Why everything you feared about Trump is true

0:01This is a global production.

0:30position on July 4th it's going to be approximately 107 degrees out and I'm gonna go and I'm gonna make a really long speech just to show that I can do anything you ever see a guy somebody told him he looks great in a bathing suit on a Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday and Friday during the week we basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the fuck they're doing. Do you understand that? Let's look at this shit. Quiet, quiet. The second Trump presidency is 529 days old. There are 931 days remaining. During that time, he's pardoned every January 6th insurrectionist.

1:14He's publicly attacked President Zelensky in the Oval Office. He's imposed tariffs. He's reduced tariffs. He's invaded Iran. He's kidnapped the Venezuelan president. He's levied tariffs again. He's plastered the Oval Office in gold. He posted a video which suggested that Gaza could be the Riviera of the Middle East. He said that Gaza should be taken over by his own government, that Canada should be the 51st state, that UK soldiers didn't do much in Afghanistan or Iraq, that he would reopen Alcatraz. He told people that they should go and check what's in Fort Knox because he was worried it might all have been stolen.

1:50Even this week, he's talked about a threesome with his sons. And he posted this. For someone you know been diagnosed with TDS, the symptoms can be relentless. Fortunately, I'm Dr. Trump and I have a treatment plan. Let's hear what some of my patients have to say. I have been suffering for over a decade. And after listening to Dr. Trump, I can see some results. Man, I've been suffering for years. I really didn't believe that was help out there. That was when I came across this video on TV. I really thought I was a lost cause. This was going to affect me for the rest of my life. But after using the treatment plan, I can see a difference.

2:36I really wasn't sure I could help some of these people. They were so far gone, I wasn't really sure. I had no idea how much this was affecting my life. My work has slowed down. I'm hardly recognizable anymore. I just needed help. I couldn't eat. I couldn't sleep. Constantly angry. I made everyone miserable around me. I feel like I've aged 20 years in the last two years. I've been so concerned I was really starting to worry about my future. The treatment is simple. Turn off. Fake news. Say your prayers and if you ever feel anxious, just have a Diet Coke like me and you're going to see a remarkable difference in your life.

3:26I don't think Wild Ride quite cuts it. Two journalists who have reported on Trump every step of the way in this presidency and the last are Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times. No one is better connected in the court of King Donald than they. And they've just published a new book, Regime Change, inside the imperial presidency of Donald Trump. You kind of think you can't be surprised with Trump anymore, that after 10 years, the shtick might have worn thin. And then you read a book like this, with your jaw permanently stuck beneath its pages. So in this episode, I'm talking to Maggie and Jonathan about their reporting inside the imperial new Trump presidency and how the man has changed, how he hasn't, what's been done, what for America and the world in those 931 remaining days is still to come.

4:19Welcome to the News Agents.

4:25The News Agents. well maggie haberman jonathan swan thanks so much for joining us on the news agents um your book is uh as extraordinary as perhaps we might expect it to be given the subject matter and both of you are very experienced chroniclers and journalists of donald trump his first presidency and the wider politics surrounding him just just before we get on to some of the specifics in the book i just wonder if you could reflect on the differences in this second term reporting on him, the politics of reporting on him by comparison to the first? It's almost unrecognisable. It's not to say that Donald Trump has had some profound character change.

5:07Of course, he hasn't. And Maggie's covered him for much longer than I have. And we show in the book the roots of a lot of his behaviours and actions. But the way he's operating as president is unrecognisable. You could break it down in so many different ways. There's the team around him, which in the first term when Maggie and I would talk to his many of his top advisers and aides in private, they had contempt for him. They would mock him behind his back. They would make clear that they saw their role as stopping bad things from happening, protecting America, protecting the world from Donald Trump.

5:47That was their worldview. That was how they functioned. You don't find those people in this administration at the senior level. The other thing that's changed in terms of the team is it's shrunk. His circle has shrunk. And one of the reasons the reporting of this book was so difficult is most of the US government at the very senior level has no earthly idea what's going on, how decisions are being made, what discussions are happening in the Oval Office and the White House Situation Room. So you have this sort of pantomime of transparency every day where Trump's doing kind of open mic night. He invites the press in, you know, he'll answer a few questions or he'll invite the cameras into the cabinet room.

