198. How Trump’s Imperial Presidency Really Works

0:00Thanks for listening to The Rest Is Politics. Sign up to The Rest Is Politics Plus to enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolitics.com. That's therestispolitics.com. Is it chaotic or is there a method to the madness? The two people would have to manage the fallout from the biggest global energy shock in history. They just learn about this, you know, the day of. He was being compared with Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Hitler, Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin. This is a president who is operating so much on pure gut.

0:36The White House press corps generally have lost the battle of how to cover this guy. What I think that the Trump era has shown more broadly, I would say, is the limits of what daily journalism can do. Stephen Miller immediately saw that this was an opening to crush the left. This episode is presented by IG. Now, as a listener of this podcast, you're no doubt acutely aware of the world's unstable political landscape and how it can affect your money. Exactly. It can be incredibly frustrating to feel like yet another maddening decision made in Westminster or Brussels, or dare I say, Washington, can directly affect your finances.

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2:15How does Donald Trump's imperial presidency really work? Well, to help us answer that question, I'm joined today by two very, very good journalists, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times. And they've written a book, Regime Change, which is already the fastest selling nonfiction book of 2026 in the USA. They've done more than a thousand interviews with people attached to the Trump presidency. Their book, which I've read now twice, really does give you a sense of life inside Trump world, from the Oval Office to the Situation Room. And it also gives you an extraordinary insight into the decision-making process surrounding the US-Israeli attacks on Iran.

3:02So I hope you enjoy listening to me talking to them as much as I enjoy talking to them. I wonder if I can start with that commercial success. And please don't take this the wrong way. We're a British podcast, but I can tell you that more than half of our top 10 episodes last year were about Donald Trump. So how much is that amazing first week sale down to your undoubted journalistic skills? And how much is it actually down to the fact that the world is obsessed with Donald Trump? Can I give you an obnoxious answer? Yeah, go on. Go on. Do that. Do that. It's down to us. I'm telling you that because every Trump book in the last three years has sold like 10 ,000 copies.

3:46So we must be doing something right. We actually had been told by many people that the nonfiction market was dead, that everyone was exhausted by Trump. I was very bearish about this book, actually, commercially. I thought it was the best work we'd ever done journalistically. but commercially I was very bearish because all the signs in the market were that people were just not reading this stuff anymore so we must have done something right I was just saying to Maggie before you came on Jonathan I have both listened to the book and read the book in in in this form it's a very different experience I found reading it more pleasurable than listening because listening not because you're not brilliant journalists just because Trump is who he is who he is I found it gave me a headache quite regularly and I had to sort of just slow down and stop.

4:39But listen, we're not going to cover all the big things in the book. So I want to focus on the things that really kind of leapt out at me. And one of those came close to the end, page 1394. And I want to kick off with this and then we'll kind of we'll dip in and out as we as we go working backwards. Netanyahu and his team outlined conditions they portrayed as pointing to near a certain victory. This is about Iran. Iran's ballistic missile program could be destroyed within weeks. Iran would be so weakened that it could not choke off the Strait of Hormuz. The likelihood that Iran would land blows against US interests was minimal.

5:12Besides, Mossad indicated that protests inside Iran would begin again, and with the Israeli spy agency helping to foment riots and rebellion, and an intense bombing campaign could create the conditions for the Iranian opposition to overthrow the regime. The Israelis also raised the prospect of Iranian Kurdish fighters crossing the border from Iraq to open a ground front in the northwest, further stretching the regime forces and accelerating its collapse. Netanyahu delivered his presentation in a confident monotone. It sounded compelling and well prepared, at least to Trump. And I thought, wow, that just puts together the process, it seems to me, by which Trump agreed to do what he then did, and which is plunge the entire world economy into a form of chaos.

5:58What does that tell us? What does that single passage tell us about the way that Trump's term to White House works? A couple of things. And the scene that you laid out was this incredible moment in the White House situation room where Netanyahu is delivering not just the conditions that you described, but he plays this video for Trump of possible regime change scenarios of who could take over. The U.S. officials really saw it as pretty farcical, you know, Trump aside, and never really believed in what that could be. But A, we couldn't find another example of a foreign leader briefing a U.S. president in the situation room this way, number one, and it speaks to the relationship and just how this White House operates.

