Why everything you feared about Trump is true

Nobody likes her. She could never be the first woman president. She could never be. That would be an insult to our country. You will feel it in the future. God bless. You don't know that. God bless. God bless. You will not have a war. Don't tell us what we're gonna feel. We're gonna feel very good. We're gonna feel very good and very strong. You will feel influence. You're right now not in a very good position. 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 **** they're doing. Do you understand that? The News Agents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. This is a global production. The second Trump presidency is 529 days old. There are 931 days remaining. During that time he's pardoned every January 6th insurrectionist. He'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. Even 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. I 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 is 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. I 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. Welcome to the News Agents. The News Agents. Well Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, thanks so much for joining us on the News Agents. Your book is as extraordinary as perhaps we might expect it to be given the subject matter. Both of you are very experienced chroniclers and journalists of Donald Trump, his first presidency and the wider politics surrounding him. 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, of 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 many of his top advisors 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. That 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 so you have this pantomime of transparency every day where Trump's doing open mic night, he invites the press in, he'll answer a few questions or he'll invite the cameras into the cabinet room and it seems like you're getting this rolling reality show. But for anything that actually matters, 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. I 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, it certainly has accentuated certain aspects of his personality and his behaviors and one of which is about vengeance and payback. To 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 two 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 say describe him to us on Trump's team literally as the chosen one and 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 a you know 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. So 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, we're not doctors, we're not diagnosticians, but we did meet with him for an hour-long interview in March this year and 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 than 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. 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 and he starts to try to almost kind of recruit Biden onto his side, you know, say oh they were so rough to you, the Dems, 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, or might have won, 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 you, you know, you're very popular in Pennsylvania. I mean he was laying it on thick and then 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 you know anything I can do to help, you know, 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 and 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, you know, totally bamboozled. But in the moment, I mean, Trump, look, Trump can be, many people have described this, people who can't stand Trump, describe being charmed by him. It was funny, Tucker Carlson, who I'm sure is familiar to your viewers over in the UK, but 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 Trump's world and 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 in the Oval Office, visitors, and he'll just, he'll be telling stories that are divorced from reality. You 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, you know, 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. Okay. Jonathan spoke about how the court of Trump, the number of advises is much smaller than it used to be, that that's constricted quite a lot. Who is it in these, you know, 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 Besant, 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, but also his security advisor and those dual-headed roles and titles don't really accurately describe the scope of Miller's power within this government. He is somebody who the major cabinet level appointees understand they either have to be willing to work with or fear crossing. And 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 governments. 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. Other 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 JD 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. Taking some of the issues which have defined his second term so far in turn, all of which 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 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. They owe us, they need to repay us. And Scott Besant personally, you write, is scathing about Zelensky saying, I've dealt with this little ******. 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 which is Trump respects power. He respects force. And in that relationship, you know, the people Trump has most contempt for are the other 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, you know, 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 Putin and Zelensky. It was his first phone call with Zelensky since he last was in office. And we reported on in the book. And it's, it's a study in contrast, you know, in the Putin call, it's two peers, he's, he's talking to Putin as a peer, he is excited about the prospect of getting to a peace deal so they can conduct business together so that US 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 Zelensky, it's a sort of sarcastic joke, I just spoke to your best friend, Vladimir Putin, you know, so and then he basically tells us you've got no cards, you know, you need to, you know, essentially make a deal and compromise. And what that means is give up, you know, large chunks of land and, and deal with with Putin, almost erasing the fact that Putin was the aggressor that Putin invaded. There's no moral dimension, really, to that equation. It's just a power dynamic. And Trump, you know, favours that 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 entitled, it 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. You also saw that, by the way, with Iran, you know, he empowered Steve Whitkoff, 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 rigour. 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 gonna I was gonna 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. And 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 a 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. And frankly, it that only became hardened in these years between his two presidencies when Iran was threatening to kill him, threatening to kill and are going after a number of his advisors who were part of his event 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, you know, weird or distressing or, you know, horrific. He was fascinated. And that showed up in our reporting repeatedly. He 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. By 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. But 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 it'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 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 the creek there. And the 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 is no one on Trump's senior team who thought this was a good idea. The closest you would find was Pete Hedseff. 