6:31And it seems like you're getting this rolling reality show. But for anything that actually matters, like secrets that they want to keep, they're very good at that. So penetrating those rooms became much more difficult. In the first term, it was just easier. I think the type of reporting that Maggie and I do, which is to try to show people how decisions are made, how their country is being run, that was much easier to do in the first term. And I think one of the reasons the reaction to the book has been as overwhelming as it has is there just simply hasn't been that much of this type of reporting this term, frankly, because it's really hard.

7:08I wonder to what extent has the period, Maggie, and you've known him for such a long time, you reported on him personally for such a long time, was the period when the Biden administration, and not just the Biden administration, but when he faced prison, do you think that that has affected him personally? In the book, you report that he says, if I lose, I'm fucked ahead of the election. He calls the Biden administration the Gestapo. Has that affected his personality and mode of governing? It certainly has. I think it's a little more nuanced than that. He certainly has accentuated certain aspects of his personality and his behaviors, one of which is about vengeance and payback.

7:47To be clear, it was not only the Biden administration that prosecuted Donald Trump. He was convicted criminally in a state court in New York on a totally unrelated case. And Trump has tried to smear it all with the brush of Biden was going after me. But what we do show in the book is how this period in the political wilderness where he was debanked, where he was deplatformed from social media, all of this made him something of a and face to assassination attempts. This all made him something of a mystical figure for his followers, for his supporters, and frankly, for his own team. I was actually thinking about this this morning where when we were reporting this book, we would have people describe him to us on Trump's team literally as the chosen one.

8:30And all of that has led into how he is governing now. It was true that he was concerned about going to prison. His advisors were concerned about going to prison. We show in the book how one of them said to us in the course of reporting shortly after one of the indictments, he has to win. That was the mentality in June of 2023. And so what you are seeing now is a president who has defied every odd everybody had, who has cowed the Republican Party. He has turned House Republicans in Congress into an appendage of the White House, essentially. And he has a presidential immunity decision, which means there are fairly little accountability measures for him and he knows it.

9:18So that all combines with how he's governing now. Something that has been talked about a lot and obviously was written about a lot with regards to the Biden presidency, perhaps less than it ought to have been, is the president's mental acuity. Having seen him over so many years, do you think that he's mentally declining? I think he's 80 years old. And I think that, you know, you can look at video of him talking now and video of him talking 10 years ago. And he seems to be, you know, certainly older. I will say we met with him. We're not doctors. We're not diagnosticians. But we did meet with him for an hour long interview in March this year.

9:54and neither of us came away thinking that there was some distinct difference in him other than the fact that you know he is wearing his age much more visibly than he used to but certainly not in terms of any kind of a mental decline. Jonathan talking about Biden for a moment something that really just stood out to me just as a vignette in the book is it clear decline or not it's clear despite the fact that Trump might seem even more harder edged on this side of the Atlantic before He retains this ability to charm and to beguile. And that included even President Biden in the meeting that he had when he returned to the White House, where Biden actually thought that Trump might be something that he wasn't.

10:37Would you just recount that story? Because it did seem quite extraordinary to me. Yeah, it is a pretty remarkable scene. So we have a scene in the book quite early on. It's actually chapter one where Trump goes to Washington after this incredibly brutal campaign where he's said everything you could possibly say about Biden, the worst president ever, full of dementia and incompetent and what have you. He shows up to the White House and they're sitting by the fireplace and Trump basically starts telling Biden what a great job he's done as president. And, you know, you're so popular in Pennsylvania, Joe.

11:22And he starts to try to almost kind of recruit Biden onto his side, you know, say, oh, they were so rough to you. The Demo, you know, it was so terrible what they did to you, taking the nomination away from you. And he was trying to bait Biden into criticizing Kamala Harris. He obviously didn't take the bait. You're right that he even suggests that he would have won if the it might have won if the if the if the Dems hadn't taken the nomination from him. He said to Biden, we might not be doing this if they hadn't taken it from him. You know, you're very popular in Pennsylvania. I mean, he was laying it on thick.

