An insider's account of Trump's White House

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0:46That's O-D-O-O dot com. Hello, it's Justin here and hello to all the new listeners to AmeriCast. There are quite a few of you at the moment, so if you do enjoy what you hear, please do consider subscribing to the podcast. That way you will never miss an episode. Now, on with this one. What really goes on inside Donald Trump's White House in this second term in office? It's a question many of you have asked us. We're speaking to a journalist today who gained unprecedented access into the Oval Office. We're speaking to Jonathan Swan on his book Regime Change, Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.

1:22It's an extraordinary read with incredible anecdotes and insights into the inner workings of President Trump. And we get groundbreaking reporting on how President Trump decided to go to war with Iran. Welcome to AmeriCast. AmeriCast. AmeriCast from BBC News. Whatever you want to talk about, Abdul, keep my wife's name the hell out of your mouth because she's way out of your league. The tide is coming, and this time we intend to win it all. See, he doesn't want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.

2:06When I'm not around, you're going to be broke. There's not going to be anybody to report on. Nobody gives a damn about anybody else.

2:18It's Sumi in the D.C. Bureau. As promised, I'm joined by Jonathan Swan, who's co-written this book with Maggie Haberman, White House correspondent for The New York Times, who has reported on President Trump for many years, and they chart the first 14 months of President Trump's second term. Jonathan Swan is with us. Jonathan, thanks for joining. Hi, Suni. Great to be here. Maybe you can start out by telling us, how did this book come about? Oh, well, in 2023, Maggie and I were working together very closely with the New York Times, and we could both see that the Trump story, no matter what happened, was going to be headed for an epic conclusion.

2:57At that time, it could have been prison. He'd been indicted, very real prospect of criminal conviction, or it could end up in the White House. Either way, it was an extraordinary story. And we were both very deeply sourced and widely sourced in his world. We've been covering him for a long time. And we felt that together we could do something that would reach the level, the ambition that we both had for what this should be.

3:38if he had ended up in prison? Yeah, we discarded thousands of pages of reporting. We essentially discarded a year and a half of reporting because we were doing intense daily reporting for the book, behind-the-scenes material throughout the campaign, throughout the late 2023 through 2024. And once we got to 2025, we realised that this was such a consequential administration that the bar that the material had to clear to make it into the book, for anything that happened before 2025 was that the material had to illuminate and help explain things that we were seeing and living through in 2025. So that's a pretty high bar.

4:17Most things don't clear that bar. So we went through the very painful process of discarding an enormous amount of immodestly very high quality reporting. I know you can't tell us about kind of your sourcing, But can you give us some insight into how difficult it is or unprecedented, let's say, to have that kind of access? It's very, very difficult and completely different from the first term. So the sort of fly on the wall reporting became unremarkable in the first term because there was so much leaking, so much factional warfare and what have you. So you actually saw spillage almost every day out of the Oval Office, even out of the White House Situation Room.

5:00I think one reason this book has had the impact it has is that you haven't seen that this term. People were sort of, whoa, I didn't know that. I didn't know that that happened. They could actually, for the first time, really see inside these rooms. And the truth is it's a much more cohesive team, much smaller, tight-knit group. And so it was much, much more difficult to get these scenes. And again, it goes back to what I was saying earlier. if you saw the amount of material that we didn't put in the book because we just couldn't be certain it was true we had a pretty high level of confidence that this scene had happened it was a sensational scene or an extraordinary scene or you know maybe a funny scene or a revealing scene and we just went through the process of trying to verify it and at the end of the day there might have been a five percent little bit of doubt in our minds and so then very ruthless decision no doesn't go in the book we could only put things in there that we were willing to put our names on and I think it's been interesting uh that now the book has been out for is it three months now I don't know it's a blur two two and a half months there has not been one single substantive denial of any scene in this book of any piece of dialogue in this book what not one not one specific denial of someone who was in the scene saying, I never said that.

