Maggie Haberman, US journalist: Trump tests limits

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1:41Hello, I'm Paddy O 'Connell, and this is The Interview from the BBC World Service. The best conversations coming out of the BBC. People shaping our world from all over the world. I want to get freedom. I like that freedom. A gender equal world would be a better world for men too. We need this as fire. We need healing. We need trust. These companies don't really, they don't care what governments do. This is a war. The first thing that we want is a war to end. For this episode, I speak to Maggie Haberman, White House correspondent for the New York Times and co-author of Regime Change, Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.

2:24In the book, Maggie examines Trump's second administration, from the influence of Elon Musk to his increasingly fraught dealings with world leaders. She explains how the four years out of office changed the president, his political instincts, and an agenda that goes further at home and abroad. She also tells me he pushes the powers of the office further than before and how he's testing the limits of the US system. One of the things that's fascinating about him, simply just as a historical study in this office is the recognition that shamelessness is a superpower and he refuses to be shamed in almost any action that he takes.

3:05But he also realized that he doesn't have to abide by the U.S. system, which is primarily norms and not laws. He is testing them in a way they have never been tested before. That is absolutely true, and it is because so much of this system has essentially been the honor system.

3:28Welcome to the interview from the BBC World Service with Maggie Haberman. We started thinking very early into Trump's second term in 2025 that what we were looking at was not a typical transfer of power from a Democrat to a Republican. and a typical U.S. presidency within the normal bounds that we know it, even one similar to term one Trump. This was an entirely different type of U.S. presidency, a massive, massive escalation in expansion of executive power. And it can be very hard to know how to cover something that's right in front of our faces sometimes, But it became very clear to us that we were covering a form of regime change in our own country, which we are unused to doing.

4:22As you say, this administration has engaged in regime change efforts in Venezuela, a not so successful one in Iran so far. There's discussion about regime change in Cuba. But it does work on multiple levels. We really were talking about the U.S. Yeah, it's very clear that you meant that they learned a lesson during the pandemic. This was the case with countries around the world, not just democracies. Executive functions were speeded up during the pandemic. In our own country, there was a lot of argument about how much power could be wielded by the smallest amount of people. Do we say that Trump, too, completely eclipses Trump, one, and that one of the reasons for that is there was a clear demonstration to Donald Trump's team of the power of the executive as demonstrated during the pandemic.

5:21Multiple factors led to why this Trump term is being waged the way it is, but you are correct that it is almost unrecognizable to term one. It is just fundamentally different. And it is true that in 2020, when the pandemic hit, that Trump and Stephen Miller in particular, his top domestic policy advisor who has such a vast remit that, you know, domestic policy advisor is almost too small a title or description to describe what role he plays in this government. But it became clear to them when they declared a public health emergency at the southern border of the U.S. and essentially sealed it so that immigration across it was stopped, that you could use emergency powers across all manner of declared emergencies, fentanyl emergencies, tariff emergencies, go on and on and on.

6:18You unlock sweeping powers and, as you just alluded to in the case of other countries as well, you do it very fast and you do it without going through the traditional bureaucratic process. Now, a number of Trump's advisors are maximalists anyway when it comes to executive power. And this is a longstanding discussion, particularly in Republican circles, about exactly what role the executive branch plays, whether there actually are any pockets of independence, so-called independent agencies. The perspective that the Trump administration has taken is there aren't any, and they had success in that at the Supreme Court level just this past week.

7:00But yes, this was a lesson that was hard learned in 2020. And so they started out this term declaring any number of emergencies, including an invasion, in their words, of migrants coming into the country. And by the time courts have caught up with what they are doing at this administration, a lot has been done. And it can be very, very difficult for the court system to constrain them. It's fascinating because your subtitle is Inside the Imperial Presidency, and it seems to me that you're grappling with when you kicked the British out, the Constitution created this office whose powers have not been properly understood.

