Trump WH Exposé Rocks DC

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0:38That was the sound of Stute, the AI coworker that collects your cash for you. Stute's collecting over$200 million a month for its customers autonomously. Got cash stuck in overdue invoices? Get Stute and start collecting in days. Go to stute.ai. That's S-T-U-U-T dot A-I today. Welcome to The Beat. I'm Ari Melber. We have a lot of news to cover. On many nights on this and other programs, we draw on reporting from some of the top newspapers in the country. Tonight, we will be joined by two of the top journalists from The New York Times. You know their names and bylines, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.

1:18Their bestselling new book, Regime Change, which goes inside this second term, has been reverberating through Washington. It is a national bestseller. It is in demand. We're going to get into the substance, the meat, the reporting on that in a moment. So thanks to both of our guests for standing by. Before we get to them, we begin with the very latest in the U.S. hitting Iran with a series of what are called powerful strikes late today, a reminder that while many people from Washington to the business community have sort of priced in and expected full ceasefire to hold, this is still a very unpredictable situation.

1:52It's retaliation for Iran's attacks on what are commercial vessels in the strait. That is according to the U.S. Central Command. The president is in Turkey for the NATO summit. He has been clashing with allies there, reportedly furious that other countries did not help him fight the way he wanted, regardless of what many experts said was a failure to do the groundwork to build the coalition on that war and, frankly, a range of other international issues. There's also reporting how people that have been seen as Trump's allies over many years in the U.S., including Tucker Carlson, were very much against not only the Iran war, but the basic expected fallout which we're now living through.

2:31There's a report in that Carlson said, you're going to destroy your presidency. You won't do anything after this. If you get into a, quote, regime change war with Iran, it's over. You will note what many could see as a double entendre there. That is the title, of course, of the big Haberman Swan book. Now, Trump did not, of course, heed those warnings. If you are looking at this as just a matter of how the government works, you could say, fine, the president made up his own mind. He didn't listen to a political ally or a member of the media. Of course, there's also a lot of reporting about how many people who were even aligned with Trump's general agenda warned about how the way he planned to go into Iran, the nature of the kind of rushed and emotional or kind of aggravated assault on this country without a long-term plan and a plan B was dangerous.

3:23And the pattern of ignoring expertise or input is a kind of a pattern of the second-term governing. Trump does take some big swings. If you hear his allies tell it, he does what he said he would do. Whether he wins or not, he started a trade war just like he said he would. And you could point to examples like that. But there are many other big swings that falter. For example, Donald Trump, at tremendous cost to his agenda, his so-called political capital to Washington, even among some Republicans, has repeatedly pushed the DOJ to do things that it should not, legally cannot, and often are not able to do.

4:02So he has a slew of revenge cases that we've been covering, but very few of them have gotten anywhere, let alone towards convictions. He also launched, of course, that rushed Doge Musk effort. The initiative just shuttered this weekend. Many estimates say it didn't produce the savings promised. There was taxpayer money spent on all kinds of other projects. Talk about the contrast between him and Elon Musk lecturing everyone about government spending and then Donald Trump spending your tax dollars on the reflecting pool, on his vanity projects, on construction at the White House that nobody asked for.

4:36As for the trade war, the Supreme Court basically stopped the key parts of it. And then there's the profiteering. This isn't so much about government decision making as it is the oldest trick in the book, which is if the people have some power over your money, why don't they just take it? Our system of government is supposed to have checks and balances for that, but through crypto and other means, Donald Trump has shown his guile, his sort of cleverness at a minimum at self-enrichment. MSNOW has interviewed several Trump supporters who say that they're upset about a range of things, but especially what is currently the Trump economy.

5:14I feel like it's a recession, man. I ain't never felt that before. I feel it now. I feel it now. It's almost like the poor getting poorer and the rich are getting richer. Everything in America right now is ridiculous. It really is. Everything is going up and you can barely afford things. I think, you know, the way people feel about the economy, like it looks good on paper, but people are really struggling. 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. They're co-authors of the book I mentioned, Regime Change Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.

5:52Welcome to both of you. Maggie, when you look at just some of what's going on today, including how President Trump is approaching the world stage from matters significant like war and NATO to what some would say optional clashes like whether to intervene in the World Cup. What from your reporting, the many sources you spoke to sort of informs or gives us a lens for what we're seeing? So you mentioned the title of the book as a double entendre. Ariane, again, thank you for having us. We'd actually thought of this title long before Trump went into Caracas to snatch Nicolas Maduro because it occurred to us early on in the presidency that what we were covering was a form of regime change in our own country, a form of a different kind of American-style democracy.

