"Walking MORAL HAZARD": All the EXPLOSIVE "Regime Change" reporting INSIDE Trump's W.H.

[0:00] Maggie Haverman, Jonathan Swan, now colleagues at the New York Times have teamed up to deliver [0:05] the most important look inside the Trump White House in the second term under the title [0:10] Regime Change Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. [0:15] They conducted over a thousand interviews for this book with Donald Trump granting them [0:21] an exclusive interview at the very last minute in March of this year as the book was headed [0:27] to publication. The interview was on a Monday in March. And three days before welcoming them [0:36] into the Oval Office, Donald Trump posted this on social media. [0:44] Maggie Haverman, just another sleazebag writer for the failing New York Times, insists on writing [0:50] false stories about me even though she fully knows and understands that the exact opposite [0:56] of anything she says is usually the truth. In any event, I'm thinking of adding [1:00] Maggott and some of her associates into my Florida-based lawsuit against the Times, which [1:06] very happily seems to be proceeding nicely. Thank you for your attention to this matter. [1:12] And so, how were these two reporters greeted in the Oval Office just three days after Donald [1:20] Trump spewed that vile poison at Maggie Haverman? Did he use that horrible nickname? Did he call [1:28] her a sleazebag? No. Trump entered the Oval Office from the corridor, connected to his private [1:37] dining room. He was in smiling salesman mode. Nice to see you, he said, gesturing for us all to sit [1:45] down opposite him at the desk. It was the 17th day of his war with Iran. 13 American service members had [1:51] already been killed, and more than 200 had been wounded. Thousands of Iranians were dead, including [1:58] the Ayatollah al-Khamenei. The Pentagon had already spent more than $15 billion, and the Strait of Hormuz [2:03] was largely closed, sending global oil prices surging. The day before, Trump had made a demand [2:08] for an international coalition of warships to secure the waterway, but few nations seemed interested in [2:14] helping. This was hardly surprising. Trump had spent the previous year mocking NATO, bypassing the United [2:19] Nations, and making clear that alliances were, in his view, either protection rackets or obstacles. [2:25] The nations he was now calling on for help were the same ones he had bullied with tariffs, [2:31] threatened with territorial claims, and cut out of major decisions like the one he had just made [2:36] to wage war against Iran. As he greeted us, the war seemed the furthest thing from Trump's mind. [2:43] On the Resolute Desk, instead of a map of the Middle East, were printouts of maple trees. [2:51] I'm ordering trees for the White House, Trump told us. I know how to buy good trees, maples. [2:56] Trump held out another printout. The headlines screamed, 339 billion all-time views of Trump TikToks. [3:04] Can you believe it? The president asked us. Then Trump showed us two final printouts, [3:09] rendering from different angles of the grand ballroom he was building on the White House grounds. [3:15] He was in a convivial mood. The structure would have 10 columns on one facade, he said, [3:20] modeled on the Roman style, and the other side would be inspired by Athens. He noted with evidence [3:25] satisfaction that the columns were larger than those of the Supreme Court. Behind the scenes, [3:31] some of his aides, had told us they wished Trump was more anxious about the dangers he was courting [3:37] and about his plunging poll numbers. The president's pollster, Tony Fabrizio, [3:41] summarized findings from two nights of focus groups conducted earlier in March. The first fell [3:46] on the very same day we sat looking at Trump's maple tree printouts in the Oval Office. The results [3:52] were bracing. The war in Iran was unpopular, poorly understood, and seen as a broken campaign promise [3:58] that was distracting the president from the economy and health care. The military action lacked a clear [4:04] rationale, and voters saw negative economic consequences downstream of the conflict, [4:10] compounding the affordability crisis that was already their top concern about the Trump presidency, [4:15] perhaps most distressing for the Trump team. The Epstein files came up consistently in focus groups [4:22] and were a real negative with some of these voters. But Trump was uninterested in such feedback to the [4:29] extent he still cared about polling at all. He was seeing far fewer polls than during his first term. [4:36] His advisers knew he was not receptive to being briefed on harsh realities. In his second term, [4:41] unlike his first, he was willing to take breathtaking risks, risks that could throw not only his presidency, [4:47] but the Republican Party and the entire world into chaos and carnage more than ever before as president, [4:53] he was operating on pure gut instinct. It would take a combination of mind reader and psychologist [4:59] to explain fully why Trump was willing to gamble so much more recklessly now. There were obvious [5:06] theories. He was term limited and no longer had to worry about re-election. He had immunity confirmed by [5:12] the Supreme Court and no longer had to worry about prosecutions. He was more confident in his instincts. [5:17] He had already served a presidential term and had felt vindicated so often. And there was the fact [5:22] that he was a walking moral hazard, rarely saddled for long with the costs or consequences of his [5:29] risk-taking and rule-breaking. Now was his moment to try things like military adventures and overthrowing [5:37] the global trade system. Joining us now, New York Times Pulitzer Prize winning correspondent Maggie Haberman [5:43] and her co-author, New York Times reporter Jonathan Swan, whose new book is Regime Change [5:48] inside the imperial presidency of Donald Trump. Maggie, I have to begin with you. And what is going on with you [5:57] and Donald Trump? The world wonders about this because we've seen for years these vicious and that last, I apologize [6:05] for reading that one, but I had to set that stage for our audience. The viciousness of that three days before you walk into the Oval Office. [6:13] Did you already have the Oval Office appointment booked when he wrote that? [6:18] We did. And it was actually the first time that there had been one of those in some time. And thank you again for having us, Lawrence, [6:24] and talking about the reporting for this book, which we really broke ourselves working on and are quite proud of. [6:30] The only way that I can describe that action is a hip check, right, ahead of this interview. [6:36] He was essentially trying to lay down a marker. Some people told us that people we had fact checked different material [6:43] with had gotten him spun up and in a heated mood about what he might get asked about. [6:48] And so he was laying down a warning flag. And we have we've both been on the receiving end of attacks from him. [6:53] He is, in my view, a subject I cover. You know, we have spoken to him in the course of our daily reporting during news events [7:04] and at either press conferences or on Air Force One or so forth. [7:09] But we have actually spent very little time talking directly to him during this presidency. [7:16] And that's that is a choice that we have made for a variety of reasons. [7:20] But he has a specific fascination with The New York Times. And you know that we've seen it over and over again. [7:25] And I think just in his mind, he associates me with it. [7:29] But for whatever reason, you know, he never totally closes the door with anybody. [7:35] And for our purposes, we had fact checking questions we needed to ask him and we needed to give him an opportunity to respond to. [7:42] But we did not want it to be sort of open mic night in that kind of an interview where he was just going to pontificate. [7:48] We asked a series of detailed questions and and he answered most of them. [7:53] So when you started at The New York Post, what was your first interaction with Donald Trump as a reporter? [7:59] Yeah, I've actually tried remembering my first one. [8:03] I mean, the first clip that I have a byline on where he's quoted, I don't think it was me who spoke to him. [8:10] I think it was there were three other names on the story and it was after a Swiss Air plane crash. [8:15] And he told whoever it was among us that had spoken to him that he had just gotten off the phone with one of the people who had been identified as having been killed in this crash. [8:26] And it was