The News Items Podcast
John Ellis talks with interesting people doing important work. Some you've heard of. Some you haven't. All of them are worth listening to, at some length.
The News Items Podcast
Regime Change, with Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan (Episode 19)
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John Ellis talks with The New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan about their book, Regime Change, an account of Donald Trump’s second presidency. They discuss how power operates inside a White House built around speed, instinct, and direct access to the president, often with little traditional process. The conversation covers Stephen Miller’s influence, Trump’s tariff decisions, the role of tech executives, the administration’s handling of the Epstein files, and the path to war with Iran. Haberman and Swan also describe the unusual figures who shape Trump’s information flow, the limits of internal dissent, and the tension between his visible stamina and questions about his age and health. It is a detailed look at an administration moving quickly, personally, and with few institutional brakes.
Hosted by John Ellis
Hello and welcome back to the News Items Podcast. I'm John Ellis. I am the founder and editor of two Substack newsletters. One is called News Items, the other is called Political News Items, and you can find them both at news-items.com. My guests today are Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swann. They are the authors of a fantastic new book called Regime Change inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. How they got this book out is a mystery to me. So my first question is, are you both married still, or did this cause the end, so to speak?
SPEAKER_00John, you're touching on a far more sensitive nerve than you might even imagine. So uh we are both still married to our respective partners.
SPEAKER_02Correct. But they're not they're very happy to have this done.
SPEAKER_00It was not beloved in my household.
SPEAKER_02The process was certainly not beloved in mine. The book itself is beloved, but not the process.
SPEAKER_03Aaron Powell How long did it take to do I mean obviously the reporting was ongoing. Maggie, you told me that you had a book contract almost immediately after Trump was elected. You obviously split the reportorial duties, but when you actually sat down to do the book, you both had book leave from the New York Times. How long did it take from point A to publication by Simon and Schuster?
SPEAKER_02I don't think we can completely quantify it. The book contract was actually signed in 2023 because we both, you know, Jonathan came to the Times in January, and he had been a uh a a very difficult human to compete against, and I was very happy that uh he came here. He's also uh a fantastic collaborator and colleague and an immense talent. But we realized that we were covering, you know, envisioning this as the last act of Trump, whether that was court cases that were going to end potentially with a with a you know a prison sentence, which was in fact a real possibility at the time, or whether it was going to be him back in the White House, but that we had something that we could tell a unique story about and provide unique reporting on. And then by the time we got into the first term the first year of the term, the the volume of activity was so huge from the administration that it became very clear to us early on that we were covering something vastly different than a even frankly, even then the Trump handoff to Biden in 2020. This was just a fundamental sea change of what a a US presidency looks like, which is why the title is what it is in terms of regime change. But we had to jettison like 99% of our reporting. And we started the writing. God, I don't even remember exactly when we started the writing. We started the writing, I think, fairly early last year, Jonathan. Am I right about that?
SPEAKER_00I would say for real, for real, it kind of was like June, July, June last year when we really started the writing. Basically, we've got thousands of pages of reported scenes and things that we have that that is on the cutting room floor. And we were reporting and writing somewhat in real time for about a year and a half before we started the actual writing of the book in earnest. I took 10 months off from the Times. Maggie took five and a half off. Yeah. Five and a half. We took a lot of time off for it very at a at a very, you know, high stakes moment. So the Times was very good with us. Quite very supportive.
SPEAKER_03So Trump was elected in 2024, obviously, with 49.8% of the vote, had 230,000 votes gone the other way in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Kamala Harris would have received 270 elector votes and would have been elected president of the United States. Trump describes this as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, landslide in American political history. Does he believe that? Or is that just uh, you know, a way of positioning himself as more powerful than he in fact might be?
SPEAKER_02I don't know how to quantify whether he believes it or not. I think there's a very long history of him saying everything that he does at which he succeeds, or frankly, even the things he doesn't are a massive success. And so the the salesman aspect is is is key. He had this line in the 90s when he was giving someone a tour of Mar-a-Lago, and uh he was saying something like that, you know, we have the we want a competition for the best doors or something like that. And he said to the person, the word the best is very the the phrase the best is very important to me. And that, you know, you see that play out on a number of fronts. What I do think it is, is him underlining the fact that I mean, look, he he was the first Republican to win the the popular vote in 20 years. And so I think it was just underscoring how legitimate this win was. You know, his his last one was two in 2016, but he did not win the popular vote, and it was under a cloud of investigations. So that's always been how I interpret that.