6:38This was not a Democrat to a Republican marginal policy. Trump is expanding executive power in massive, massive, massive ways, sometimes affirmed by the Supreme Court, sometimes not. But he has taken a lot of big swings. And in cases like you just mentioned, for instance, with the revenge prosecutions, the process is actually intended to be the punishment. And we talk about that in the book, number one. Number two, on Iran, he is operating on gut, as you say, in a way that we really didn't see in term one. This was a decision that he made despite the fact that nobody in his government thought it was a good idea.

7:16He's now angry. As you say, he didn't make a case to the public about why they should be with him because he believed this was going to end quickly based on a feeling, based on his impulse. And he was very clear about that with people. And you are now seeing the result of that. Yeah, Jonathan, Maggie mentions it in the book really makes the evidence backed case that separate from ideology and red blue, which we hear so much about, that the second term under this president is experimenting with or ramming home a different way to run the federal government. that structurally in terms of where power operates, how little can really meaningfully be done at the cabinet or expert level without the president, at least on his chosen issues.

8:05Can you tell us more about that? Because it is distinct from so much of the ideological discourse around Trump. Yeah, I mean, it's a very complicated story and there are so many elements to it. But I'll just give you one example from, you mentioned it in your introduction. We've all sort of memory-holed Doge. We've sort of forgotten about Doge. But for a few months last year, Trump essentially appointed Elon Musk as a sort of co-president, the richest man in the world who had not divested from any of his business interests, who was placing people throughout the government. And yes, a lot of the stuff that he wanted to do didn't get done.

8:52But I'll just give you one example of something that did get done. And again, people don't really even talk about it anymore. It's been consumed with so many other issues. USAID, a government agency designed to help the world's poorest people, foreign aid, set up by Congress. They just shut it down. They didn't talk to Congress. They didn't talk to anyone. They just shut it down essentially over a weekend. Musk did. Rubio, the Secretary of State, wasn't even really that involved in that. He had to take over the remnants of USAID. Most of its functions have been disappeared. The dregs of it has been absorbed into the State Department.

9:33That's one example. I could go through endless examples, but the macro story is Congress, an entire branch of government last year, led by Republicans, essentially just ceded the field. And so that, as a check on Trump, just essentially evaporated. You're seeing a little bit of it now come back with the Senate, but only a little bit. And the only institution that the Trump team have really respected and not defied or tried to bulldoze is the Supreme Court. But at the lower court level, they've ignored tons of rulings. People have documented this in the immigration space in particular. People have been languishing in these detention centers, not getting hearings.

10:19And so it's not just that he's ignoring or bulldozing norms. They're actually really stretching the law in very significant ways. Maggie, how about that? Look, at the beginning of his term, I'll give you another example. Trump fired a number of inspectors general. It was actually impossible, at least in those days initially, to learn exactly who had been fired. The government couldn't even give you a specific example or a specific hard number. The process, the law, is that the White House is supposed to notify Congress. There is supposed to be 30 days. And there's supposed to be a reason given.

10:55None of that was done. Chuck Grassley, who is normally the senator from Iowa, normally very much a stickler for process, did some mild complaining. But that was about it. And you saw there that they were going to do what they wanted to do. Inspectors general were a thorn in Trump's side in term one. They actually are responsible for some accountability and oversight over agencies. They exist in a rump state now. And so most measures of accountability, particularly ones post-Watergate, but not only, have been eradicated or run over. And by the time, as Jonathan mentioned, the Supreme Court, the only entity that they really listen to, catches up, so much is done.

11:36Like the East Wing has been torn down, or I can go on and on, but those are examples. Yeah, well, we can go on and on because we set aside time for this to nerd out a little bit, Maggie. I'm sorry. Thank you. Again, there's so much in politics that is the noise. And we all talk to sources and sometimes, you know, sources will say, well, let me go off the record. And then they'll say something like, and this could be for any politician, you know, my boss is actually really thoughtful. He's really he's really thinking hard about this. And it's really he wants to do right by the American people. And I think, oh, we went off the record for that.

12:12Like there's so much crap. And you guys have found a way to cut through that and get a lot of real reporting done through sources and the relationships you have. And when you mentioned the inspectors general, I'm curious, Maggie, what your sources told you about how how Trump does zero in, because there's a lot of politicians in Washington who couldn't name a single inspector general of any agency. And I remember quite vividly when Trump was talking about, you know, Horowitz is pretty good. He's one of the he's one of the good ones and these others aren't. And so that told me, wow, Donald Trump, who plays sometimes a very blustering fifth grade level speaker in public, had not only figured out who the DOJ IG was, but had determined through his own lens that he preferred those outcomes to IGs at other departments and agencies.