7:43This is a president who, although he polarizes people, he is making us understand the post-revolutionary powers of the office, which we did not understand before. He has helped us understand the powers of this office as created for George Washington in a way that really no one else has done. One of the things that's fascinating about him simply just as a historical study in this office. And I'm not I'm not saying that Jonathan or I endorse how he is viewing this office one way or the other. but this is just what he is doing, is the recognition that shamelessness is a superpower, and he refuses to be shamed in almost any action that he takes.

8:28And that has been the case with him much of his life, but really it is exponentially the case now. But he also realized that he doesn't have to abide by the U.S. system, which is primarily norms and not laws. So what you just described about the powers, amorphous powers of the executive branch in the U.S. He is testing them in a way they have never been tested before. That is absolutely true. And it is because so much of this system has essentially been the honor system. I wonder if I can ask you about the people. I remember the extraordinary power of Elon Musk in Trump, too. And now you can hardly hear the man mentioned except for rockets.

9:13Can you take us inside the early Svengali role? You describe how Elon Musk would sleep in the White House in a sleeping bag in his office or in one of the bedrooms in the White House, bringing his children into cabinet meetings. Yeah, Elon Musk is almost a forgotten chapter of history, especially because Doge, the agency, the quasi-agency that he led, is about to sunset out. He was, I think, less Bengali than co-president. I mean, he wasn't technically a co-president, but he basically was a co-president. He summarily shut down a congressionally created agency in USAID. Just shut it down. Just ended it and gutted it.

9:57And what was left was sort of a rump that the State Department, led by Marco Rubio, had to deal with. He sent out emails to personnel that the White House felt like it was held hostage with. All of that led to what seems to be very little trackable savings, despite his claims that he was going to cut more than$1 trillion from the budget. Sometimes the number was two, depending on who you were talking to, and led to massive chaos and also stymied the Trump presidency for the first few months. And you have to look back on it and think, for what? But we get into detail in this book, in regime change, inside these meetings and just how discomfited so many people in the White House were with what Musk was doing.

10:41As to your question about his sleeping habits, yes, he would sleep in a sleeping bag in the executive office building. And he wanted to sleep in the White House residence for some reason. And Melania Trump was at first not thrilled with it. I don't know that she ever got thrilled with it. But he did end up doing that. And he was sort of excited about this. He was a he was a guest who stayed very long at the party. I'll put it that way. You're listening to The Interview from the BBC World Service with me, Paddy O 'Connell.

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12:22it's interesting that everything maggie says is disliked by don trump but he agreed to sit down for nearly an hour with her and her co-author to go through things and i just find it to be exactly typical of how difficult it is to cover this white house fairly for everybody's satisfaction because if you say something that Donald Trump does not like, he disputes it and can often insult you. That's one of the things he does. And in a post-truth era, it's very significant that he did agree to sit down with these two journalists who are very considerable journalists in Washington. So it's like he wanted to converse, but he doesn't really like their published account.

13:09And for me, it's an example of what we all find, I think. we're listening to the president and we're listening to his supporters, is it used to be much easier to call people to account on the facts. But once the facts themselves become disputed and you're in the post-truth world, it's what we all find when we listen to the great people on BBC World Service. Increasingly, we want to know how to tell the truth from vibes. And that's really the important thing about this conversation. It is a process where the journalists have sourced their account. They've gone to people who were in the room. Donald Trump doesn't like it.

13:47He, if he was here on the interview, he'd say it's not true. But that's why you are listening to the journalist explain her process in getting the book to air. So that's one of the things I found very interesting about it. So let's return to my conversation with Maggie Haberman. So we're learning that Donald Trump does like to surround himself with power, power interested people. He wants to be the top dog, but he does want ideologues and strong people. Stephen Miller is important in your book in a way that we hadn't really seen him mentioned before. We we we obsess about Elon Musk. But is Stephen Miller more of an influence on Donald Trump than Elon Musk ever was?