6:45Number two, Yes, Netanyahu had been selling Trump on a regime change war for some time. There's no question about that. But the sounded compelling piece, and it was very clear that, and we write this to the U.S. officials in the room, that Trump was pretty taken by this presentation. But it's not because, you know, Netanyahu is marionetting Trump, contrary to the narrative that he just sort of, you know, made Trump his meat puppet. Trump is much more hawkish on Iran than most of his advisers in either term, but particularly this one. And so he got more radicalized during the four-year interregnum when he would face two assassination attempts, neither of which has been tied to Iran.

7:30But around the same time, a man was indicted in the U.S. in connection with an Iranian-backed, alleged Iranian-backed murder-for-hire plot. And so all of this helped fuse the conditions for what happened. Plus, this is a president in his second term who is operating so much on pure gut. And he had a good feeling about this. He told advisors he believed that the Iranian regime was a paper tiger, that this would go quickly. That obviously did not come to pass. But it is not because Trump did not have warnings from his own team. He listened to both and he knew where he wanted to go. What strikes me through various parts of the book and some of the decisions that are made is you have this wonderful phrase, which I've never heard this before, rolling bull sessions, where meetings just kind of morph from one subject into the next.

8:18and you're never quite sure who's in the room. And it feels very chaotic in terms of a decision-making process. Jonathan, is it chaotic or is there a method to the madness? It's both. So you have these rolling meetings that are sort of one meeting, really. There's no delineation between them. So the Oval Office is the epicentre. If you're not in the room, you just don't even know about the decision. like the notion of an orderly interagency process where you have a proper National Security Council process of all the voices, everyone developing an idea, like the George W. Bush administration, very much consensus building up, you know this from your time in government.

9:02You know, Bush wanted to have everyone agreeing, and then it was presented to him and he was the decider. This is the precise opposite. It's Trump in the room with a few people, five, six, seven people. Sometimes you have these like guests kind of rolling in and it can be almost farcical. We have a scene in the book where they're discussing a highly classified defense program and this sort of salt of the earth looking country kind of guy strolls in with stone samples. And he says, you know, I've got these stone samples for the Rose Garden that Trump was wanting to pave over. And Trump immediately gets up off his chair and goes off and they're looking out the window.

9:40He's on the phone. You know, meanwhile, they run out of time. The meeting ends. So you have all this stuff and, you know, it is chaotic. Let's just be real. It is chaotic. At the same time, when there are certain issues, when they really want to keep a secret, they're very, very secretive. So the lead up to the Iran war is a very good example, which we document in this book. Look, it was so secretive that the Treasury Secretary and the Energy Secretary, they weren't in the room. They were not involved in any of the planning meetings. The two people would have to manage the fallout from the biggest global energy shock in history.

10:16They just learn about this, you know, the day of basically. So it's both. And it's also not total chaos because you also have people like Stephen Miller, who had a long range plan in the interregnum period. we interviewed Stephen Miller for example in 2023 a long interview we did with him about the immigration plan for the second term he laid out in fine detail everything that we're seeing now so he had a a vision you had people like Russ Vogt the budget director who had a vision for trying to dismantle what they would call the deep state the administrative state you know mass firing so it's not just the total circus chaos it's it's all things at once and that's why what we try to do in the book is show it's a nuanced picture as crazy as it can seem it's more textured the book sort of goes through very very detailed sort of all the big issues that you're dealing with and then you have this kind of quite strange interview at the end with donald trump first of all why did he do it why did he want to do the interview and it's interesting to read because you couldn't you you're proper old-fashioned journalists who want to check facts and you want to put things to people etc.

11:30But you're not able to do that properly because he's just going in all the directions that he does. But the thing that really leapt at me, I said I wanted to put you the things that really leapt at me, was this story that he told you about Gary Player, the golfer, who was a big part of my childhood. He was the guy who famously used to do 100 press-ups and people thought, why did golfers have to keep fit? And he revolutionized the way you think about golf. Anyway, Trump goes to see him on his 90th birthday. And Trump tells you that Gary Player has this friend who's a historian. So this guy tells Trump, or the paper that this historian wrote for Gary Player said Trump's the most powerful person he's ever lived.