13:00So, Maggie, what are your sources tell you about the layers of Trump? And you've covered him a long time that still work where I hear Trump critics criticize him on terms that he would welcome because he wants to be a blustery businessman. And there's other things to it. Go ahead. It's a great question, and it's actually a very good example. One of the things that Trump said many, many years ago to a writer who passed away recently was that he likes to do things, I'm paraphrasing, nice and complicated so nobody really knows what's going on. And so what you just pointed to actually is a very good example of that.

13:34It's a mixture of factors. It's not a binary of he knows everything or it's nothing at all. In the case of Michael Horowitz, this was the inspector general when Trump was under investigation in term one, when Trump wanted to see the DOJ take certain actions like prosecute James Comey in term one. And so he remembers the report about that. He didn't actually recommend prosecuting Comey. And when Bill Barr, then the attorney general, who was hardly a squish or, you know, hardly a lefty, is telling Trump that he can't, this is not going to happen, Trump was infuriated. So Michael Horowitz is a specific one that sticks out in his mind.

14:14But on the other ones, it's some mix of allies who have issues with specific people, his own personnel advisors, which is a small group within the White House who have specific interests either in the agency or they have looked at things in their vetting of what these inspectors general have done in the past. It is a mix of different factors. And I think that if we went down the list or if we ever even got a full list, we would be able to go through it. And there would be different reasons for why. But Horowitz is an example of the personalist nature of how Trump is approaching absolutely everything right now.

14:50The other thing. And with. Go ahead. I was just going to say the other thing that's really important we get into in the book is the long range planning for this term. um steven miller had really thought through what they were going to do in a few key respects and one of them which i think is very underreported we get into it in the book is stocking the administration with a new cast of lawyer different types of lawyers and you know many people would particularly left of center people would view the federalist society as you know sort of darth vader They stocked the Supreme Court in term one. People like Stephen Miller viewed the Federalist Society as a bunch of squishers.

15:34And actually what they wanted was lawyers who were going to be much more aggressive in their interpretations of the law, much more willing to push the envelope, and not just in the White House, but across the agencies. So when you stock a government with a different type of lawyer, as you know, you get a different type of legal analysis, and that allows you to do far more than they could do in the first term. They're not getting the same sort of agency pushback that they were. Right. I think you guys document that in a way that's very useful for people who want to learn how this really works. There's the old joke in Better Call Saul when he wants a lawyer to go even farther.

16:08And he says, you don't need a criminal lawyer. You need a criminal lawyer. And don't take my word for it. There are people like John Eastman who faced and Rudy Giuliani who faced civil and bar discipline over whether they crossed those lines. And so that also goes to another detail I want to ask you about, Jonathan, on Stephen Miller, where, again, the contrast between the terms that earlier the Pentagon leaders, however ideologically aligned they might be with aspects of MAGA, They were still unnerved by what you write was the young Miller with his inexperience and aggression. Reading from the book, you say they now installed a Trump devotee atop the now named Department of War.

16:51Miller had lobbied for a like minded defense secretary whose thoughts about the American military and contempt for by the book lawyers were much more in line with the aggressive mindset he shared with Trump. And, you know, let's leave out to the side, Jonathan, the semiotic politics of the term deep state. and just refer to the fact that there is a large superstructure of people in the federal government. It's supposed to be that way. And yet you document that as they figured this out, they went deeper into what they would call the deep state to make those changes. Jonathan? Very much so. And the Pentagon was an area that they really saw as almost an enemy force within the government, that in the uniformed ranks were full of, in their opinion, never-Trumpers, anti-Trumpers, people who were going to obstruct the president.

17:41So it's been a very systematic effort to clear them out. And it's had real world effects. I'll give you one example. The boat bombing campaign. In term one, Trump was talking about, term one, he would talk admiringly about how Xi Jinping doesn't have a drug problem because he just kills drug dealers unilaterally, that Duterte didn't have a drug problem. Trump is now doing a version of that on the high seas. And what he has done is fishing boats, carrying cocaine traffickers, Donald Trump has decided that these are enemy combatants. And instead of doing what has been done, interdicting them, arresting, putting on trial, treating it as a criminal matter.