14:29Oh, it's not even a close call. And we try to, one of the things that Jonathan and I tried doing in this book was to describe the people who are making decisions in Trump's world and influencing decisions, not just as caricatures, but as people and where they came from and what their views of the world are, including Musk, by the way, but he was more of a limited character overall in Trump's world. Stephen Miller is an original Trump person, and he is the most powerful, one of the most powerful domestic officials, domestic policy officials in the White House, in any White House that we can think of in modern times.

15:07He is involved in almost every significant domestic policy piece that Trump has done. He is the keeper of executive orders, which gives him enormous power. He was often described as the keeper of the grievance list, for back of a better way of putting it, meaning the people who Trump wanted to seek some kind of retribution against. And cabinet agencies' leaders knew that in order to be there, they needed to work effectively with Miller or be afraid of crossing him. And we tried to demonstrate the various ways in which that plays out. But I will say that for all of his reputation as a meticulous planner, and that was true during the transition, it did not translate into being in government the same way that Miller's allies and acolytes had hoped it would.

15:57We lay that out in the book as well. The book also goes into the fallout from the Iran war. Do you think that we can safely say that the Iran war has changed Donald Trump? Does he understand that he was misled? Does it look that he thinks he was misled by Benjamin Netanyahu? Or are they still the allies they were when the bombing started? I would dispute that the premise of that question in our reporting. It's quite clear that Trump went into this very willingly. It is not that he was, you know, the portrait online of Netanyahu misleading Trump or puppeteering Trump, that just doesn't comport with our reporting.

16:41Trump has always been much more hawkish on the topic of Iran than most of his advisers are. And most of his advisers wanted to acknowledge that he was. And that only got more significant as time went on after his successful strike against General Soleimani in 2020 led to death threats against Trump and some of his top advisers. After the campaign was hacked by Iranians, top officials had their emails hacked and so forth. Trump was very clear with Netanyahu, and we get very deep inside these conversations in 2024, that he was going to be much tougher on Iran in a second term. So does Trump regret the war?

17:20There's no question that Trump would like to be done with this. He doesn't have the attention span for long-term diplomacy. He thought this was going to be quick, a quick regime change. But that was him. He decided that. It was really not so much what he was being told. And his own advisers warned him, albeit not usually grabbing him by the lapels. Only J.D. Vance did that. But his advisers did not support this. And they did suggest to him that the regime change scenarios were farcical and that munitions were going to be depleted. So he went in eyes wide open, and this is on him. Did you just tell me that J.D.

17:53Vance grabbed him by the napels? Metaphorically speaking. But J.D. Vance was the only person in Trump's... Because... Yes. Just in setting up the Board of Peace for Gaza and in bringing Hamas and Israel to a negotiation, You do describe an absolutely hair-raising conversation in which Donald Trump, on an open phone call, curses at Benjamin Netanyahu, tells him everybody hates him, and uses the F word. Was it as heated as that between these two leaders? It certainly was. And to answer a question you asked before, their relationship is not very good right now. At the time, it was the rare instance of Trump really using what leverage he had with Netanyahu in a way to get an outcome that he wanted that was different than what Netanyahu wanted in that moment.

18:50And that was about the ceasefire with Gaza. What did he say to him? What did he say to him? I'll paraphrase. I'll paraphrase. I'm going to paraphrase because I don't have the section in front of me right now. But it was a remarkable phone call. the evening of September 27th, 2025, Trump, Netanyahu, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff were also on the line. Netanyahu was calling, Trump believed, to try to quash this ceasefire discussion. And Trump just lit into Netanyahu for minutes on end, berating him. Yes, using the F word. This is a great deal for Israel. I've stood by you when people didn't want me to.

19:34Everyone hates you. You know, even the two Jews, all the Jews hate you. Even the two Jews on this call are sick of you. You know, this is a great deal. If you don't go along with this, we will break up. We will get a divorce. It was brutal. It was so brutal that people were surprised that Netanyahu showed up at the White House for the pre-planned meeting two days later. But it was really something. And, of course, there was the phone call with Prime Minister Netanyahu on the phone and Donald Trump holding the phone by way of an apology to the Qataris. But although I saw that image, which implies that there had been a conversation, Donald Trump has since said of your book with your co-author that it's mostly made up.