I think it was a Swiss watchmaker or something. [8:29] And he said that he was he was just about to start doing a product line with this person. [8:34] I don't know whether that was true. [8:36] It's obviously can't be verified. [8:38] But he was in the ether. [8:41] We you know, he did. [8:42] I was covering the rebuilding of the World Trade Center and he did this plan about how he would unveiled something, how he was going to rebuild it exactly like it was. [8:48] He did not own anything connected to the site, but he did want to be associated with it. [8:55] When I started covering him most rigorously was in 2011, very end of 2010 and beginning of 2011 when he was looking at running for president. [9:05] And that was the year that he started talking about birtherism in the middle of this this proto campaign or pseudo campaign. [9:13] And he watched his poll numbers take off. [9:15] And it's and the year later was the first time they ever attacked me on Twitter. [9:20] It's just what he does. [9:22] So it's it's been a long, very similar ride, Lawrence. [9:26] But I will tell you that I did a piece with Ben Smith when I was a political in 2011 about what Trump was doing and whether he was serious and whether he might run. [9:35] And so much of that piece could have run at any point from 2011 until 2020. [9:40] And one of the things that we talk about in this book is how much of this term has become the result of hubris of his belief that he can get through any situation because he has before. [9:52] But what you're seeing right now, particularly with Iran, is that he has a limited number of of of tricks, right? [9:59] He has a limited number of of tools in this kit and it's coming up against reality and the limits of what he can bend it to. [10:07] Jonathan, where were you when you read that social that's true social thing on Friday about Maggie? [10:16] And what did you feel when you were reading that? [10:18] He's done it so much that we were both expecting something. [10:26] We knew something was going to come before the interview. [10:28] There was no way. I mean, firstly, is it at the point where you laugh at this? [10:33] Is there any sting in it when you read it? [10:35] I mean, the words are so ugly. [10:37] He's been calling me maggot since my last book came out. [10:42] I mean, literally since it actually hadn't published yet. [10:45] And so it's been like half a dozen times or something like that. [10:49] I mean, you know, it's you get a flurry of texts of people saying, did you see this? [10:54] And yes, I saw it because I get alerts for. [10:56] And you get a lot of threats. You do. I mean, after I interviewed him in 2020, it was, you know, an inundation. [11:02] We don't talk about it publicly because you don't want to encourage people. [11:05] But, you know, we've had we've had to deal with that. [11:09] There's no question about it. [11:14] And a crucial meeting leading up to Donald Trump's war in Iran. [11:17] Donald Trump dismissed warnings about the Strait of Hormuz. [11:21] When Trump joined the meeting, Radcliffe briefed him on the U.S. intelligence assessment of Netanyahu's presentation. [11:28] The CIA director used one word to describe the Israeli prime minister's regime change scenario. Farcical. [11:37] At that point, Rubio cut in. In other words, it's bullshit, he said. [11:43] Several others jumped in, including Vance, just back from Azerbaijan, who also expressed strong skepticism about the prospect of regime change. [11:52] The president then turned to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Cain. [11:56] General, what do you think? Cain replied, sir, this is, in my experience, standard operating procedure for the Israelis. [12:02] They oversell and their plans are not always well developed. [12:06] They know they need us. And that's why they're hard selling. [12:10] Cain shared with Trump and members of the cabinet the military assessment that a major campaign against Iran would dramatically deplete stockpiles of American weaponry with no clear path to quickly replenish. [12:23] He was deeply worried about both the potential for significant American casualties and the further depletion of munitions and missile interceptors strained after years of support for Ukraine and Israel. [12:35] He also flagged enormous difficulty of securing the strait of Hormuz and the risks of Iran shutting the strait, a scenario Trump dismissed on the assumption that the regime would capitulate before it came to that. [12:55] New York Times, Meggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan are back with us. [12:59] Their new book is Regime Change Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. [13:05] So in this passage, it looks pretty clear who's to blame for the strategic blunder closing the strait of Hormuz. [13:12] Donald Trump was warned by, as you just laid out, his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of all of these potential outcomes. [13:20] Again, this was not some secret. [13:23] The strait of Hormuz and the possibility of it closing has been in Pentagon wargaming scenario for years and years and years. [13:30] It's hard to think that there's ever been a war that or a conflict that America has entered based on anything. [13:39] It was really just a gut impulse from Donald Trump. [13:42] He felt that this regime was a paper tiger, that this was going to be a fast war. [13:47] He just said he felt that that was going to be the case, that they were going to collapse very quickly. [13:51] And so you ask yourself all these questions, you know, as we were doing our reporting, we've obtained a lot of classified information about the number of munitions that America has. [14:01] We have spent down our critical stockpiles to an alarming extent. [14:04] And so you ask yourself, how did this happen? [14:07] How did we get into this war where, you know, we're running out of critical munitions, the strait is closed, the gas prices. [14:14] And then we do all this reporting. [14:16] We go into the, you know, dig into these rooms. [14:18] And it turns out, well, if you assume the war is going to last sweet F.A., you know, no time at all, that's it. [14:26] I mean, it's a form of magical thinking, actually, is what it all boils down to. [14:31] Except for very real consequences. [14:33] Here's another piece of magical thinking. [14:35] This is from the book. [14:37] Trump said he thought Gaza's two million residents would be happy to evacuate their uninhabitable homeland. [14:43] They could return eventually, he suggested, once the war-turned strip was transformed into the Riviera of the Middle East. [14:51] The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it, too, he announced. [14:56] We'll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site. [15:04] Level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings. [15:07] Level it out. [15:08] Legitimately nutso, one senior aide said later, but very on brand. [15:16] The Gaza idea represented the spur-of-the-moment nature of Trump's foreign policy that many had feared. [15:23] Maggie, that line, legitimately nutso, is so important for readers and for the audience to know about. [15:31] Because this time, this term, the Trump team has been publicly unified. [15:38] We don't see the cracks. [15:39] We don't see, we never hear that person. [15:42] After we see Trump do something, many of us might think that's legitimately nutso. [15:48] We don't know there are people in the White House thinking the same thing. [15:51] This is a group of people who genuinely want to see him succeed, Lawrence. [15:55] I mean, I think that is something that is just so fundamentally different from term one. [15:59] And I think it is hard for people to understand because people got so used to term one, [16:04] where a man who had never run for city council before becomes president. [16:08] He doesn't know most of his government. He doesn't know most of his White House. [16:12] He is working with a very small group of people who he actually knows and two family members. [16:16] And that's really it. [16:18] He has people in his government who view his worldview and his behavior as dangerous and in need of a check, [16:25] whether it is John Kelly or James Mattis or on and on and on. [16:30] There are people who were opposed to his agenda. [16:33] There were also people who believed that he was trying to exceed his authority, [16:36] which were people who still liked him or who were conservatives. [16:40] There's none of that now. [16:42] And he touched the hot stove in 2017 of firing James Comey and got a special counsel investigation. [16:48] That's also off the table