6:24Or, you know, an oil CEO who was in there. Oh, that never happened. Nobody, nobody. And so that is because we killed ourselves on this reporting. And I think by the end of the book, by the end of the reporting process for the book, I don't want to speak for Maggie, but I was like, I don't think I'm ever doing another one. So anyway, I hope you like this one because I don't think there'll be another one. So let's talk now about some of the content of the book. So, you know, the access you've had, which we've talked about, but also just the really interesting picture of the inner workings of this Trump second term.

6:58And you talked about it being a much more cohesive unit. I just want to read out a line that I find so interesting when you talk about how the day is really fluid for President Trump. And you say that on any given day, there could be Republican lawmakers, titans of industry, former pro wrestlers, country musicians, golf royals, crypto bros, or friends of felons seeking pardons, which is a delicious sentence as it is. But how is it both cohesive and a close-knit, tight unit, and you have this rotating cast of characters? Don't misunderstand the word cohesive with disciplined, well-organized, George W.

7:39Bush organized in 10-minute increments. That's not what I mean by cohesive. What I mean by cohesive is these are not people at war with each other in the first term you you had an inner circle who were trying to destroy each other and that was the source of those leaks that i'm talking about you you know when you had factions like bannon and kushner and they were trying to get each other you know this was just brutal inner warfare that doesn't exist you have a group of people that believe in the president um that you know with some exception mostly get on with each other and are certainly not at war with each other trying to kill each other.

8:13That's what I meant by cohesive. And when it really matters, when it's subjects that they want to keep as secret, they're very good at keeping secrets. So it's both true that the Oval Office is the sort of grand central station often. You have people wandering in and out, have no business being in meetings, you're coming in CEOs and what have you. But when you have really important matters like the planning for the Iran war, you have a situation where the two people who would have to manage the biggest global energy shock in history, Treasury Secretary Scott Besant and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, they weren't included in the planning meetings.

8:52That's how small the group was. They weren't in the room. So they found out about all this planning very, very late in the day, actually on the day of when the operation launched. So that's what I mean by tight-knit, It's small. It's a nuanced picture. It's not one thing or the other. They're very good at keeping secrets. But there's also huge problems with that approach because you're leaving expertise out of the room. You're not involving people at the different agencies who are subject matter experts. And so you're really running the government with five, six, seven people. Yeah, that really stood out to me that you and Maggie wrote that the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, essentially isn't at the State Department.

9:35He's always at the White House because he knows if you're not around Trump, you won't be included in that inner circle of decisions. But who is then prioritized when it comes to getting - Or you may not even know. By the way, you're not just included. You may not even know about it. I mean, quite literally, the president might just make a decision. You might be one of the most senior people in the government. You may have no earthly idea that the decision was made. I mean, that is remarkable. So if you look at that, who is prioritized in terms of getting access to the president on any given day.

10:03Well, it's very haphazard. And for many of these people, they just call the president. Like I said, this is a sort of stupid, trivial little example. Maggie and I couldn't get an interview request granted through the press shop. Understandably, they didn't think it was a good idea, whatever. We went directly to the president and we get the interview. So Laura Loomer, it's not like she needs to go through a whole bunch of scheduling and whatever. She could just call Trump or text Trump and talk to Trump. So that's a lot. Members of Congress, I mean, one thing we talk about in the book, which I think is very important, I don't think it's very well understood, is that Trump's grip on the Republican Congress is not just a factor of fear.

10:49It's true that a lot of them are afraid of crossing him. They know that he can end their careers. He's done that before. But it's also true that many of them relate to him as fans, essentially. That was particularly true last year, less true as time goes on. And he has charmed them. He's had them and their families to Mar-a-Lago. He signed hats for their children. He's given out his cell phone number to the most junior nobody backbench members of Congress. And so they have this giddy feeling of direct access to the president. So when you ask about how do they influence him, in many cases, they influence him by just calling him and talking to him late at night or what have you.

11:33That's what I mean. It's two things at once. It's both this chaotic, haphazard situation, because that's always going to be the environment around Trump. It's what he likes. It's the way he's always operated. But on certain matters, when they really want to keep something a secret, particularly when it comes to national security, It is the tiniest group of people, and they're actually very good at keeping secrets. Very difficult reporting to get inside those meetings. So let's talk about some of that groundbreaking reporting, particularly on the war on Iran, because this truly was access that blew everything else out of the water, which is that it was Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, who came in with his team to President Trump to present an argument for going to war with Iran.