11:54And then he he even expressed sympathy about he said, it's terrible what they did to your son, Hunter, which, you know, is sort of your head almost explodes. You know, Trump and his allies were obviously central to over many years of going after Hunter Biden and the quote unquote Biden crime family and all the rest of it. So and he said, you know, he basically intimated to Biden that anything I can do to help, let me know. So I think it was I mean, I think it was quite a bewildering experience. Biden fell for it. Well, he did and he didn't. So he definitely was in the moment a bit offset by that.

12:42And some of his allies thought that he was being naive, you know, Trump telling him how nice Trump was. He also pardoned his son not that long after that meeting. So clearly, pretty quickly and based on our reporting, once Trump started to actually announce some of the people that he was going to that were going to be running the FBI and the DOJ. Biden pretty clearly saw where this was all headed. And so he pardons his son. And, of course, just shortly before Trump took office, he pardoned other family members. So, you know, it's more nuanced. It's not quite he was totally bamboozled. But in the moment, I mean, Trump, look, Trump can be many people have described this.

13:27People who can't stand Trump describe being charmed by him. um it was funny i tucker carlson who i'm sure familiar to your viewers over in the in the uk but um he describes he's described this publicly as almost a spell and i know what he's talking about i'm not endorsing any supernatural explanation but i know what he's talking about because you enter the trump's world and and it's it's a world that trump has created It's a reality that he's created. And, you know, so many people have described to me the experience of sitting with Trump over a meal or in the Oval Office, visitors. And he'll just he'll be telling stories that are divorced from reality.

14:17You know, I you know, he was begging on his knees like a dog crying. And I told him, you know, whatever. And you sort of have to make a decision in those moments. Am I going to intrude and sort of insert reality into that bubble? Or am I just going to kind of let it all wash over me and just experience the flow of Trump? And if you want to stay in his company for more than 15, 20 minutes, you have to make the latter decision. And that creates its own ecosystem. And that's the world that Trump lives in. Maggie, Jonathan spoke about how the court of Trump, the number of advisers is much smaller than it used to be, that that's constricted quite a lot.

14:59Who is it in these first 18 months, two years of the second term? Who is it that he does listen to now? It's a very small group, as Jonathan said, but it really does depend on which issue we're talking about. And it can change. And that group of about a half dozen people can expand a little bit depending on what the subject matter is. If it's economic issues, it can include Scott Besson, the Treasury Secretary, and often does. But it's a tiny group. the person who he will almost always listen to it doesn't mean that he is always going to do what he wants but who he will often listen to is Stephen Miller and we describe his deputy chief but also his homeland security advisor and those dual-headed roles and titles don't really accurately describe the scope of Miller's power within this government uh he is somebody who the major cabinet level appointees understand they either have to be willing to work with or fear crossing.

16:01And that includes the Secretary of War, the Attorney General, and who also used to be the Deputy Attorney General. I could go on and on, the DHS Secretary. Miller has a vision for governance. Miller has a vision for what the U.S. government should look like. And Miller has a very, very hard line view on immigration, much harder line than Donald Trump himself. But what Miller is able to do is tell Trump, I can get something done quickly. And often he does. And because of the way the U.S. system is set up, particularly in its current iteration, where Congress is essentially acting as a supplicant, it takes a while for courts to catch up if they have disagreements.

16:45Other times they sign off on what they're doing. So Stephen Miller is who he listens to quite a bit. Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, still is someone he listens to. He will, depending on the issue, listen to J.D. Vance. He likes Marco Rubio a lot. But again, he is listening to himself more often than not these days. It is a presidency being run on Trump's pure gut very frequently.