now. [16:50] You have people who were with him through four indictments, a number of civil cases, two assassination attempts, [16:58] and him winning overwhelmingly, unlike 2016. [17:03] And so they believe there is something sort of almost mystical about him, [17:08] that he can hear frequencies that maybe they can't. [17:11] And they hate the mainstream media more than they hate things they, you know, see him doing that they have concerns about, [17:20] many of them anyway. [17:21] And so you will not hear as much of that. [17:24] You haven't heard as much of that. [17:25] That's part of what the challenge was with reporting this book, was getting... [17:30] Well, you certainly report a lot of dissent inside the White House and disagreements with what Donald Trump's deciding. [17:36] We do. [17:37] We also show areas where there is not process, but there is certainly an effort to try to make his plans work. [17:45] I would say the tariff implementation of Liberation Day was one of those. [17:50] We were really struck in the reporting, and we show this in the book, how scared people inside that government were, [17:57] how scared people inside that White House were. [18:00] First, in the lead up to Liberation Day, when they could not get him off of what he wanted to do, [18:04] this was a 40-year project that he just wanted to try. [18:08] And they were scared at how close the bond markets came to just completely melting down seven days later, [18:14] which was finally what got him off of it. [18:17] But again, it was the willingness to just go straight to the brink. [18:20] But then he stopped. [18:22] And so they all believe that he can get himself out of certain situations, and he believes it. [18:28] What you are seeing now, though, Lawrence, and I think that if people really do want to understand how this government works, [18:34] I do think this book will help them do that. [18:36] What is happening in these rooms? [18:38] Where would this goes from here is you have a president who even there are disagreements, [18:43] even if they want to see him succeed, there are people who believe that, say, habeas corpus should not be suspended. [18:50] And there are people who say, let's do it. I think we can. And we'll see where it goes. [18:56] Trump doesn't really want to hear from the people anymore who say maybe this can't work. [19:02] He really wants to do what he wants to do. [19:04] And that is also something we are hearing inside this government. [19:07] And so when you see him putting Bill Pulte in place as a director of national intelligence now [19:13] and essentially going in with a mission to fire people, a lot of what we write about in this book will help people understand how that happened. [19:20] Joining the conversation, we have New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman [19:26] and New York Times White House reporter Jonathan Swan. [19:29] They are co-authors of the new book out today titled Regime Change Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. [19:38] And what a book it is. [19:41] It's incredible. [19:42] I spent the last week reading it and it really kind of encapsulates everything. [19:47] And, you know, the thing about it is, Maggie, and we talked about this before the book, talking about it. [19:53] A lot of these books will have like five or six stories that people will gasp about and they'll make big headlines and it's good reporting. [20:02] But this is sort of it's more thematic. [20:05] It's not just sort of a look what this happened in the White House on this state and isn't this shocking. [20:11] You read through it and you start picking up these themes and you actually start putting your arms around all the chaos of the first year. [20:18] Yeah. One of the things that really struck us as we were reporting this book and this book took us an enormous amount of effort to quote my colleague. [20:28] No, we're not in Fallujah, but this was a lot of hard work because this is a different White House, really unrecognizable in so many ways to the first term. [20:38] And one of those ways is they do try to keep information from getting out. [20:44] They do have this sort of bubble of information around them, you know this well, much more than before. [20:49] And so this was a huge intensive effort to show readers and take you inside how this government works, not just here was this moment, here is something that happened. [21:00] But if you want to understand how this administration is functioning, if you want to understand how decisions are made, if you want to understand the small group of people who are running this government and what this could mean going forward. [21:15] This is, I think, the best effort that you can have right now. [21:21] It's obviously the first draft of history. There will be much more to be written about this period, but you do see that it is a White House that is much more invested in him. [21:30] It is an administration that is much more invested in him than in term one. [21:34] He is operating on gut instinct in a way that surpasses really anything that we saw in his first term. [21:41] And a lot of what we've seen is some of what he was hoping to do in term one. [21:45] But it is a story of hubris and buying into the idea that this one person actually could do things that nobody else could. [21:54] And you are sort of seeing the bill coming due for that right now in Iran. [21:57] It's a story of Jonathan that you guys tell of really no process in so many major decisions. [22:04] And I could name five, six, seven, eight, ten examples of him just going through and just throwing numbers off the top of his head for tariffs or just making decisions that people like, wait, wait, what did he do? [22:19] What did he say? What are we? But the best example of it was when he decided to check tariffs up to one hundred twenty five percent against China. [22:26] Then China, she just sat there and said, OK, no rare earth minerals for you. [22:31] No magnets, no this, no that. And Trump panics and he goes, OK, we got to do something about it. [22:37] What did what did we put the rate at? And somebody said one hundred twenty five percent sorry. [22:41] He goes, holy shit. He didn't remember. [22:45] And that's just one example for people said, oh, you're just picking that. [22:49] No, it happens time and time again where he just like it's all from the gut. [22:54] There's no process. And again, that's why we go into Iran when any expert would have told him not to do that. [23:03] Well, it's two things. So on the tariff situation, it's a great example because this is something he's thought about for years, talked about trade. [23:12] You know, it's this thing he's sort of had, but never really had a developed economic theory of how this would work. [23:19] But he has believed in this. For sure. Since 1988. [23:24] But at a sort of gut, fairly superficial level and was always restrained in term one. [23:30] You had people like Gary Cohn saying, no, this is terrible. He did some tariffs. [23:33] They were fairly targeted and narrow. But there was a meeting early on where they're talking about tariffs on Mexico and Canada. [23:40] And Trump says, what are we doing for China? And someone says, you know, we should probably do some analysis. [23:44] And he says, put them in for 10. Put them in for 10. [23:47] Right. Like last minute. [23:48] Put them in for 10. That's literally a quote in an office meeting. [23:51] And of course, then, you know, Xi Jinping did not back down. [23:54] He had prepared very, Xi Jinping had prepared very deliberately for this Trump term and it ratcheted up and up and up. [24:01] And before he knew it, he was in a massive trade war with essentially an embargo against China. [24:07] Mm hmm. Mm hmm. [24:09] So Maggie, I mean, you have covered Donald Trump closely for many, many years. [24:13] You're talking about some of the difference between the first term and the second term. [24:16] We see them on the public season out of the open, just beginning with the people he surrounds himself with, [24:21] that Fox News hosts have big and important jobs. [24:24] But from your point of view, from the inside, just how different is this time around from the first term? [24:31] This is a group of people who genuinely believe in him. [24:34] These are people who in many ways got radicalized by the investigations into him, by the assassination attempts that he faced. [24:43] Watching him get he's the he's the first sitting president who in the U.S. was a convicted felon. [24:49] And, you know, he is still obviously trying to get that appealed. [24:53] But they were in these court