12:06And Trump also happily showed this to you, where he was being compared with Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Hitler, Mao Zedong, and Joseph Stalin. And he seemed to kind of quite like being in that company. Was that, what was he trying to tell you with that story? And by the way, and then it turns out the guy's not a historian. He's a caddy. A, I don't know why he sat down with us other than the fact that it was something his advisors told him not to do. We had been asking for an interview for many, many weeks because he's the subject of our book. We needed to give him the opportunity to talk.

12:38There are certain things that we needed to take directly to him. So that was one piece. We were getting nowhere going through the front door of the White House press office. So we eventually messaged him directly on his cell phone. And it took multiple times of doing that before he instructed his staff to set up an interview. Is this true, by the way, that most of you guys in the White House press corps have his number? Yeah, entirely true. It's the most known and used cell phone number of a high power person that I've ever known of. I'm not sure there's anyone who doesn't have his number. No, I mean, I really like, and you can go really down the list.

13:16It's not just the White House press corps. It's like Washington and parts of New York, but and of course, foreign leaders in any event. Why he did it, I assume, is just because he believes he is his own best comms director and spokesman and because he's had a lifelong ethos that he used to tell his own children, which was always take the call from reporters. So, OK, so we go in and Jonathan and I don't. Yes, we both have his cell phone number. But just to be clear to your listeners, we don't really use it. When we have engaged with him in the course of the last year and a half, it's been in the course of our White House reporting when we're on duty or in the pool or on Air Force One.

13:53There are reporters who have gotten news out of calling him, and some of it's been instructive. But oftentimes he just dictates the terms of the call, and it's two and a half minutes long. It's not useful for what we do. So we didn't want to do it that way. We wanted to sit down in person for we could do rigorous fact checking. We were very clear about that. We got through like a fraction of the questions we had in the hour we had. But one of our questions and we're sitting in this like jewel box Oval Office that we had not been in since he started gilding it. Put in the gold. Yeah. Yeah. We have this remarkable scene.

14:26I mean, he put up like the only thing that I remember were a few family pictures in term one. And the first thing that went up was a picture of his father, Fred Trump, behind him on the credenza. Now, like you can't find a square inch. And if he does, he puts, you know, challenge coin medallions all over. Anyway, we had not been in since he started doing this. And we walk in, it's day 17 of the war in Iran. And you'd think there would be maps or documents or, you know, he used to keep classified documents on his desk when reporters would come in and turn one. This time he picks up pictures and it's maple trees.

15:01And he says, I'm buying trees for the White House. I'm paraphrasing, but I picked good trees. Underneath that were plans for his ballroom and the types of columns that they were going to use. And we were talking about the size and the variation, Athens versus Rome. And then I think it was our second question to him was about presidential power, because we knew he had been telling people that he was the most powerful U.S. president that had ever been. And so we asked him a variation of that question to see what he would say. And in response, he had his ever-present aide, Natalie Harp, who sits along the wall in nearly every Oval Office meeting.

15:35Natalie, go get the printouts from the historian. And so she brings us these sheets of paper. And the first paragraph was essentially Donald Trump is the most powerful person who's ever walked the face of the earth. And then it goes through this list of what he describes as the top 10, which is history's conquerors and monsters. You know, Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Napoleon, Tamerlane, the Caesars, Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan. I'm missing someone. It's fine. You get the point. The point that he wanted us to understand was that they had power. He had more. And then the other piece that this historian, supposed historian, wrote was that Trump was willing to use it, which was clearly part of what he was describing to us about the Iran war, not openly, but that was part of what we were supposed to take.

16:20We asked him about his partnership with Bibi Netanyahu. And he said, you know, because they've obviously had a very complicated relationship. And he described him as a good wartime partner because, quote, he's not afraid of war. and sitting there while Trump was describing his own power and his understanding of his own power and his desire to leave his imprint on not just Washington, but the world and reshape global order in the post-World War II dynamics, just gone. The whole idea of the most powerful person ever aside, but it really was the premise of our book being read back to us about somebody who was so radically changing the US presidency through expanded power.