SPEAKER_03Aaron Powell And there was a document that was prepared by I think the American First Policy Institute, and I think the Heritage Foundation had a similar document that sort of sketched out what Trump would do with this mandate. How much has that been followed by by the administration? Has that really framed what they've been up to, or is that something that, you know, changed as things went along?
SPEAKER_00Mostly I think you're probably referring to Project 2025, which was the heritage effort. AF, the American First Policy, had a bunch of stuff. Look, American First Policy ended up being much more involved in the transition than heritage because Project 2025 became so politically toxic during 2024 that the Trump people sort of distanced themselves from them. In reality, a lot of the people who were involved at different levels in Project 2025 ended up going into the administration. Russ Vose is the most prominent example, going in as budget director. He was a very central figure in Project 2025. Look, a bunch of Project 2025 policy ended up becoming administration policy, but I don't think that's so much because they sat down and said, well, this is our blueprint. It was more of a menu of things that, you know, people agreed with or didn't agree with, picked and choosed. And, you know, you see some AFP ideas come through, but it didn't end up being this sort of guiding light. And certainly when it comes to issues that Trump himself cares about, like trade and foreign policy, those efforts are completely irrelevant, couldn't be more irrelevant, have had no bearing whatsoever on anything that Trump has done. There may be areas where they intersect, but not because anyone's following a blueprint.
SPEAKER_02There's also a whole downstream list of uh items that Trump, at least I think to the best of our knowledge, isn't especially interested in, doesn't pay much attention to. A lot of it is intricate agency policy. And that is the kind of thing that Russ Vogt is very interested in, or Stephen Miller is very interested in. And so those things may be going on, but it's not because Trump is saying get that done.
SPEAKER_03Aaron Powell That's a great thing in the at the, I guess the last chapter of your book where you're meeting with him to fact check and sort of finish up uh your research, and Trump says he's off to sign some executive orders that he has no idea. Uh, not even sure what I'm signing.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03The thing that just surprises me is that the administration is incredibly active on any number of fronts. You have the president incredibly active on social media, watching TV, talking to people about what's going on in the official business, then meeting people, you know, the five-minute photo op kind of thing. How much does Trump know about what the administration is doing?
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell It's a good question. And I I think that it depends on what the issue is. You know, one of the things that we talk about in the book is how the immense power of Stephen Miller as Trump's top domestic policy advisor is not properly understood, but it's certainly seen uh throughout any number of actions. One of the things that was very striking about the whole signal gate controversy where they were discussing the battle plans in a in a signal chat group was that Stephen Miller was the final word that everybody heard from. The president wants this and we move forward. And Stephen is very involved in a number of a number of matters. He part of how he succeeds is he will say, you know, that he speaks as if he has the president's authority in conversations not with Trump and the, you know, the president wants this, the president says he wants this. And his his statements on those things are very rarely challenged. So does Trump know everything that is happening? Almost certainly not. For instance, you know, I'll give you an example in the book. We described Stephen Miller being quite surprised to learn that that Christy Nohm at DHS was requisitioning a bunch of warehouses that were going to be morphed into detention centers for migrants. And he thought that was an incredibly stupid use of money and of of time. There's no chance that that Trump knew about that. Or I shouldn't say no, but it's extremely unlikely. But on major items like trade policy, like sanctions, you know, you can go down the list, they won't make a move unless he's consulted. So it just depends on the issue.
SPEAKER_00There are whole vast areas of the federal government in which he has zero interest and couldn't tell you like there are whole departments and agencies that he has never learned what they do or paid any attention to. You know, he spends zero time thinking about the activities of HUD, of housing and urban development, of transportation, of health and human services. Nobody spent less time thinking about healthcare policy than Donald Trump. So there are whole areas of the government, EPA, where the secretaries are completely autonomous. He he sort of gives them a attaboy pat on the back if he sees a segment on Fox that gives them good press, you know, great job. I remember talking to one cabinet secretary in the first term, and they told me that Trump's marching orders to them when they took over this agency, an agency he cares nothing about to this day, and Trump's instructions was just win. I just want you to go and win. And so they interpreted that to mean I'm just gonna do whatever I think is right until I hear otherwise. And they basically never heard from him. I mean, very rarely he would talk to them at a cabinet meeting or whatever, but that's still the case.