fights with him and watching him still win and watching him win overwhelmingly and watching their data prove to be right. [25:03] Mm hmm. [25:04] Basically informed their view of how they were going to function, which is a he was denied things that he wanted last time by people who either saw him as dangerous or at least in need of being curbed in some way. [25:17] And remember, he had never run for city council and much less president. [25:21] He wins on the first shot. [25:22] He has no familiarity with the federal government outside of lobbying for, you know, contracts or lobbying for grant funding or things like that. [25:33] And he expects the world to function kind of like a municipal government. [25:37] Right. And that is what he knows in New York. [25:40] He didn't know most of his government last time. [25:42] He didn't know most of his White House last time. [25:44] Trump's use of power for the purpose of retribution. [25:48] Mm hmm. [25:49] And so talk to us a little bit of whether it's it's Jerome. [25:52] We have some remarkable scenes in here about, you know, Trump being frustrated. [25:57] Todd Blanche wanted to make Letitia James life miserable that he wanted to go after and very colorful language. [26:02] Jerome Powell. [26:03] Talk to us about how we've never seen a president use the levers of government for his own personal agenda to carry out revenge. [26:09] So Watergate happens. [26:12] And after Watergate, there is a societal decision that we need to put in some reforms and that as a matter of prudence, not as a matter of law, it makes sense that the Justice Department operates independently from the White House when it comes to investigations. [26:30] And again, what these guys will say is, well, the Constitution says they brought the president. [26:36] Of course, that's that's technically true as a matter of prudence and as a matter of the country. [26:41] Do you really want the president of the United States saying that guy, that guy that I hate? [26:47] I want you to investigate. [26:49] But that's literally what's happening. [26:51] Of course, I think that's what happened. [26:53] I mean, I mean, let's face it. [26:54] One thing that your book did bring out is like Letitia James ran and one of her political promises was she was going to investigate Donald Trump. [27:01] I won't speak for you all, but I still and I said it at the time. [27:05] I still don't get the Alvin Bragg charges against Donald Trump. [27:09] So obviously, I do understand the classified documents case, but you guys bring out the fact that I mean, he he feels like a martyr and everybody around him feels like a martyr. [27:23] And you say he was facing economic Armageddon weeks away from having to pay three hundred and fifty million. [27:29] I mean, it really did. And then the assassination attempt, it really that has been part of building this sort of godlike, as you all say, this godlike wall around him with his supporters. [27:43] All of that's true, but in terms of the effect of it. [27:47] But the fact is, there is no evidence that Joe Biden was directing any of Merrick Garland's activities. [27:54] In fact, quite the opposite. [27:55] They were extremely frustrated with Merrick Garland because he didn't move quickly enough. [27:59] Same thing with Bragg and James. [28:01] But you raised something really interesting, which is the pain is sort of the point. [28:06] He Trump, you know, people say, oh, they haven't been that, quote unquote, successful in the sense that, well, you know, some of these people, these people are not in jail yet. [28:15] John John Bolton was obviously being charged. [28:18] But for Trump's mind, and he has said this to people, he just wants them to go through the process, the pain of being investigated, the pain of being prosecuted. [28:28] That's enough, actually. [28:30] Of course, he would love them to go to jail as well. [28:32] But the fact that Letitia James has to go through this herself, the fact that Comey, you know, is stressed out about all this, that is emotional sustenance for him. [28:42] Wow. [28:43] Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, the authors of Regime Change, which is one of those books that had many different headlines and excerpts in The New York Times. [28:51] One was about what seemed like, frankly, a panic inside the White House over Epstein as they failed to control that story. [29:00] That was a big theme in the first year. [29:02] Reading from the book, Trump and J.D. Vance, who spent a lot of time on X, you know, and were tapped into a younger and hyper online portion of the base, were very worried. [29:10] They urged the White House to change course and to force the DOJ to release more of the files. [29:14] But there was one major obstacle in the path of the solution. [29:17] The president himself had no interest in transparency. [29:21] He wanted the whole Epstein issue buried and snapping at anyone who mentioned it. [29:25] Maggie, what does the inside story tell us about how concerned Trump was about this issue? [29:33] That the guys criticized a lot. [29:35] The guys obviously stared down and come back from all kinds of things. [29:38] And this seemed to be huge. [29:40] And also tell us about the situation room. [29:43] Sure. [29:44] That was one of these issues, Ari, that Trump just — he had gotten so used to his base listening to him say, [29:50] what I say is true, what those people are saying is not true. [29:53] And he just couldn't make it disappear. [29:55] So he kept calling it a Democratic hoax. [29:57] It was, you know, it was all concocted. [29:59] As we say in the book, he didn't want to talk about this at all. [30:02] He wanted it gone. [30:03] And so that left his aides — and we're not — you know, I'm not defending this or saying, yes, this was right. [30:08] I'm just saying this was their view — that left his advisers with the choice of, [30:13] how do we deal with something where the president doesn't want anything out? [30:16] And that led us to report on a handful of specific situation room meetings. [30:23] The White House Situation Room, which is this, you know, essentially like a no-cell-phone sanctuary [30:29] where wars had been planned and discussed, where raids of, you know, Osama bin Laden, [30:36] where he was killed, was monitored by President Obama. [30:39] In this case, it became an Epstein crisis comms center, in part because they were worried about leaks. [30:45] But you had the top levels of the White House, the top levels of the DOJ and the FBI [30:50] talking about what their options are. [30:53] There was this remarkable meeting that we wrote about in August [30:56] where they were talking about releasing a public-facing website [30:59] put together by the DOJ of all things Epstein. [31:02] The question was, what about Donald Trump and things related to Donald Trump? [31:06] And so one aide had searched Trump's name and up popped this uncorroborated secondhand claim [31:11] that had been public for a year and a half in an unrelated case. [31:14] A civil case. [31:16] That Trump allegedly abused some woman's nipples and the abuse was visible. [31:23] They were very swollen and looked painful. [31:25] And the aide said, this is out there. [31:28] And the vice president, who wanted everything out, said, you know, [31:31] I think he'd be fine with it. [31:32] He'd been accused of worse. [31:34] And the White House chief of staff said, no, no, he would not be fine with it. [31:37] But that was the end of that conversation about this public-facing website that didn't happen. [31:41] So it was remarkable for the fact that they were attempting very hard to keep this very quiet and private [31:49] and deal with this situation that only grew bigger. [31:52] And the fact that because of their own resistance or that every path was blocked by Trump not wanting anything out. [32:01] This issue has lingered and remained a real problem for them politically, which polling shows, including their own private polling that we lay out in the book. [32:09] And, Jonathan, when you look at that story in your reporting, who was it around Trump and the White House that figured out there's a gap? [32:19] The gap between what they were willing to give up and the accountability, the demands of their base was too wide a gap to bridge. [32:26] I mean, we ultimately got the law because they mishandled it so poorly. [32:29] Right. [32:30] That's one of the only issues where the Congress has overridden Trump on a bipartisan basis. [32:35] Right. [32:36] Well, many of his senior officials of Trump senior officials underestimated the political potency of Epstein. [32:45] And, you