17:02But it was among the most remarkable moments that either of us have ever had with him. But the other extraordinary observation that came through that is that I think in the introduction of the book, you essentially are talking about the, it seems to me that you're saying it might have been better in terms of the sort of levels of power that you now assumed if actually he had beaten Joe Biden and done the two terms and gone. And he seems to think that as well, that actually it's only because he had the four-year interregional with Biden that he's had the time and then the will to become, to use power and in my view, abuse power in the way that he's done in the first year of this term with three to go with more to come.

17:43I don't even think that's a disputable premise. The counterfactual, if he had have won the 2020 election, he would have had to deal with, COVID was still raging. There was global inflation. Every developed economy in the world was suffering global inflation. He was already pretty unpopular. He was on an expedited timeline to withdraw from Afghanistan. Every likelihood, it would have been just as chaotic as the Biden withdrawal. He would have hobbled, potentially, you can never know for certain what would have happened, but a very good chance he would have hobbled through that term, are reacting to events, you know, unpopular, not being able to really marshal things together.

18:23Instead, he has four years where he gets built up as this almost mythological figure through surviving four indictments, becoming a martyr, the two assassination attempts. Biden was the biggest gift you could ever imagine to Donald Trump. And his team, people like Stephen Miller, had four years to really think through how they would do things differently. He had four years to think through who would I bring in that's different. And when he came back in, the way they're governing, I mean, Maggie and I covered the first term. It's not recognizable. It's not recognizable. Every aspect of it. His character is the same, but the way he's using the office and the way he's thinking about the office is completely different.

19:07And the team is just radically different. So yeah, I mean, I just don't think it's a disputable premise. The other piece too, that I do think just to add to what Jonathan just said about Biden being the biggest gift, I think that for all of the anger on the flanks of both parties, you know, the elections are binaries. And so when voters had a choice in 2024, it was very clear they were not going to choose Joe Biden long before he dropped out, just because he was struggling so much. And it wasn't just the age factor. There were all kinds of other issues. I don't think we fully understand the impact that the post-COVID period had on politics, certainly in this country.

19:47I can't speak to the rest of the world. And the last time a lot of voters felt good about their lives in this country, it was 2019, and Donald Trump was in office. And so the fact that Biden came in with this immense promise and lost credibility fairly quickly after the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and then proceeded to tell voters that actually they should feel fine about their financial situation, that was all just ripe for Trump. Interesting, yeah. There's a passage where you quote him as saying in a meeting with his kind of intimates before the election, if I lose I am fucked was did he mean by that that he thought he was going to go to prison or or something but yes I mean certainly he thought that he was going to potentially go to prison that he would face additional indictments that he would face a ton of lawsuits there are various factors that went into why he ran again and we talk about that in the introduction of the book about the the fusing of his legal challenges with his political situation he declared his presidential campaign and a story broken by my colleague when he was not my colleague yet, incredibly early.

20:53I can't remember a presidential candidate beginning their candidacy that early, November of the two years out, right after the midterms. But the fact that he was facing prison and his advisors all believed they all were too. We write about in the book about how right after one of the federal indictments, one of his advisors said to us, he has to win. I mean, that was the emphasis. He has to win. And then followed by, I wouldn't want to be the people who did this to him, meaning if he came back into office. And all of that has driven their anxiety and their belief in him and their radicalization, because they all believed, and I'm not endorsing this view.

21:36I'm just saying that's how they see it. They all felt chased. They received subpoenas. Some of them were indicted. Many of them spent thousands and thousands of dollars on their own legal bills, although most of them had them paid by Trump's donors. That was what they were facing. And that was what Trump was facing, including the prospect of financial ruin, because he still had that New York Attorney General civil fraud judgment hanging over him. Now, that one has gotten more complicated since. Who knows what that would have looked like if he had not won? You two cover the White House. But of course, Trump, whether we like it or not, is a truly international political figure.