SPEAKER_02And to the extent that he pays attention to something like H I'll just add one thing, to HHS or, you know, the EPA, it's because he has, you know, oil executives or industry, you know, energy executives coming in to meet with him. And HHS, it's because of this synergy that he has with RFK Jr. and this interest in what he does. And Trump is, you know, has been a a a vaccine skeptic for a very long time. But, you know, I mean, Trump it it just depends on the issue. In term one, he was interested in HHS so much as it related to like vaping policy. But it's on very, very discrete issues. I don't think he would even be thinking about the Department of Labor were it not for the fact that there's a scandal involving the head of it.
SPEAKER_00I think he was complaining recently about how boring it was when Mehmet Oz was trying to describe to him Medicare policy on a plane flight. So so yes, I agree. Like when the farmer executives come in, it it's usually when someone complains about something or there's bad press, for sure. Exactly. Exactly. Generally speaking, yeah.
SPEAKER_03One of the things that bus top business executives have said repeatedly, uh a number of them has said anyway, that the great thing about the Trump administration is that you can get things done quickly. Uh you can go to the administration, and if you have an issue, if you have a problem with this, that government agency, it can get resolved very quickly, and they've been, you know, they were constantly complaining about Biden. Right. Is that true? I mean, is that you can get things done quickly if you're a business significant business operation?
SPEAKER_00I mean, there's no there's no question. There's no question. We have a pretty extraordinary scene in the book where you have big CEOs of the big oil companies, energy companies uh in the I want to say the cabinet room. Is it the cabinet room or the Roosevelt room? I think it was the cabinet room. Anyway, you know, we're talking about Exxon, Chevron, Conaco, whatever. And it's like a fun house in there. They're just complaining about regulations and Trump's just like, we'll get rid of it. Stephen Miller at the table is texting, live texting with Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, well, we'll do this, we'll do that, complain about the European Union. Trump's like, Howard, we'll tariff them, put 20%. And it was this sort of like, there was no policy process. It was just direct to him, and he's like, yes, instinctively get it done. And one of them who was in the room, I spoke to them afterwards, and they said they've never seen, they've dealt with many presidents, and they've never seen a president who has such a feel for his executive power. And they said, I would never want a Democrat to have this sort of grasp of executive power, but this guy does, and you know, it's good for us, kind of thing. If you hire the right lobbyist, if you hire the right, if you if you, you know, you you don't even need to hire lobbyists anymore. You can actually just go into business with the Trump family. That's right. You can get a lot of business done at a very high clip in this administration, no question.
SPEAKER_02Well, and it's one of the things, just to just to add one more piece to that, you know, the the remarkable thing about Stephen Miller's texting with Pam Bondy is, you know, Stephen Miller says in that meeting when the president is directing this, I'm on it. And and that is the whole approach. One of the things that we detail in the book is how Miller and Trump, I mean, Trump disdains government process for a variety of reasons, one of which is that he's a form, you know, he was a developer and he can't stand it. Miller dislikes agency processes because they often stymie the power that the executive branch can have or the decision making that can be done quickly. And so one of the most illustrative and instructive episodes for them was imposing Title 42 as a health emergency during the pandemic in 2020. It sealed the border. And everything once they came back in power was not everything, but a lot of things, were emergencies, a tariff emergency, a fentanyl emergency, things were invasions. And Miller would say to people that it wasn't just that you could do you unlocked extraordinarily sweeping powers, but it was the speed to your question, John.
SPEAKER_00But I've I've talked to senior executives at different major companies who had previously served in either the Bush administration or the Obama administration. And they've told me they've had to basically unlearn everything they understand about White House policy, you know, about what they understand about the policy process. And in some cases, they've just recommended to their CEO, just call Trump himself or just, you know, just get a meeting with him at Mar-a-Lago or text him. And that has a if you're one of the big CEOs, you don't even need to be that big a CEO. He'll take calls from really anyone. So you can circumvent a lot. I mean, this is a I'm I'm going on a tangent here, but just for us to get an interview with Donald Trump, if it was up to his staff, we wouldn't have had the interview. They were, they were not helping us get an interview.