know, to be fair, they had endured all kinds of scandals in their time working for Donald Trump. [32:51] So you can see why they thought this would blow over. [32:53] The two people internally who really were most adamant about getting Epstein transparency and putting it out there and trying to get on top of this issue were the vice president, who the White House chief of staff described to others as a conspiracy theorist on Epstein, and Dan Bongino, the deputy FBI director, who in his previous life as a podcaster had talked about Epstein and the need to get to the bottom of it. [33:20] He was very aggressive internally and actually we report in the book there was a pretty astonishing blow up between him and the attorney general Pam Bondi and then again him storming out of the White House situation room after a meeting with the chief of staff. [33:35] So those two were really the most aggressive, but many of them underestimated us. [33:40] And, you know, the thing we found, which was kind of stunning to Trump's aides was even this year in their private, you know, in their confidential memos from Trump's chief pollster, it's still popping through in their focus groups. [33:55] Voters are just bringing up this issue and they found, Trump's own team found that it ranks above issues like crime and data centers and some really politically salient issues. [34:06] Epstein is still cutting through from their perspective to an alarming extent. [34:12] Number one, true. [34:14] Number two, you got to be really in the weeds to be impressed by that data center comparison, Jonathan. [34:19] Bigger than, bigger than data centers. [34:22] Oh my God. [34:23] You said we were nerding it out. [34:24] That's what we're doing. [34:25] Data centers are big, man. [34:26] They are. [34:28] They're a big deal. [34:29] Yell it. [34:30] Yell it. [34:31] Data centers are big. [34:32] They're big, man. [34:33] They're big. [34:34] We're over on time, but Jonathan, on the other positive note, this applies to both of you, but I'll give the question to Jonathan. [34:39] People talk so much smack about the media and we can all learn and do better and take constructive criticism well, but what does it say to you that this book at one point was sold out on Amazon? [34:50] I know it was in back order, hundreds of thousands of copies, that real journalism reporting, talking to sources, reporting it out, still apparently matters to people. [35:00] And obviously it mattered because we saw a reaction from the government. [35:02] In brief, what does that say to you tonight? [35:04] I mean, it's very, it's very gratifying for anyone who believes in the value of journalism, that there is still a real hunger. [35:12] I think it's a hunger for people to understand what's going on, to put meaning around it, to really understand how the country is being run. [35:19] And we've, we've been, we've been overwhelmed by the response to the book. [35:23] We're joined now by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, the White House reporters for The New York Times, who I just quoted in some of this lead. [35:31] They're co-authors of the book I mentioned, Regime Change Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. [35:36] Welcome to both of you. [35:38] Maggie, when you look at just some of what's going on today, including how President Trump is approaching the world stage, [35:45] from matters significant like war and NATO to what some would say optional clashes, like whether to intervene in the World Cup. [35:52] What, from your reporting, the many sources you spoke to, sort of informs or gives us a lens for, for what we're seeing? [35:59] So, you mentioned the title of the book as a double entendre, Ariane, again, thank you for having us. [36:05] We'd actually thought of this title long before Trump went into Caracas to snatch Nicolas Maduro, [36:11] because it occurred to us early on in the presidency that what we were covering was a former regime change in our own country, [36:18] a form of a different kind of American-style democracy. [36:23] This was not a Democrat to a Republican marginal policy. [36:27] Trump is expanding executive power in massive, massive, massive ways, [36:32] sometimes affirmed by the Supreme Court, sometimes not, but he has taken a lot of big swings. [36:37] And in cases like you just mentioned, for instance, with the revenge prosecutions, [36:42] the process is actually intended to be the punishment, and we talk about that in the book, number one. [36:47] Number two, on Iran, he is operating on gut, as you say, in a way that we really didn't see in term one. [36:56] This was a decision that he made, despite the fact that nobody in his government thought it was a good idea. [37:01] He's now angry. [37:02] As you say, he didn't make a case to the public about why they should be with him, [37:06] because he believed this was going to end quickly, based on a feeling, based on his impulse. [37:13] And he was very clear about that with people. [37:15] And you are now seeing the result of that. [37:16] Yeah, Jonathan, Maggie mentions it, and the book really makes the evidence-backed case [37:23] that separate from ideology and red-blue, which we hear so much about, [37:29] that the second term under this president is experimenting with or ramming home [37:36] a different way to run the federal government, that's structurally, in terms of where power operates, [37:43] how little can really meaningfully be done at the cabinet or expert level without the president, [37:48] at least on his chosen issues. [37:50] Can you tell us more about that? [37:51] Because it is distinct from so much of the ideological discourse around Trump. [37:57] Yeah, I mean, it's a very complicated story, and there are so many elements to it. [38:02] But I'll just give you one example from, you mentioned it in your introduction. [38:07] We've all sort of memory-holed Doge. [38:11] You know, we've sort of forgotten about Doge. [38:14] But for a few months last year, Trump essentially appointed Elon Musk as a sort of co-president, [38:22] the richest man in the world who had not divested from any of his business interests, [38:28] who was placing people throughout the government. [38:32] And yes, he didn't, you know, a lot of the stuff that he wanted to do didn't get done. [38:37] But I'll just give you one example of something that did get done. [38:40] And again, people don't really even talk about it anymore. [38:43] It's been, you know, consumed with so many other issues. [38:47] USAID, a government agency designed to help the world's poorest people, foreign aid, [38:54] set up by Congress. [38:56] They just shut it down. [38:58] They didn't talk to Congress. [38:59] They didn't talk to anyone. [39:00] They just shut it down essentially over a weekend. [39:03] Musk did. [39:04] Rubio, the Secretary of State, wasn't even really that involved in that. [39:07] He had to take over the remnants of USAID. [39:10] Most of its functions have been disappeared. [39:14] You know, the sort of the dregs of it has been absorbed into the State Department. [39:18] That's one example. [39:19] I could go through, you know, endless examples. [39:22] But the macro story is Congress, an entire branch of government last year, [39:29] led by Republicans, essentially just seeded the field. [39:32] And so that, as a check on Trump, just essentially evaporated. [39:37] You're seeing a little bit of it now come back with the Senate, but, you know, only a little bit. [39:41] And the only institution that the Trump team have really respected and not, you know, defied or tried to bulldoze is the Supreme Court. [39:51] But at the lower court level, they've ignored tons of rulings. [39:56] You know, people have documented this in the immigration space in particular. [40:00] People have been languishing in these detention centers, not getting hearings. [40:04] And so it's not just that he's ignoring or bulldozing norms. [40:08] They're actually really stretching the law in very significant ways. [40:14] In their new book, Regime Change, Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, [40:18] New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan write, quote, [40:22] One morning, Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt entered the Oval Office to find Donald Trump clutching a tube of superglue [40:29] and attempting to affix gold's decorations to the marble fireplace mantle. [40:34] As he was known to prefer his own aesthetic candy work to anyone else's. [40:38] I can understand that, honestly. [40:39] The sight of the president squeezing glue onto gilded appliques and mounting them on the wall