22:07But apart from the Middle East, Ukraine, Venezuela, there's very little sense of a world outside the US. In fact, not only have I read the book twice, I've read the index. G7, the other six leaders of the G7 countries get three mentions between them in this book. Keir Starmer gets two, one of which is for Donald Trump offering his valet services to take the creases out of his trousers. The other one is we've got to deal with this Epstein stuff, before Starmer arrives and the press come in. And the Macron mention is when Trump phones him up to ask how big the Arc de Triomphe is because he wants to build a bigger one.

22:45No mention of Mark Carney, no mention of Merz Maloli, Takaichi, Milley, Lula, von der Leyen, Guterres of the UN, Mark Rutter of NATO. Is this because you are White House correspondents or because actually we don't matter anymore? In his mind, in his mind. I would say two things. One is that, as I'm sure you've gathered, Alistair, the group of people around Trump, including Donald Trump, have utter contempt for Europe, deep contempt for Europe. They view Europe as a civilization in decline. They view Britain as weak, ungovernable, fragmented, almost pathetic. You hear, depending on who you talk to, I don't want to universalize this.

23:35There are some who don't have quite the strong views, but there's this conversation that's constantly happening whenever I talk to diplomats. What's the best way to deal with Trump? You know, it's this cliched, tiresome conversation. And the correct answer is the best way to deal with Trump is basically you need to have the power of China and then you can tell him to fuck off. Because the person who's dealt with Trump the best is Xi Jinping. Trump completely got spooked last April when China refused to back down and just went tariff for tariff with him. He got up to 145 percent. We show in the book he just says, holy shit.

24:10and then sends Scott Besant off to Geneva to de-escalate. Ever since then, Trump has been in full-on appeasement mode with China. How can we soften everything? How do we get a nice deal, a nice way of doing it? He watered down the national defence strategy, taking out more hawkish references to China. But there is only one China. That's my point. No, this is my whole point, Alistair. So we don't matter. In a sense, if you are a small or a middle power, You're only good for like flattery, you know, come give him the embossed card, come see the king, this and that. And the thing I find so interesting about the UK, again, I don't pretend to understand your politics particularly well.

24:53I, you know, read and listen and try to educate myself from afar is the only way the UK can actually deal with Trump in a way that will get his attention and not just be this sort of pat on the head. Can you imagine a more humiliating thing that he could have done to what he did to Keir Starmer recently before, you know, before he even had a chance to, you know, Trump basically pre announces this with like a couple of complete lies about the whole thing? You were fired. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, it's only as Europe that it comes with the financial power and the leverage and whatever. And UK has obviously done Brexit.

25:29And we're now sort of 10 years later. I don't know. Is it the seventh prime minister now? What are we up to? Is it seven? So, you know, from the Trump perspective, it's about leverage. It's just not that complicated. He doesn't see things in terms of the history of the relationship or NATO, or there's no sort of long credit in the bank that goes back, you know, for those things. It's completely transactional and completely leverage based. So yes, you can get small situational wins by sucking up to him, but it doesn't have any long term. It's not a durable strategy. Even Mark Carney, who, you know, so he made that speech in Davos that most people in the world of politics kind of know about.

26:12It was interesting. And since when that relationship, I don't know, it's been quite stayed quite spiky. But it's just really interesting to me that in terms of you guys putting together this, you know, pretty sizable book and account of that year, that even Mark Carney doesn't figure at all. I understand what you're saying. I think just to jump in here and Jonathan, you know, feel free to disagree, but I don't think you do. Number one, we had a lot of reporting. 99 % of the reporting that we had for this book ended up on the cutting room floor, both from the two years leading up to the election and then a bunch in the first year.

26:47That included a fair amount of reporting about the aftermath of his blow up, plural blow ups with Zelensky, the aftermath of the utterly bizarre Alaska summit and the back and forth about what was actually agreed to. But what we didn't have was anything that would have changed a reader's understanding of those events. And we had choices to make where this was going to be a 1 ,500-page book, which would not have been an international or any kind of bestseller. Four volumes could work. Sure. Someone will do a Robert Caro-like miniseries dive at one point. It won't be us. But regardless, it is partly because the negotiations related to Europe just don't matter as much to him.