SPEAKER_01Let me just said that as an understatement of the statement.
SPEAKER_00It was there was a believed that. There was a very there was very much a locked door there that we're so we just called Trump and he made it happen. He ordered the interview to be set up. So there's the corporate version of that as well.
SPEAKER_02I just want to just make clear we had to we had to call more than once. He uh he he he he he took a bit of nudging as well.
SPEAKER_03So I have two w I think non-serious questions, but they urgently need to be answered. One is This could be terrible.
SPEAKER_02I'm waiting for it.
SPEAKER_03Maggie wrote about this in in Confidence Man, which is her first book on Mr. Trump, uh which was a meeting in the White House in which Rupert Murdoch brought down a senior Goldman Sachs investor, excuse me, a senior Goldman Sachs executive to, I guess, audition, or at least in Rupert's mind, have him audition uh to be the next chief of staff. And your description is basically, you know, dozen not dozens, but number of people sort of walking in and out and you know, looking at their phones and maybe 10, 12 people in there for a meeting that uh that Goldman that particular Goldman Sachs executive thought would be Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump, and himself. Is that continued? Or is it is that sort of chaos in the Oval Office, everybody walking in and, you know, uh sort of looking at what Trump's what's on Trump's desk. Is that is that still the standard operating procedure? Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.
SPEAKER_02I think it's accelerated, in fact. Uh you know, we describe in the book what a what an average I mean there were efforts in term one. That moment came just to for your listeners. That was A, I don't think that that's that particular executive really wanted to be the chief of staff. But it was after Right. It was after Rheinz Priebus was about to be getting his swan song in the summer of 2017, Trump's first chief of staff. And Priebus had tried imposing order on Trump. He had tried imposing a schedule because, as you know well, John, a a president's most valuable commodity is is their time. And they were looking for somebody. They they, by the way, when I say they, it was, you know, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump were looking for somebody who they thought could manage this. And I I think I think Murdoch was somebody who they were speaking to. They ended up settling on John Kelly, who had a terrible relationship with Trump, was a was a retired general who monitored his calls, who wanted to set very strict controls on who could come in and talk to Trump. And it backfired spectacularly because Trump got really angry about that. And then you had two subsequent chiefs of staff. Susie Wiles, his current chief of staff, doesn't function that way. And we say in the in the book, it's it's you know, her her aim is not to try to control him. And she, I, I suspect, sees no utility in trying to do that. So what you do have is more of these kind of collapsing meetings where one rolls into another and you've got, you know, the we describe like the we we talk to somebody who is describing being in a meeting in the Oval Office, a highly sensitive, classified briefing. And like in comes the the guy with the stones for the paving over the rose garden, and it's like he's got walk-in privileges. And so it's just much more of a flattened experience. Um, but it's very much reflective of the person who's in the Oval Office.
SPEAKER_00At the same time, so there's this sort of rolling, you know, sometimes it can almost be like a circus-like atmosphere. You've got, you know, pro wrestlers strolling in, you know, people crypto bros, whatever. But when it comes to stuff that they really do want to keep quiet, and they're actually, it's completely different. It's a tiny circle. They do not share the information with the rest of the government. Um, we we show in our reporting on the lead up to the Iran War that the two officials who would be charged with having to manage the biggest global oil shock in history, Scott Bessant, the Treasury Secretary, Chris Wright, the energy secretary, they were not in the room. They were not in the meetings that led up to the Iran War, the planning meetings. Neither was the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbott. So they were not brought into the loop until the war began. So when they really do want to keep stuff quiet, they're actually very, very good at it. But there are also huge downsides to that.
SPEAKER_03Aaron Ross Powell The less substantive question, but we do have to talk about the human printer.
SPEAKER_00Natalie Hart? Yeah.