himself surprised no one in his inner circle. [40:47] Joining us now are the authors of that book, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. [40:52] Thank you both for joining us this morning. [40:54] Just to use a phrase Eugene likes to use, we want to give you guys your flowers. [40:58] Yes, yes. [40:59] I know there's been lots of celebrations, but we're going to give you our own. [41:02] This book is a feat and a defining tome of the Trump administration and this man who has risen to power and held on to it for so long. [41:14] So congratulations and thank you for making time for us. [41:16] Maggie, we're going to start with you. [41:22] There's been some news last night. [41:23] Some of your colleagues were subpoenaed. [41:26] I'm honestly, quite frankly, surprised that you and Jonathan haven't been attacked as aggressively as this administration has done to other outlets so far [41:37] when they have seen unfavorable reporting that does not shine the most positive light on the president and his staff. [41:45] Can you talk to us a little bit about what happened yesterday and what the impetus for this attack on journalists, just the latest, was caused by? [41:54] Our colleagues who wrote about President Trump's Air Force One departure from Turkey, he flew in on the Qatari plane that is now retrofitted to be the new Air Force One. [42:06] He left on the old Air Force One and our colleagues reported, as others have, that the Secret Service suggested it. [42:14] Yesterday, they reported that there were the new plane does not have the same equipment that, you know, defensive equipment that the old one does. [42:22] And several of our colleagues were subpoenaed yesterday. [42:27] And it's unfortunately not the first time that we have seen the Trump administration try to intimidate journalists doing their job. [42:33] The federal agents showed up at their doors. [42:36] Yeah, using subpoenas or federal agents going to their homes, and at least in one case that we know of in The Washington Post, searching their homes. [42:44] And, you know, they were doing their job. [42:47] They were informing the public. [42:50] This is what is going on with the president and what is going on with the safety of the president aboard a taxpayer-paid-for plane, despite all the claims that it was free, is a public's right to know. [43:03] There are White House staff and journalists aboard those planes as well. [43:07] And, fortunately, The New York Times has made clear it's going to vigorously defend its journalists. [43:14] We also published this at MSNOW. [43:16] And since we published our story, the White House commented on it, calling it, quote, fake news, but did not offer a denial or additional details, as they often don't. [43:25] I want to bring you in here, Jonathan Swan. [43:27] I also want to find a way to get you some new headphones, because those are just for television, my friend. [43:34] Why is it people saying this about the headphones? [43:36] I like it. [43:37] I saw someone tweet them. [43:38] I think they're fine. [43:39] Everyone needs a thing. [43:41] Everyone's like grabbing on their headphones. [43:42] This is a good thing. [43:43] Just a little earbud. [43:44] You're too fast. [43:45] You're too fabulous with a big old headphones. [43:48] Some Jonathan solidarity. [43:49] Exactly. [43:50] Send me something. [43:51] Send me something, Eugene. [43:52] We are not in the room. [43:53] I will. [43:54] So the thing about, there are a lot of things within your guys' book, which was just fabulous, that for somebody reading it, they can be like, oh, this is silly. [44:05] Like the gluing, Donald Trump running around gluing the things around the Oval Office. [44:10] But I think it tells you a lot about him. [44:12] I think that's what you guys are so good at within this book. [44:14] And as a reporter, what was great for me with this book is a reminder that Donald Trump isn't actually that complicated of a person. [44:24] And he's much more simple than I think a lot of folks want to think about it. [44:29] Like the things that move him are kind of simple. [44:32] He focuses on a couple of things. [44:34] Everyone else is doing the rest of the work. [44:36] And I'm curious, as you watch coverage and as you're thinking about, like, what's going to happen next, if you could even think about that, that aspect of him as kind of a person who operates by id and how important that is to understanding who this man is. [44:51] Yeah. So, I mean, what we tried to do in the book was tackle the big, weighty issues. [44:57] You know, we have deep reporting and coverage in the book of the profit making that the Trump family has been doing off the presidency. [45:08] We go into ICE. [45:09] We go into foreign policy, whatever. [45:12] But we also want to show Iran, you know, Epstein, whatever. [45:17] But we also want to show what life is actually like inside the White House and inside the residence. [45:23] And, you know, some of the more, I guess you would say, intimate details of what that life is like. [45:29] And the truth is, uncomfortable for some people to acknowledge, but the president is spending an inordinate amount of his time and his mental energy on redecoration. [45:42] He just is. [45:44] It's what's on his mind. [45:45] When Maggie and I walked into the Oval Office, finally, at the end of this process for an interview with him on March 16th, 17th day of the war with Iran, you know, Americans had already died, service members. [45:57] And what was on his desk? [46:00] Photographs of maple trees. [46:02] And he holds them up. [46:03] He says, I'm buying maple trees for the White House. [46:05] And then what's under that? [46:07] Photographs of the ballroom. [46:09] And he starts talking about how one side is inspired by Athens. [46:12] The other side is inspired by Greece. [46:15] Sorry, by Rome, the size of the columns, you know, what have you. [46:20] So it's just a fact. [46:21] He's spending an inordinate amount of time on that. [46:23] But there's a more important point, which is what we try to explain in the book, and it really became apparent to us, you know, even in more stark terms towards the end of our reporting process, is Donald Trump's mindset this term is very different from term one. [46:40] In term one, he was very reactive to domestic politics. [46:44] If the polls changed, you know, there would be, you know, those of you who covered him understand he would frequently change course. [46:52] This time around, he's playing for what he regards as how can I be a great man of history. [46:59] And that was really brought into stark relief when he handed Maggie and I, I mean, I'm not going to rehearse the whole scene, but you'll see it in the book. [47:07] But when he hands us this document, which compares his power favorably to people like Mao, Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Napoleon, and what have you, not on a moral sense, but just in raw power. [47:21] And so I think you start to see now his focus in the second term, taking big risks internationally to try to reshape the world. [47:30] You know, you see that in Venezuela, you see it in Iran, you might see it in Cuba. [47:34] We're seeing a lot of planning behind the scenes now with Cuba. [47:38] But you're also seeing it in the way that you set up in your introduction. [47:41] You're seeing it with him renaming things after him himself, building monuments essentially to himself. [47:48] So it's both domestically and foreign. [47:52] So, Maggie, speaking of spending his mental energy on a lot of these other things, this Eugene knows what's what's coming. [48:03] I wonder through all your reporting and all the seriousness and everything and everything. [48:09] I keep wondering about the president's mental acuity, particularly he is now older than he was in the first term. [48:17] He is now 80 years old, just at the NATO summit. [48:21] He talked about the Islamic Republic of Japan, the JCPOC, saying to the reporters, do you have a question for President Putin? [48:31] Had this happened in a previous administration, people would be saying the man is nuts. [48:36] He should he shouldn't be in office anymore. [48:38] When it comes to this president, given all the reporting that you and Jonathan have done, should the American people be concerned about the mental acuity of this president? [48:52] Well, what we've seen over time is that clearly a lot of people do have that concern. [48:57] You hear from people the same as we do. [48:59] His health is like a black box inside that administration, much more than almost any other issue. [49:06] And if there is an area of failure