12:18So give us a sense of how all of that played out. Well, it played out over more than a year. I mean, Netanyahu, you can go back, how far do you want to go back? I mean, Netanyahu's obviously had a multi-decade dream of destroying the Iranian regime. And his team, Netanyahu's team, particularly one of his top advisors, Abram Derma, understood after the 2024 election that Trump's views about Iran, which were already pretty hawkish, if you look at his record in term one, had only hardened and become more personal. He'd been briefed by the FBI during the 2024 campaign that Iran was trying to kill him.

13:03And when Ron Derma, one of Netanyahu's top aides, left a meeting with Trump after the election in 24, he told people that he thought that there was an 80 % chance that Trump would join Netanyahu in war against Iran to remove this regime. So this was a long-running effort by Netanyahu. But it's also true that Trump himself had far more hawkish instincts about Iran than many of his team. So it wasn't this sort of simplistic story of Netanyahu as a puppet master. The 12-day war played a huge role in it. Trump saw that as a great success. And Iran's response was so tepid, firing off a few missiles, killing no Americans, that many people around Trump believed that he concluded that Iran was a paper tiger.

13:52And so the combination of the meeting that you mentioned, this very forceful presentation from Netanyahu of these regime change scenarios, with Trump's strong gut instinct that this regime would collapse quickly and a sense of hubris and overconfidence in the capacity of the u.s military and the israeli military all those factors combined plus a tiny circle of people around him not many really the only person who made a an aggressive argument against this war before the war in the room with others was jd vance the vice president many others uh didn't express their skepticism in any kind of forceful way with Trump.

14:35So that's a big change as well, the team around him. And I think all those factors combined to lead Trump to take the biggest risk of either of his presidencies. Can we stay on that point of J.D. Vance's opposition here? Can you tell us what exactly he said and what the impact was on his relationship with President Trump? He made many arguments against the war. He raised many of the issues that we're seeing right now, stockpiles of American munitions, the potential for the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and spiking energy prices, and then also political argument about this being a betrayal of one of their core promises and a large amount of the Republican base believing that they were voting for no more wars, no more Middle Eastern wars, made all of those arguments, and it cost him.

15:24It cost him. I think one misperception or misconception about this was that this was political from J.D. Vance setting himself up for 2028. I actually think it's the furthest thing from that. And you could talk to people in the administration who can't stand J.D. Vance, and they will tell you he actually took quite a large risk by sticking his neck out and making these arguments because it pissed off Trump. He did not like hearing it, and he was complaining about Vance privately at that time. It was also at a time when he was pitting Vance against Marco Rubio, you know playing them off each other so vance really has what if you're just taking this purely political lens for vance for 28 he really just has one job which is to be endorsed by donald trump supported by him and most people believe if that happens he's the republican nominee i still think that's the most likely scenario based on all our reporting but you know doing what he did before the war risked that uh in a real way so it was quite interesting because I wouldn't necessarily have predicted that based on everything else he'd done with Trump for the previous three, four years.

16:34Let's talk about that pitting Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance against each other. You had some interesting reporting with Maggie in the book about how Trump just seems more comfortable around Marco Rubio than he might be with J.D. Vance. Tell us a bit about that. Vance, you know, his history with Trump, obviously. He was a very harsh critic and became a convert. Trump loves a convert. Rubio was also a very harsh critic, became a convert, what have you. Trump seems to have a real comfort with Marco Rubio, spends a lot of time with him, and Rubio cracks jokes and what have you. Vance is someone who is more ideological when it comes to the populist MAGA movement.