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. That 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. What 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, you 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. Well, I think there's quite a few things that, again, if he was honest, 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. 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. So his team had to, I mean, what we have in the book is a pretty extraordinary series of meetings over the summer in the White House Situation Room, usually a room that is focused on national security, the most sensitive conversations in the government. They turned it into a sort of Epstein crisis response center. And the most senior people in the government sat around the table without Trump to try to figure how to spin their way out of the crisis. Trump just didn't want to hear about it, didn't want to do anything with it. Liberation Day was really interesting because I think Trump, this was sort of the fulfillment of a 40-year dream in some respects. Trump has been talking for 40 years about how America is being ripped off and our foreign countries are taking advantage of America. He talked about tariffs. He didn't really have a deep economic theory of the case. But he teed up this date of April 2nd last year as the day, Liberation Day, of course, in typically Trumpian hyperbole, the day when America would liberate itself from all these foreigners ripping us off. It turned out to be a calamity. And he took the bond market almost to the point of catastrophe. I mean, the bond markets almost melted down and his aides had to, you know, Lutnick and Besant had to almost plead with him to pull back from the brink. So he did. He paused it and we ended up getting sort of a messy series of bilateral deals. I still think because Trump, you know, based on our reporting, because Trump operates so much in the zone of the power of positive thinking, I don't believe he would even privately concede that this was a failure. From all accounts, he tells people that we're getting, America's getting richer. The stuff he says publicly about how America is getting richer than ever through the tariffs, he says the same thing privately. So either he's the world's best actor and never breaks character, or he's convinced himself of that. Obviously, America is now heading into this 250th anniversary weekend. There is two years still to go more than of the second term. What, Mark, what do you think the remaining two years of the term have in store for the United States and the world? Because obviously, you know, typically in that period, the next presidential cycle will begin, the spotlight will move away. I can't imagine of all presidents that he would accept that lying down. There's no question that he's going to make life very hard for whoever is running for president. Obviously, his vice president would be chief among them. And we have extensive reporting in the book about how he's already begun that process of making things very uncomfortable for J.D. Vance, who both Jonathan and I still think is the leading candidate to be the nominee for the Republican nomination, just for a variety of reasons. But Trump's not going to make that easy, as you say. There's a separate question, which is what happens governmentally. And normally, when you have a midterm cycle with an unpopular lame duck president, you can see how it is going to play out. You know there is going to be oversight. You know that things are going to grind to something of a halt. All of that will be true. I can't even see how they get a spending bill done under these circumstances, and I think it'll be very difficult. But the broader question is what happens with oversight, because if Democrats take the House, which most polls indicate they will, we haven't seen before a government—and again, we don't know this will happen, but there are reasons to believe it will—that just doesn't respond to subpoenas at all. Now, the House members can subpoena the Trump sons. They can subpoena Howard Lutnick's son, Steve Whitkoff's sons. They're not in government. But there are still slow-walk tactics that I anticipate will get used. And the only recourse that everybody would have would be criminal referrals to the DOJ, and somehow neither of us thinks that the Trump DOJ is going to be eager to prosecute that kind of a case. And Trump has openly said, and we report this in the book, that he's going to pardon anybody who comes within 250 feet. He says different numbers, 200 feet, 25 feet, some radius around the Oval Office. Most people who we've spoken to in our reporting are counting on those pardons in the government. So I look forward toward the future, and it just looks like a black hole. I have no idea what's coming. And one final thing. He told you, Maggie, right at the end, there's only one thing you can say about me that anybody believes, and you know what that is. Essentially, I won every ******* time. Is that how he wants to go down in history, do you think? I think more than that. I think that he wants to be seen, you know, as one of history's capital G great men. And he made that very clear in that interview too. But for that part, I hope people will buy the book and read it. Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, so grateful for your time. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks for having us. One final thing, one last vignette from the book, which might give us some sense of where we've been. When the two authors asked the president whether there had ever been an American president as powerful as he was, Trump responded by reading out a tribute written by a golf caddy he'd met, an amateur historian about his status in comparison with the great men of history. He reeled them off. Alexander the Great, the Caesars, William the Conqueror, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Napoleon, Trump added with relish, Hitler, Mao, Stalin. These leaders maintained power through fear, he said. The caddy's conclusion, if President Trump is the American eagle, then William the Conqueror was merely a sparrow. Trump gratified, looked back, reflected by saying, it's very interesting, isn't it? The power. The election was rigged. If it weren't, my presidency could never have been as powerful in the second term as it had been in the third. Regime Change by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan is available now. Thanks to our own Imperial production team on the newsagents, Shane Fennelly, Michaela Walters, Natalie Inge, Arvind Badawell, Anna Djordjevic, Jess Williamson, Mikey Baggs, Martin Kroeser and Lizzie Ward. Our executive producer is Louis Dagenhart. Our editor is Tom Hughes. It's presented by me, Lewis Goodall, Emily Maitlis and when he can be bothered to be in the right hemisphere, John Azteca-Sopil. Remember to join me on Sunday for Sunday with Lewis Goodall on LBC from 10 with the best interviews and analysis of British politics anywhere. We will be back on Monday. Have a lovely weekend. Come on, England. How hard can it be? The Newsagents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK. Opening up a world of opportunity. This has been a global production.