Who is really in the room when Trump makes decisions？ New book reveals all

Well, joining me here in studio, and I'm super excited about it, Maggie Haberman, New York Times White House correspondent and co-author of the book Regime Change Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. It is a bestselling nonfiction book of the year, the year, and it chronicles Trump's unprecedented maneuvers to claim the constitutional crown. Simon & Schuster reports sales of more than 300,000 copies in its first week. The book is already in its third print run at 360,000 copies. Maggie, I mean, this is huge. It is a tremendous feat of journalism, right, by you as well as your colleague Jonathan Swan, who's been a guest as well. And it's so exciting to have you here. But my question is wanting to get to why you think right now this has hit a nerve clearly hard and fast. The book, I think that people were actually eager for some kind of an inside look as to how decisions are being made by this government. And one of the things this book, you know, Jonathan and I often say that this book almost killed us. It really did. I mean, again, we're not in Fallujah. We're not war combatants or war reporters. But it was very, very hard because this is not term one where, you know, you had to be absent your senses to not get a story because they were all leaking on each other all the time. They were all at war. It was so factionalized. This is a very different government where a loyalty test was taken of prospective employees during the transition among the questions. What did you say on January 6th? What did you say on January 7th of 2021? Do you think that who do you think won the 2020 election? The correct answer was not Joe Biden in terms of these questions. So these are also a lot of people who have been around him for a while. In many cases, they were very radicalized during the I'm not taking a position on it's just how they experienced it. I saw him as persecuted unfairly, were subpoenaed themselves, in some cases indicted themselves. And they believed the stakes of the 2024 election were not going to prison for him and possibly for themselves. And so that has been made it so hard to find out what is happening inside these rooms. But I clearly there is interest in understanding how this administration functions. I'm thinking in the wake of last night, you look, you've covered him for a long time. And the vibe really was quite interesting. Trump was planning a big, huge party. He spent lots of money planning this party. He spruced everything up. He invited everybody. And then the day came. And look what happened. There wasn't great turnout. There were not a lot of people showing up, at least to his state fair there on the National Mall. What's your sense of his mood as a reaction to this? Well, he makes pretty clear his mood on Truth Social when he says, you know, who cares? Storms are lucky. I'm going to go out anyway. He doesn't like canceling events. We know this. He has often responded poorly to having events canceled. He's not thrilled. His advisers are not thrilled from our reporting about how sparse the attendance has been at that state fair. Part of the reason is weather. But that's obviously not the only reason. The Freedom 250 events, which are different than a lot of the planning that had gone on in a bipartisan fashion for a while, turned this anniversary into something about Donald Trump in many ways. That's been the criticism is that it became less holistic about the country. And so when you when you do that, when you set up a series of events that are how you want to see it, not how there might be dissenting voices, if anything impinges on it, it is going to be a disappointment. And to that end, his constant invoking of communism of late did so again in his speech last night. Why is he doing that? Because I don't know if you've heard of people. I certainly haven't. You know, the communists are coming and we're being overrun by communists in this country. It seems to be a reference to the Democratic socialist candidates who have won in some primaries. Obviously, Mayor Mamdani in New York is the most prominent example of it. Mayor Mamdani is an unusually talented politician. He is a very good political performer. We don't quite know yet how everybody else will perform. But when he says communism, I don't know that people really understand. I understand what he's talking about is the DSA because I follow politics and because I know his rhetoric on this, but I don't think that the average voter necessarily understands it. I also think that, look, Republicans have been concerned that their voters are not animated enough for these midterms. And part of the reason is, number one, there is less of a fear of Democrats than there had been. And a top Trump adviser had said this to Jonathan and me in the course of reporting for this book many months ago. Part of it is also that Trump is not especially interested. I mean, one of the things that's been really shocking and again, we report on this at length and the state fair and all of the 250th events are part of this. He's so interested in legacy building, in leaving his imprint on Washington in an indelible way this time and on the world, frankly. And so if that's what you're interested in, you know, we walked into the Oval Office to have an interview with him at the end of our reporting process, 17 days into the war in Iran in March of this year. And you would have thought that there would have been maps of Iran on the Resolute Desk. Instead, there were pictures of maple trees that he showed us that he was picking. Below that were mockups of the ballroom that he's building. He's much more interested in those projects than he is. Now, maybe he'll get more interested in the midterms, but he's not yet. And so they're casting about for a message themselves. So I'm looking at this, the stats here. This book is a it's a book of scoops, right? You've had what? A thousand interviews. No wonder it almost killed you. I'm exhausting. Situation room meetings to strategizing the response to what might come out of the Epstein files, how Trump decided to get into this war in Iran, all that happening in the sit room. Trump, though, called this book largely fiction, though you did get an interview with him on the record for it. What did you find most shocking about how this White House operates and who really gets a say in decision making? One of the things that's remarkable, and again, to go back to what I was saying about how hard it is to get actual confirmed information this time around, is the government is being run by basically a half a dozen people. And they're all around Trump much of the time. That number can expand or contract a bit depending on what the issue is. If it's economics, you know, Scott Besant will be in the room, Howard Lutnick will be in the room. But to prove that point, when we laid out and we did a very extensive excerpt on this from the book in April in The New York Times about how Trump took the country to war, and we got inside these situation room meetings, Scott Besant, the Treasury secretary, and Chris Wright, the energy secretary, were not in the room for most of these meetings. These are the two people who have to now manage the biggest global energy shock in world history because of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. And they weren't there for these discussions. They were there, you know, in some versions at the end. But that speaks to how concerned they are about leaks. And you can be in very high up jobs at different agencies throughout this government, but if you're not in the room with Trump, you often do not know what's going on. And he is operating from pure gut in a way that really is fundamentally different than term one. He feels emboldened. He feels like every time he gets told no by experts, that his gut is correct. He believed, for instance, on Iran, he believed that they were a paper tiger, this regime, and that this would be a quick war coming on the cusp or actually on the heels of the Venezuela operation to capture Maduro. That's obviously not what happened. Do you know of anybody who suggested what would happen that actually happened to him? So nobody in his government favored this. The closest that you would get would be Pete Hexeth. And it's not a total binary. There were people who thought aspects of this were doable. Marco Rubio thought that you could take out Iran's ballistic missiles capability, although that's debatable right now. But he never thought the regime change scenarios that Benjamin Netanyahu presented in this extraordinary Situation Room meeting that we detail on February 11th. He never thought those were possible. The CIA, John Ratcliffe, the director, they ran analysis. They did not think that was possible. Again, Pete Hexeth, the closest you might get. But the only person who really grabbed the president's lapels metaphorically on this was J.D. Vance, the vice president, and it cost him with Trump. Dan Cain, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, did say, here is what could happen. We could have munitions depleted, which were already running lowish from Ukraine. We could, the Strait of Hormuz could be closed. He did say all of these things. The president was told. So when he says, no one said, or I didn't know, or whatever, it's late at other people's feet. This was entirely his decision, and it was made with knowledge. But unlike term one, to go back to your question, these are not angry debate sessions where Gary Cohn, the economic advisors in the room, you know, slamming down his fist about tariffs, or where Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, saw it as his role to stop the president, or where John Kelly or James Mattis found Trump's worldview detestable and dangerous and wanted to stop him. These are people who either fully believe in Trump, or in certain cases, if they don't believe in aspects of the program, they know that they are not going to say that, and that this is Trump's decision. So that's how decisions are made. But he knew. He was fully aware. That is absolutely stunning. We are going to ask you to stay with me through a short commercial break, because we're going to talk about one of the president's design quirks, and it is polarizing. That's all I'm going to say about it for now.