17:18Rubio certainly, if you just take the Iran issue, he harbored, based on all of our reporting, He harbored doubts and skepticism about this war, but he did not argue against it in the way that Vance did. So Vance is willing to create more friction than Rubio seems to be. But I don't know that it amounts to much, all of this. I mean, Trump, particularly last year, was doing this sort of parlor game. Who do you like better, Marco or JD? What do you think? Do you think JD's got what it takes? All that sort of stuff. So we got a lot of a lot of beauties out there, JD. I envy you and other people. I don't know.

17:58Who's it going to be? Is it going to be JD? Is it going to be somebody else? I don't know. Does anybody have? OK, let's go. You ready? Who likes JD Vance? who likes marco rubio all right sounds like a good ticket jd it's a perfect that was a perfect ticket we have a scene in the book maria and i extraordinary scene where trump has rupert burdock over for dinner at the white house and he has vance and rubio at the dinner table and he asks rupert in front of them who he prefers um so that was all going on incredibly incredibly so that's all going on but i just don't know that it amounts to very much i've seen no sign that marco rubio is making any effort to run for president or doing anything to set up himself for a run he's told vance privately and he said it publicly that he will support vance um as the nominee and i just see no indication that this is going to happen, that Rubio is going to knock out Vance and be Trump's blessed candidate.

19:08Things could change, but I don't see that right now. I still think the most likely scenario is that Trump supports his vice president and he's in the best position of anyone to be the nominee. So beyond the cabinet members, we've had a reader question from Ian that I think really points at some of the other influential members of the Trump administration. And Ian asks, Does Trump listen to any of his advisors? And if so, who has the most influence on what he does and says? So I guess that gets us right into the territory of people like Stephen Miller and Susie Wiles. But I guess first, if you could take on Ian's question there.

19:44It's not so easy to answer because there are situations where he listens and takes advice. Often it's things that we don't learn about until much later, things that people have headed off or stopped or killed or what have you. He also gives people often a huge amount of leeway to essentially run the policy. So there are huge areas of the US government that Trump has no interest in, whole agencies and departments that he just lets them do whatever they want. So I wouldn't call that listening to them. I would just say, go forth. I remember in term one, one of his cabinet secretaries who ran a department that Trump didn't really care about, they told me that Trump's instructions to them were just go and win.

20:33And so they interpreted that as, I'm just going to do what I want until I get into trouble. Stephen Miller is probably the most powerful domestic policy advisor in the modern history of the White House, has huge influence, certainly over the immigration program, but much broader than that. And he's also been involved in national security and foreign policy, particularly in the Western Hemisphere. Scott Besant plays a big role and now he's got a very close relationship with the new Fed chair, Kevin Walsh. So managing the economy, Trump is quite deferential at certain times to Besant. Not always.

21:10Otherwise, he wouldn't have started a trade war with the whole world last April. And Susie Wiles, they can all have an impact, but at the end of the day, they're not really pushing back against him on on major issues in a strong way. And mostly it's Donald Trump making a decision, often from gut instinct, without a real policy process. And the decision gets pushed down through the system. It's not like George W. Bush was the very reverse. It was all representatives from each agency would get together in a room. There was a National Security Council process where they would work through ideas, share perspectives.

21:47It would go up the different levels and there would be consensus and then it would be presented to the president. This is the exact opposite. Trump's in the oval with four or five people. This is what I want to do. And that gets pushed down through the system and retrofitted and what have you. That's what the policy process is. So on Stephen Miller in particular, you called him the most powerful person probably on domestic issues. You and Maggie describe in the book how he is already powerful and then seems to expand his reach really over the course of that first year or so of President Trump's term.

22:22How did he manage to do so? I mean, how is it that he manages to kind of have such power across so many areas? He had a huge advantage because he'd served in the first term and he had spent a good deal of time in the four years between administrations preparing. So, for example, when Trump came back into office and you saw that blizzard of executive orders, executive action. It was just an assault across the board. Stephen Miller was the architect of a lot of that. I mean, he was running that process inside the transition. So he was prepared. He also filled a vacuum. That second term team that came into the White House was lacking to an astonishing degree in West Wing experience, certainly at a high level.