17:26taking some of the issues which have defined his um his second term so far in turn all of which uh you have extensive reporting on obviously one of the early issues that trump set himself to deal with was ukraine and again remarkable reporting and quotes uh in your book i mean not least you report on a meeting with trump marco rubio keith kellogg his envoy and others where Trump can really only focus rather than the issue at hand, you report, on how much he loathes Zelensky. At one point, you write, he says, I'm not a big fan of Ukraine, except they're women. And then he says he likes the minerals deal because he sees it as a way of extracting wealth from Ukraine.

18:04They owe us, they need to repay us. And Scott Besson, personally, you write, is scathing about Zelensky saying, I've dealt with this little fucker. He's tricky. He's like the special needs child for the Europeans. He's acting like Mr Bean on crack. This is a remarkable account. What explains in your mind the antipathy for Zelensky personally and the sort of way that they talk about and deal with this issue? I think at the core is I think the most important point besides, you know, some of it's a personality issue and there's no question about that. But I think there's something deeper, which is Trump respects power.

18:44He respects force. And in that relationship, you know, the people Trump has most contempt for are the middle powers, the small powers, the ones that don't aren't completely sycophantic to him. I mean, he obviously has great regard for Viktor Orban, whatever. No one would describe Hungary as a great force. But for the middle powers and the smaller powers that are not totally sycophantic and deferential to Trump and don't have enormous militaries and are somewhat reliant on the US, Trump has contempt for them. And he's always respected Putin, had an affinity for Putin. we describe in the book a pretty remarkable, you know, we have reporting in the book about phone calls that he had with Vladimir Pusin and Zelensky.

19:34It was his first phone call with Zelensky since he last was in office. And we reported on in the book. And it's a study in contrasts. You know, in the Pusin call, it's two peers. He's talking to Pusin as a peer. He is excited about the prospect of getting to a peace deal so they can conduct business together so that U.S. companies can invest in Russia again. You know, he wanted to do some kind of a grand bargain. When he's talking to Zelensky, he's talking to an irritant as sort of an obstacle to what he wants to do, which is, you know, get back to business with Russia. So, you know, the call is laden with frustration it actually opens with an especially cruel greeting trump says to zelinski it's a sort of sarcastic joke i just spoke to your your best friend vladimir putin you know so and then he basically tells zelinski you've got no cards you know you need to you know essentially make a deal and and compromise and what that means is give up you know large chunks of land and deal with Putin, almost erasing the fact that Putin was the aggressor, that Putin invaded.

20:49There's no moral dimension, really, to that equation. It's just a power dynamic. And Trump, you know, favours the large power. Has he, I mean, obviously, as I said, he set himself, he said that he would fix it on day one. He then, you know, went back on that and said he wasn't being literal. But obviously, by definition, the war has now been going on since longer than the First World War. It's not resolved. Has he lost interest in it now, do you think? There's no question. Trump definitely has lost interest in it. I mean, he would like to obviously solve it, but he doesn't have the patience for sustained diplomatic engagement.

21:27You also saw that, by the way, with Iran. You know, he empowered Steve Whitcoff, his envoy last year, to negotiate with the Iranians. But, you know, he only gave that a couple of months. As you know, from the Obama administration experience, nuclear diplomacy and all of its complexities takes a long time to do in any sort of detail and rigor. And within a few months, Netanyahu came back and told him, you know, we're going in and Trump didn't stop him, didn't use any of his leverage and ended up joining it. Well, I was going to ask you about that. You write in the book, Maggie, that Tucker Carlson warned Trump, you're reporting, that the only thing that could wreck your presidency is war with Iran.

22:08And Trump responded by saying, we're not doing that. What changed for the president, do you think? Trump is very good. And we write about this in the book at telling people what they want to hear, depending on what the audience is. You know, he knows where Tucker Carlson stands. He knows where other intervention skeptics stand. Trump himself. And again, it's this is it's it's much more nuanced than the online portrait of Trump is being puppeteered by Benjamin Netanyahu or that something dramatic changed. Trump has always been more hawkish on Iran than most of his team. And that was true in term one, and it was true now.