in the reporting for us, it was this in trying to not not mental per se, but just his health, how he is, why he has gone to Walter Reed several times. [49:17] And they have released less and less information. [49:19] We see what you see, which is he is 80, which is that he is clearly, you know, doesn't speak with the same crispness that he did 30 years ago, 20 years ago, 10 years ago, as people who turn 80, 10 not to. [49:33] Yeah, there was nothing I will say in our interview with him, which was a fact checking interview. [49:39] This is the one that Jonathan was referring to where we were handed the. [49:42] Which honestly, that seems worth the price of the book alone. [49:45] I. [49:45] How long was that? [49:46] It was an hour. [49:47] So actually, let me just let me let me set the scene for that just for a second. [49:51] And it does answer your question to some extent. [49:53] Just in terms of what we know, there was nothing that seemed unlike Donald Trump of who Jonathan and I have both been around a lot. [50:01] We had interviewed repeatedly. [50:03] There was nothing that felt, oh, this is unusual. [50:05] This is different. [50:06] It was actually quite the same. [50:08] Just, you know, Steve Bannon refers in the book to pure Trump. [50:11] And this was very much pure Trump. [50:13] But we walked in and after Jonathan was describing what had happened, you know, we had asked him about presidential power. [50:20] And he had described himself to somebody, a couple of people that, as far as we knew, maybe more than that, as the most powerful U.S. president who had ever existed. [50:32] And, you know, we were in a new war after he had campaigned on no new wars. [50:36] So we wanted to hear what he would say if we put that question to him. [50:38] And what we got was this two pager that Jonathan referenced, which he described as being written by a historian. [50:44] Historian who was a friend of Gary Player, the golfer. [50:46] He had his aide, Natalie Harp, go get the. [50:48] So she hands us these two pagers. [50:52] She gives him one, too. [50:53] And he's just he's just reading it. [50:55] And he's reading what he describes as the top 10. [50:57] And it's history's, you know, conquerors and monsters, frankly, Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, the Caesars. [51:07] And he says, because there's more than one Caesars, Tamerlane. [51:11] I'm missing someone. [51:12] But you get the point. [51:13] We got the idea. [51:14] You get the point. [51:14] And so and he's reveling in being in their company, as Jonathan was saying. [51:18] And that was the part that was so striking to me, frankly, and to Jonathan. [51:22] And it was this extraordinary moment, in particular, that the fact that he was talking about Hitler, you know, just again, it was not an immoral component. [51:30] But often when people have raised a Hitler comparison as a critique of him, which is not infrequent. [51:36] And you and I know that all three of us have seen it. [51:38] All four of us have seen it. [51:40] I was surprised he gets very reactive. [51:42] I was surprised to hear him just sort of, you know, reading this way. [51:47] You know, the coda is that it was not a historian. [51:49] It was Gary Player's former caddy and business associate. [51:53] Who reads a lot. [51:55] But, you know, the reality is that he wanted us to understand these folks have power. [52:01] I have more and I'm willing to use it. [52:03] And so that is the constant. [52:06] And, you know, Jonathan was making the point that he was more reactive in term one. [52:11] And that is very much what we, you know, found in our reporting for this book. [52:14] But there's a part of this that both of us, you know, and we've written this when he was at Axios, as of the Times. [52:23] Some of this is what he was preparing to do in 2020 had COVID not happened. [52:27] And you are now really seeing pure Trump. [52:30] So the mental acuity point is not one that I feel equipped to answer. [52:35] You know, and I don't think Jonathan does either. [52:37] But I think that people can very legitimately question whether 80-year-old people should be president. [52:43] And there are reasons for that. [52:45] But that's a different issue. [52:46] In this case, the subpoenas were not a last resort, which is typically what they're supposed to do when there is an alleged leak hunt. [52:55] They are, this time it came within 48 hours of the first story being published. [53:00] And less than that of the one about his plane not being fully equipped the way the current Air Force, real Air Force ones are, the ones that were commissioned by the military. [53:10] You are correct. [53:11] This was something that was quite known in Washington. [53:14] It was not a surprise, and the reason that the reporters were looking at the fact that he was flying a different plane was because he posted a true social comment about it, [53:23] about how he was taking the old one for old times' sake, which was a little hard to believe. [53:28] This is not just issuing subpoenas. [53:30] It's sending federal agents to people's homes, as you said. [53:32] The goal is very clearly intimidation. [53:35] It will now almost certainly be something that comes up in Jay Clayton's hearing and Todd Blanche's hearings this week. [53:41] The problem that senators have, Joe, to your question about Jay Clayton, is they have to decide whether they want Jay Clayton to be confirmed to take over, [53:51] or do they want to keep Bill Pulte in place, who they are more concerned about, as best as I can tell. [53:56] But this obviously complicates things this week. [53:59] Yeah. [53:59] Jonathan, one of the most remarkable of so many remarkable scenes in your book is when we go inside the Situation Room. [54:05] With your reporting, we find out that Todd Blanche is, in effect, trying to figure out how to cover up the Epstein files. [54:12] Now, you tell me, how do 50, 51 Republicans get to voting for a guy that was at the center of the Epstein file cover-up? [54:22] Well, it actually, those scenes just demonstrate that the wall that existed between the White House and the Justice Department [54:32] that was erected after Watergate, in terms of not having White House direction of Justice Department's actions [54:41] that veered into politics or into investigations of individuals. [54:46] One thing we've done a lot of reporting of, which we document in the book, is Trump has completely torn down that wall. [54:52] He gives directions, publicly and privately, to the Justice Department. [54:57] No one is in any confusion about who he wants prosecuted, who he wants investigated. [55:02] And the clock is ticking. [55:04] I mean, we have reporting one of the key reasons that he became dissatisfied with Pam Bondi, [55:10] who he's replacing, trying to replace with Todd Blanche, [55:13] is because he was dissatisfied with the speed of prosecutions of his enemies. [55:19] That was the number one thing. [55:20] It was not Epstein. It was not all the other things people expected. [55:23] It was simply that Trump wanted results, meaning people behind bars, people like James Comey, Letitia James, [55:30] all sorts of other people that he has on the enemies list. [55:34] So, Maggie, I want to get your thoughts about President Trump's relationship with Senator Lindsey Graham, [55:39] passed away suddenly over the weekend. [55:41] And, you know, they obviously had their ups and downs from the 2016 campaign. [55:45] But Graham had, you know, and then we saw another break after January 6th, [55:48] but Graham had become a reliable ally and advisor. [55:51] And, you know, as even as much as he's a shapeshifter in his political life, Graham was consistent. [55:56] He was trying to push Trump on Ukraine. [55:58] And also, you know, that's where he was hours before he died. [56:02] But also talk to us about the role he played in advocating taking the fight to Iran. [56:07] So it's really remarkable, actually, watching the White House's reaction to Lindsey Graham's passing. [56:15] It was utter shock, John. [56:16] And as you say, yes, he was a political shapeshifter. [56:19] You know, he ran against Trump quite famously. [56:22] I mean, one of the most memorable moments in 2015 was then-candidate Donald Trump reading Lindsey Graham's cell phone number out loud at a rally when they were fighting. [56:35] But Graham did become one of Trump's biggest Senate allies. [56:39] He was sort of a, you know, I think I heard you say earlier that he could make adjustments of Trump's behavior on the margins. [56:45] That was a great value to the White House, not just to the president. [56:49] And