23:14Susie Wiles had not served in the White House since Reagan, and she was a very young staffer in the Reagan administration. You had a lot of inexperienced people at the deputy chief of staff level when it came to federal government. So Stephen Miller was the sort of possessor of knowledge. He knew how it worked. He knew how the government worked. He'd learned in the first term where the levers of power were. He had placed many lawyers within the system that would help him and enable him. He'd set up the executive orders. He had a plan and that gave him a huge advantage. So when Trump was saying things like, you know, I want to do this, Stephen Miller was the one who could say, I will get that done for you, sir.

23:53Here's how we'll do it. That's an advantage he had over his colleagues, certainly many of his colleagues in the West Wing. If we kind of take a bigger view or a broader view now, Jonathan, on your takeaways from reporting this book. If we talk about how those takeaways impact how you're seeing President Trump now in this moment, I mean, what do you think about his approach to the midterms? Because the broad reporting we're seeing right now is that President Trump is more focused on his legacy on some of these construction projects than he is about his party winning the midterms. Do you think that is a fair assessment?

24:27We reported in the book, and it remains true, that people around Trump wished he was more concerned about the midterms, wished he cared more. It's not to say he doesn't care at all. Of course, he doesn't want to get impeached. Of course, he wants Republicans to hold the House. Of course, they're using every lever they can, but he doesn't actually care at an emotional level to the extent that many of the people around him did. He won his great victory in 2024. He's not on the ticket. He can always say, I mean, one of the most revealing things that Trump said that helps you understand his mindset was late last year, Republicans had performed very badly in the off-year elections.

25:03Trump said, Trump said, you know, he said something like, you know, pundits are saying that they can't win without Trump on the ticket. And he goes, it's a great honor. So he could just say, well, look, they can't win without Trump. You know, what are you going to do? Look at the ads that his political group are putting out. They're basically ads for Trump. They're just glorifying Trump. He doesn't want to spend what he regards as his money. He doesn't want to use that to necessarily to help candidates. He wants to use it to promote himself. And so everything comes back to him. And And yes, I mean, he doesn't want to get impeached, but also it's not like he's worried about the Todd Blanche-run Justice Department prosecuting his family or himself or anything like that.

25:46We report in the book that he said that he's going to pardon anyone who came within 250 feet of the Oval Office. So he's not really worried about, to a large extent, about the consequences of democratic rule. His family's richer than it's ever been. he's trying to put his permanent imprint on Washington and also to create what he regards as a legacy around the world that will make him one of the great figures of our time. I think that's a good note to end on. Jonathan, thank you so much for joining us on AmeriCast. Thanks so much for having me. And just in time, Anthony Zerker has arrived here beside me to debrief the interview.

26:22What stood out to you? Well, I think some of the things that we knew that this was a tight-knit group, that it doesn't leak as much as the first term. And yet there is still incredible access to Donald Trump from all these people, whether it's members of Congress, low-level member of Congress calling him, or journalists like us who have his phone number who can give him a ring. It's a strange kind of setup, very different from the first term, but it does tell us a lot about how this administration has determined policy, that there's a small core group of people around Donald Trump. They make up their minds and then everything else gets pushed down.

26:59And you can influence Trump. You can call him. You can talk to him. You can change his mind on things. But then it's Trump making the decisions with a few people and everyone else kind of scrambling to adjust, including Scott Bessent, who is the Treasury Secretary, who is fascinating to hear he didn't know about the Iran war, which had this huge effect on the global economy. And he was not in on the planning. He found out about it practically when we did. Yeah. And so it has been really effective, as Jonathan said, to keep a really tight knit circle. And they're really good, as he said, about making sure secrets remain secrets.

27:35And yet they have this incredible access. So, I mean, you can't help but ask yourself, as I was listening to Jonathan speak about just how incredibly hard that they almost died, you know, verifying all this information, just how they did so. Of course, they can't release their sources or tell us who they spoke to or how they got this access. But it must mean that at some point in this administration, this close-knit circle, there is some crack somewhere. Yeah, and I think people who have looked at the book closely and try to figure out from looking to the accounts who was the one talking and who wasn't, who comes off better in the book and who doesn't.