22:41And frankly, that only became hardened in these years between his two presidencies when Iran was threatening to kill him, threatening to kill, or going after a number of his advisors who were part of his Iran policy in his first term, who were involved in the successful strike against General Soleimani, which Trump is very proud, by the way, and many of his advisors told him, don't do it. He did it. The world didn't end, but certainly it upped the risk. Trump was fascinated by the Israeli military pager attacks against Hezbollah, even as he described them as weird or distressing or horrific. He was fascinated, and that showed up in our reporting repeatedly.

23:24He was very impressed by the Israeli military's performance in the 12-day war last year. And at a certain point, Trump likes success and he likes being with the winner. And last year, Netanyahu was somebody who was taking risks that in Trump's mind were ending well. The other piece of it is that Trump did use his leverage in a very specific way with Netanyahu, and we write about this extensively in the book, in the fall to get a ceasefire with Gaza. But all of this led to this feeling for Trump of, you know, he said to us that he sees Netanyahu as a good wartime partner because he's not afraid of war.

24:06By the time we got to early this year, Trump truly believed that going into Iran was going to be quick. It was right after the Venezuela strike where they seized Maduro, which was a very effective military operation, whatever anybody thinks about what was done diplomatically or in terms of international aspects of it. Trump thought the Iran regime was a paper tiger. He thought that he could dominate. He thought that they would fall quickly and this was going to be done. And if you convince yourself that that's the case, then you make decisions based on that. And obviously that has not held up.

24:43But for anybody who wanted to see it, Trump was always more sympathetic to what Netanyahu was saying than his team wanted to acknowledge. Although, I mean, as you write, lots of his advisors did advise him that it was a bad idea, not just Carlson with whom he's now fallen out, Rubio saying that he's bullshit, CIA director saying it's a farcical plan, but Trump went along with it anyway. Do you think that he regrets it now? Well, two things. There's no question, and based on our reporting, that he regrets it in the sense that this can't end and he can't figure out how to get out and this MOU has turned into its own paddle of trying to get up at the creek they're in.

25:22The only person on Trump's team who was vocal in these rooms with Trump about not doing this was Vance. And it cost him with Trump. Trump got very irritated with his vice president. There's no one on Trump's senior team who thought this was a good idea. The closest you would find was Pete Hegsev. But nobody really grabbed Trump by the lapels and said, don't do this. They offered, you know, specific critiques that were fairly muted. Dan Cain, his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is in the same role that Mark Milley was in, in term one. But Mark Milley was adamantly opposed to various things that Trump wanted to do and would argue with him very, very vociferously.

26:03That is not Dan Cain's approach. He will lay out what could happen. But at the end of the day, he was not a strong advocate in one way or another. And they all made clear in that final go, no go meeting, we will back whatever you want to do, Mr. President. And there's a reason for that. He is the president. It is on him. But as you say, does he regret it now? This is not what he wants to be dealing with. Even if he doesn't really care much about the midterms right now, which he doesn't in all of our reporting, this is just something being described as failure. And that bothers him immensely. Jonathan, when he's assessing his presidency so far, or this second term, obviously, clearly, what has happened with Iran, the fact he can't extricate himself, as Maggie was saying, bothers him.

26:48What are the other things that he feels have not gone according to plan? I mean, I wonder whether, you know, if you could talk a little bit about his attitude towards Epstein and the Epstein scandal, and also, of course, Liberation Day. I mean, in your reporting, he's clearly absolutely incensed by it. I mean, he says to Howard Lutnick, the Treasury Secretary, he used to be a killer Howard, and now you've got your beautiful wife and your big house and you're just soft and you're a pussy. You know what you are. You're a pussy. I mean, this is a member of his cabinet that he's blaming for this imbroglio and fiasco.

27:19Well, I think there's quite a few things that, again, if he was honest, he would he would say didn't go as he wanted them to go. I mean, one of them has been immigration enforcement. He clearly didn't like the PR and the press around the killings of these protesters in Minnesota. border. That's not to say that he thinks the whole immigration mission has been a failure. I don't think he thinks that at all. And in fact, they've had great success at sealing the border. Epstein was something he just didn't want to deal with. He wanted it to disappear. And he would get more and more enraged as his base just sort of refused to move on.