Room Complex, as you know well, as you know well, is typically used for national security discussions, emergencies, discussing foreign policy, sometimes natural disasters. [20:26] This was the first time that we knew of where it had been used for essentially a crisis PR center on how to get out of a clamor within the MAGA base over unreleased files related to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. [20:45] And there were a number of meetings in that room. [20:48] We just focused on a few of them. [20:51] And there were people in Trump's orbit who were concerned about the victims, but that was not the primary discussion at these meetings. [20:59] This was about how do you deal with something that the president just wanted to go away. [21:03] And we report on this in the book. [21:05] He wanted it to disappear. [21:06] He was snapping at aides when they would bring up Epstein. [21:08] So what ended up happening were these series of remarkable meetings with the top levels of this government. [21:14] The vice president, White House chief of staff, White House counsel, attorney general, deputy attorney general, FBI director, [21:21] and that's just a partial list, discussing what they saw as their options. [21:26] And some of these meetings were described to us as surreal, at least in terms of how detailed they got. [21:31] And, Maggie, before I let you go, very quickly, how do you react when Trump bitterly and awfully, he goes after you in public and social media and elsewhere? [21:41] It's not the first time he's attacked me. [21:44] We've both been through it. [21:46] It doesn't impact how we report. [21:48] And we're in pretty good company at this point in terms of him attacking people. [21:51] Big picture here. [21:52] One of the main themes here is just how different he is and is approaching this second term than the first term. [22:00] And it's summed up by, you know, toward the end, toward the very end of the book, [22:03] your interview with the president, where he yells at you guys as, not yells, but speaks loudly and firmly with you as you're leaving, [22:12] telling you to remember, quote, essentially, I won every effing time. [22:18] So, Jonathan, what does that mean? [22:20] That idea that he is convinced that he is a winner here. [22:25] How has that manifested itself in this second term in ways it didn't necessarily in the first? [22:28] Well, one other thing that happened when we went and saw the president in March was he handed us a document that he wanted us to read. [22:37] And it was a two page document that he said was written by a historian. [22:41] And it opens with a statement, Donald Trump is the most powerful man who's ever existed on the planet by far. [22:50] And then it goes on to compare him to Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Alexander the Great, the Caesars, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror. [23:01] You know, all the sort of liberal Democrats of, you know, history. [23:05] And Trump wanted us to understand it was not a moral, there was no mention of a moral comparison. [23:13] It was that he had power that no one has ever had before. [23:16] The U.S. has the most powerful military economy technology, but that he's willing to use it. [23:21] And that was the thing he wanted to impress upon us. [23:23] And what we had understood ourselves throughout our reporting was in the first term, he was much more reactive to domestic politics. [23:32] If there was a turn in the polls or the stock market, he could he could be diverted. [23:36] This time around, he's trying to reshape the world. [23:39] He's trying to reshape this country. [23:41] And he's willing to take much bigger risks because of that. [23:45] And if you put it through that lens of sort of Donald Trump as a Napoleonic figure in his mind, the Alexander the Great, the presidency starts to make more sense, I think. [23:56] It's not so much that he's shattering the world order. [23:58] He's behaving as if there is no world order is basically what you write. [24:03] Well, when you talk to leaders in other countries, and most of them won't say this on the record, the post-World War II order essentially. [24:12] It's over. [24:13] It's it's really I mean, who actually thinks that Donald Trump would go to defend a NATO country? [24:23] I mean, he's openly saying that, you know, they're weak. [24:25] They're paper tigers. [24:26] They they screwed us over. [24:27] We need to pull troops out. [24:29] NATO is really on its last legs. [24:33] The ballroom is cutting through. [24:34] Yes. [24:35] The fact that while we have an affordability, you know, crisis in this country or many people living, you know, paycheck to paycheck, the visuals of Trump building this grand ballroom and all the gold. [24:48] It's actually cutting through to voters in a way that I don't think many of his aides anticipated. [24:54] So much of this period you're writing about the president is unchecked or relatively unchecked, you know, operates with relative impunity. [25:02] Any sense of what happens if the Democrats take control of a chamber of Congress next November? [25:08] It's very uncertain because, you know, there's a sort of conventional wisdom of let's say they take the House. [25:14] Well, now it's oversight season. [25:17] Well, what happens if you have an administration that doesn't respond to subpoenas? [25:23] What's the enforcement mechanism for that? [25:26] The Trump DOJ? [25:27] Oh, yeah. [25:28] OK. [25:29] Yeah, I know. [25:29] They'll be really cracking down hard. [25:31] So, you know, we don't know. [25:33] It's a real black box for us as to what happens after November. [25:37] And Trump has already said many times, we have this in our book, he has told people in the Oval Office meetings, I'm going to pardon anyone who came within 250 feet of the Oval Office. [25:48] Sometimes the distance changes. [25:49] Sometimes he says 200 feet. [25:51] Sometimes he says 25 feet. [25:52] But some number of feet. [25:54] So he knows he has immunity conferred by the Supreme Court and everyone around him knows they're going to get pardons. [26:00] So what's the accountability mechanism? [26:02] It's very unclear.