18:26They say, no, no, this is war and we're just going to kill them. And he has had a very enthusiastic secretary of war in Pete Hegseth in carrying out that campaign and really no resistance whatsoever from the leadership of the department. Stephen Miller was also heavily involved in that campaign. So you sort of see all those threads come together just in that one example. Yeah, and there's so many of these stories that take up attention for various reasons. You're reminding everyone that this is the first draft of history, the long eyes of history, might focus on some very different controversies than sometimes we do.

19:04Certainly, what most nations would call the possibility of premeditated war crimes. I mean, you have the technology and the ability to look, to see the persons alive, to see that they seem to pose no threat and then to go forth and kill them in what is a violation of potentially the Geneva Convention. I mean, that's big stuff. Maggie, I want to get your reporting as well on the Epstein freak out, because you have so many details there. That, of course, made news was in The Times as a standalone article. Maggie and Jonathan are back with me after a quick break. We return in 90 seconds.

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21:22We're back with 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. One was about what seemed like, frankly, a panic inside the White House over Epstein as they failed to control that story. That was a big theme in the first year. 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. They urged the White House to change course and to force the DOJ to release more of the files.

21:52But there was one major obstacle in the path of the solution. The president himself had no interest in transparency. He wanted the whole Epstein issue buried. and snapping at anyone who mentioned it. Maggie, what does the inside story tell us about how concerned Trump was about this issue? The guys criticized a lot. The guys obviously stared down and come back from all kinds of things. And this seemed to be huge. And also tell us about the situation room. Sure. So Epstein was one of these issues, Ari, that Trump just, he'd gotten so used to his base listening to him say, what I say is true, what those people are saying is not true.

22:31And he just couldn't make it disappear. So he kept calling it a Democratic hoax. It was, you know, it was all concocted. As we say in the book, he didn't want to talk about this at all. He wanted it gone. And so that left his aides, and we're not, you know, I'm not defending this or saying, yes, this was right. I'm just saying this was their view. That left his advisors with the choice of how do we deal with something where the president doesn't want anything out. And that led us to report on a handful of specific situation room meetings, the White House situation room, which is this, you know, essentially like a no cell phone sanctuary where wars had been planned and discussed, where raids of, you know, Osama bin Laden, where he was killed, was monitored by President Obama.

23:18In this case, it became an Epstein crisis comms center, in part because they were worried about leaks. But you had the top levels of the White House, the top levels of the DOJ and the FBI talking about what their options are. There was this remarkable meeting that we wrote about in August where they were talking about releasing a public-facing website put together by the DOJ of all things Epstein. The question was, what about Donald Trump and things related to Donald Trump? And so one aide had searched Trump's name and up popped this uncorroborated secondhand claim that had been public for a year and a half in an unrelated case, civil case, that Trump allegedly abused some woman's nipples and the abuse was visible and they were very swollen and looked painful.

24:03And the aide said, this is out there. And the vice president, who wanted everything out, said, you know, I think he'd be fine with it. He'd been accused of worst. And the White House chief of staff said, no, no, he would not be fine with it. But that was the end of that conversation about this public facing website that didn't happen. So it was remarkable for the fact that they were attempting very hard to keep this very quiet and private and deal with this situation that only grew bigger. And the fact that because of their own resistance or that every path was blocked by Trump not wanting anything out, 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.

24:49And 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? 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. I mean, we ultimately got the law because they mishandled it so poorly. That's one of the only issues where the Congress has overridden Trump on a bipartisan basis. right well many of his senior officials of trump senior officials underestimated the political potency of epstein and to you know to be fair they had endured all kinds of scandals in their time working for donald trump so you can see why they thought this would blow over 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.

25:58He 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. So those two were really the most aggressive, but many of them underestimated us. And the thing we found, which was kind of stunning to Trump's aides, was even this year in their confidential memos from Trump's chief pollster, it's still popping through in their focus groups. 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.

26:44Epstein is still cutting through from their perspective to an alarming extent. Number one, true. Number two, you got to be really in the weeds to be impressed by that data center comparison, Jonathan. Bigger than data centers. Oh my God. You said we were nerding it. Data centers are big, man. That's what we're doing. Data centers are big. Yell it, yell it. Data centers are big. They're big, man. They're big. 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. 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?

27:28I 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. And obviously it mattered because we saw a reaction from the government. In brief, what does that say to you tonight? It's very gratifying for anyone who believes in the value of journalism that there is still a real hunger. 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. And we've been overwhelmed by the response to the book. Yeah. Jonathan and Maggie, again, congrats on the book.