20:19And he doesn't like what you're saying about the inside scoop of his conversations and accuses you of making it up.

20:30They can say whatever they want. He can say whatever he wants. We stand by the reporting. And, you know, again, he can he can say what he wants. Tony Blair was involved in these conversations for the Board of Peace. And we now know from a British official who's given a readout of his call on the phone between Donald Trump and Keir Starmer, that Donald Trump ranged about wind turbines creating fat foxes. that's been another readout of the conversation. How would you characterize the conversations that Donald Trump has had with world leaders? We all think back to the one in the White House with President Zelensky.

21:11But is it a mixture of making conversation and giving conspiracy theories and telling people off? What's his style when he's on the phone to the British Prime Minister? it? It's a great question. He historically has a habit, President Trump, of mixing charm. And really, I mean, you know, every person you talk to who has been in his presence, and again, we're not endorsing this view, but describes it almost as being put under the ether with him, which is an expression he used to use himself about people. He generally had a good relationship with Keir Starmer. Trump also felt like he had the upper hand with Keir Starmer.

21:50He counted Starmer as among many officials who he felt were doing everything he could to please Trump and to be on good terms with Trump. And the conversations that he has had with European leaders are very different this time than last time. Trump tends to feel as if he has much more free range. His conversations with Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, Trump tends to treat Putin with a fair amount of respect in the conversation. contrary to, as you just mentioned, Zelensky, those phone calls, and we lay one of them out in the book, Trump just doesn't like Zelensky and considers him weak. And, you know, he is the lesser of the two powers in this conflict.

22:33And he does not treat him with the same level of respect. Having followed him from the New York days, as you have done, do you think you understand him? You write about his personal habits. It really took you by surprise to find out that he was sticking, gilding onto White House mantelpieces and that his bedroom is untidy. I mean, is this stuff that he doesn't want us to know about? What did you discover about his personal foibles in the White House? Caroline Levitt told colleagues, the press secretary at the White House, that she had walked into the Oval Office and found the president with a tube of super glue, gluing an applique to the mantelpiece, the marble mantelpiece fireplace in the Oval Office, which I think said a lot about how much control he likes over decoration.

23:22We got very deep inside how he lives in the residence and how he had lived last term. And, you know, he is a late night snacker who there would often be bags of potato chips and ice cream cartons, you know, the next morning. And for whatever reason, he likes a fully carpeted bathroom. And this presented problems because it would get very wet. And the resident staff was very concerned about mold and health hazards. So the solution was essentially a smaller piece of carpet, not a bath mat, but a smaller piece of carpet. And there were a few of them and they would get rotated out. One would dry and then it would be brought back in to try to reduce the potential for mold.

24:04Why? You know, it's been very interesting to us how people have been very intrigued by all of this. I mean, you can see why he's enraged with you. I know that you did have one final meeting with him, and he agrees with you that Trump, too, is more powerful than Trump won. But he shouted at you, I believe, using the F word, you and your co-author, and probably because he doesn't like the sort of stuff and would dispute the sort of stuff you're saying. Are we ever going back? If this is an imperial presidency, the final question, Maggie, is this consequential president has forever changed the presidency, hasn't he?

24:37we can't go back to the system before? I don't think we know yet. I think that there are very few presidents who could do what he has done, as he correctly says, and that is that shamelessness as superpower and the iron fist that he runs the Republican Party with and wields over lawmakers. It's just fundamentally different. There has been a mission creep of expanding executive power in the US over many decades. He has obviously thrown accelerant on it, but it's hard to see a Democrat who can see how he has used power getting into office and saying, I'm going to give up a lot of that. Biden did do some of that and he was perceived as quite weak.

25:23Thank you for listening to The Interview. You'll find more in-depth conversations on The Interview wherever you get your BBC podcasts, including conversations with astronaut Victor Glover, crime writer Patricia Cornwall and many others. Until the next time, bye for now.

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