so when it came to Iran, Lindsey Graham was one of the people who very forcefully advocated, as you said, for aggression against Iran. [56:58] And he was consistent about that. [56:59] And he was consistent about that in the lead-up to the beginning of the war on February 28th earlier this year. [57:07] He was one of several hawkish voices who were in the president's ear. [57:12] You know, there were a number of people who were close to Benjamin Netanyahu, were in good relationships with him. [57:16] And Lindsey Graham was one of them who Trump was listening to. [57:19] I don't want to overstate it in the course of the lead-up to the war. [57:23] We make quite plain in our reporting in the book, and we've talked about this before, that it's more complicated than just that Trump was being puppeteered. [57:32] He also was much more hawkish on Iran than his own advisors wanted to see or than a lot of his supporters wanted to see. [57:39] And so it wasn't that much of a closed door for Graham with Trump in the lead-up to this aggression. [57:46] However, absent Graham, I do think it is going to become a little more complicated for Trump in terms of liaising to the Senate and certainly to Netanyahu. [57:56] Maggie, you have been covering Donald Trump literally for decades. [58:02] And as a younger man, he was always interested in pursuing fame and wealth. [58:09] The reporting in your book that you and Jonathan have put together is both astonishing and frightening, [58:17] especially given what's happened to the federal government during the Trump tenure. [58:22] In your estimation, what are the biggest differences between the Donald Trump of 10, 15 years ago and the Donald Trump of today? [58:31] It's a good question. [58:33] One of the reasons that we set out to write this book, you know, the way that it came out, this particular book, [58:40] we have been talking about writing one as the last act of Trump for several years, [58:44] and we had a contract starting in 2023 to write the book, but we ultimately focused it on this particular period [58:50] because we wanted people to understand how radically different this term is from term one. [58:57] That's not to say that Trump is a different person. [59:00] He is not, but he is a version of what Steve Bannon describes in the book as pure Trump. [59:05] And so I was listening when you were talking about how he was always about fame and about wealth and amassing both. [59:11] He's still about both of those things, but he is also about power, and he has always been about power. [59:17] And his ability to harness it now is pretty astonishing. [59:22] And one of the things that we are trying to make clear in this book is how his advisers, a very small group of them, [59:29] spent four years preparing for this term for how they could grab every lever of power, [59:35] how they could essentially cow other people, other lawmakers within their own party with their open about it. [59:41] They use the term iron fist, and they have. [59:44] The Senate is not a body that had really bowed to Donald Trump the same way. [59:48] In fact, Trump hates the Senate, and he's quite clear about that all the time. [59:51] But House Republicans are acting as an extension of the executive branch. [59:56] And so Trump is essentially unchecked for the last 15 months. [1:00:01] And one of the things that was remarkable when we went in to go see Trump in March of this year is he was quite open about that. [1:00:08] And the way in which he was open about it was presenting us with this incredible document listing, you know, [1:00:14] what he described as the top 10 of history's, you know, conquerors and monsters, Hitler, Mao, Stalin. [1:00:20] I mean, I can go on and on here. [1:00:21] You get the point. [1:00:23] He was not looking at it from a moral dimension. [1:00:25] He was looking at it from the dimension of, and this was somebody else's comparison to him, but he was enjoying it. [1:00:30] I don't know that he is going to have that same unchecked power for the next several months. [1:00:35] Clearly, his ability to bend around to his will is not working. [1:00:40] If they lose the House, I think things could look somewhat different, but I don't think it is going to look like 2019. [1:00:46] So is he different? [1:00:48] No. [1:00:49] He is just more of himself and more of the version that is solely focused on power and crushing enemies. [1:00:55] Jonathan, let's talk a bit more about that unchecked power and something that you mentioned earlier, [1:00:59] which is the breaking down of the firewall between the DOJ and the White House, [1:01:02] which I still think is one of the most consequential things that has come out of the last year and a half. [1:01:07] And yet the president hasn't come into office and managed to get those people. [1:01:11] He wanted the DOJ to take retribution against people like Letitia James and James Comey. [1:01:17] They're not behind bars. [1:01:18] Right. [1:01:18] So how does he feel about that? [1:01:20] How does he feel about his co-opting of the DOJ and yet somehow being thwarted by the legal system at the same time? [1:01:26] Well, we still have courts in this country. [1:01:29] We still have juries. [1:01:30] We still have a system. [1:01:31] And it's of great frustration to him that some of these cases have been falling over. [1:01:37] We write in the book, senior people in his Justice Department, including Todd Blanche, [1:01:43] did not think that they had a strong case against Letitia James, for example. [1:01:49] Trump wanted it to be known to the senior people at the DOJ, and we have this in the book. [1:01:54] He said Todd needs to understand that Trump doesn't really care if there's a conviction. [1:02:00] The process is the point. [1:02:01] He wants to make her life miserable. [1:02:03] And so even when, yes, of course he wants Letitia James behind bars. [1:02:07] Of course he wants all of his people behind bars. [1:02:09] But the fact that they're having to spend money to go through the very painful process of investigation, [1:02:16] prosecution, you know, the stress on the family, that is also sustenance for him and revenge for him. [1:02:24] And that's the kind of old Roy Cohen playbook for him. [1:02:27] Maggie, talk about the other side of that, which is the power that he's taking on with the pardon process. [1:02:32] And how does he see that working for him? [1:02:35] Because in a sense, yes, he has the legal right to do what he's doing, [1:02:39] but it is the breaking down of that firewall still between an independent rule of law that America is known for [1:02:45] and the political process in the White House. [1:02:48] One of the things we describe in the book is how he and people close to him say [1:02:53] that he just experienced the pardon process or his power as a revelation, essentially. [1:02:59] It was quick, it was unilateral, and it was what he wanted all of government to be. [1:03:04] And that is what he is trying to do now across all fronts. [1:03:07] It obviously isn't, as Jonathan just said. [1:03:09] He does have the power to do pardons. [1:03:11] When you raise this issue, when one raises this issue with people in his government, [1:03:15] they will say, publicly and privately, this is the thing that the Constitution allows him to do. [1:03:20] That's true, but usually it has been some kind of a process. [1:03:24] And there have been erosions in that prior to this term. [1:03:27] But this is not going through some extensive DOJ process. [1:03:32] This is people who, in some cases, pay millions of dollars to find people who can get in the president's ear directly. [1:03:40] The White House has tried putting in place a process that often breaks down [1:03:44] because there is this side route which the president clearly prefers. [1:03:48] One of the remarkable things in terms of the accountability piece, and we write about this too, [1:03:52] is when I was saying it's not going to be like 2019 if the House flips. [1:03:57] The president has openly said that he is going to pardon to people in his circle. [1:04:02] He'll pardon anybody who's come within, sometimes it's 250, 225, the pardon zone around the Oval Office. [1:04:09] And we've spoken to people who are counting on those pardons. [1:04:13] So I don't know what it looks like in 2019 in terms of House subpoenas [1:04:19] because the only option that House members have is to refer a contempt of Congress charge to the Trump DOJ, [1:04:27] which something tells us is probably not going to jump on them quickly. [1:04:30] So he's legally entitled to do this, but it has broken it down dramatically. [1:04:35] Thank you.