SPEAKER_03The question is: who is she and how does she possibly survive? Aaron Ross Powell I'm curious because it would seem to me that there are a lot of people in the White House who would want her no longer there. And uh Susie Wiles seems to be one of those people. So given her position as chief of staff, I guess, you know, I mean she gave up trying to get rid of her, get rid of her. But but it seems to me remarkable that she was able to do that given Ms. Wiles' uh discomfort with her role.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell, she survives for the same reason that Boris Epstein on the outside survived. Boris Epstein. Who is Trump's personal lawyer, top legal advisor? Top legal advisor on the phone to him constantly. You know, many people to to be very understated about it are not fans of Mr. Epstein in Trump's orbit. But he survives. In fact, Trump's White House counsel wrote a report, which we report on in the group, a confidential report, or what's the official term for it? I don't know, Maggie. A memo.
SPEAKER_01It's it was a it was a review. It was a it was a it was a review. It was an inf it was an informal review.
SPEAKER_00But basically warning Trump that you know Boris should not be in his employment and that there'd be risks of indictments and all kinds of exposure. And Trump completely ignored it, and Boris is more powerful than FO right now. Trump is the only one who matters, and he likes having Natalie Harp around. She she is a young woman who used to be a host on OAN, a far-right television network. In term one, in term one. In term one. And then uh when when Trump left office, she went and joined him and worked for him. She became known as the human printer because she carries, lugs around in her backpack a portable printer. And particularly in Trump's darkest days, sort of after he left office when he was in a very at a very low point, she would constantly print out and and show him positive news stories that would boost his mood. She would follow him around on the golf course. We would sometimes literally running. We were, yeah, we had photos and things of her like on foot. Chase for some reason she couldn't get a cart. So she was a big thing.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, they weren't, they weren't getting they weren't affording her seats at that point. She moved up later.
SPEAKER_00Running after him. And we also obtained in the book letters that she'd written for Trump that were left in some of his personal spaces. Very personal letters that said things like, You are all direct quote, you are all that matters to me. Very devoted, you know, just idolizes him. Trump has said to people, his staff, you know, you're all gonna go off and make money, but Natalie, she she knows she's the only one who really loves me. She'll be here, you know, when you guys are all left me. She sits on the wall in the Oval Office through basically every meeting with her laptop open. And we have a scene in the book that's very illustrative of her role as a conduit of self-affirming information for Trump or affirming things he already believes. He they're in a tariff meeting before Liberation Day, and Trump is pissed. And he's Howard Lutnick is in front of him across the desk. And Trump says, Howard, you keep giving me these bullshit numbers. You know, give me the real numbers on how much India and China are tariffing us. You know, this is bullshit. And Howard says, These are the real numbers. This is the numbers from USTR. And Trump says, Natalie, Google, do your Google thing. Get your computer, tell me the real numbers. And of course, Natalie Harp is googling, and of course, there are no real numbers, the real numbers are the USTR numbers. But that's a great example. She's basically a conduit for information that Trump wants to seek out himself that will affirm whatever he believes. Or if there are people on the outside that want to get around, you know what it's like in a White House. Typically, there should be some sort of vetting for paper that reaches the president. That doesn't exist in this White House because Natalie will just give it straight to Trump. And so that's it, it's sort of a pipeline of, you know, gateway pundit stories and rumors and just whatever, but but stuff that will not be vetted by the chief of staff.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, that when George W. Bush was president and Harriet Mears was uh was his legal counsel, everything had to go through her. Literally, everything.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Yeah. This is a little this is a little it's a little different.
SPEAKER_03It's a little bit different. So a great part of I mean there are many great parts, but one of the great parts is Liberation Day. Trump's obsession with tariffs is goes back long before he was president, longer. I think even, you know, we can Maggie and I can remember interviews he gave to various publications decades ago about tariffs and how great they are. So can you set the scene for uh the listeners as to that day uh when he announced it and then the the immediate reaction and then his reaction to the reaction?
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell It's hard for me to summarize because it was so chaotic, and we lay that out in the book. I mean, for for a policy of this magnitude and this gravity, you know, starting a trade war with the whole world, you would imagine there would be a pretty rigorous policy process, pretty rigorous analysis, you know, not the case. There was a rolling series of meetings in the Oval Office where Trump could clear, was not really sure about what kind of a formula he wanted for the tariffs. He was devising some kind of formula in his mind. They had some discussion about color coding and different tiers of tariffs. Ultimately, Trump decided that was too complicated. And they only settled on the formula the night before the announcement. The night before. So the formula that you saw wheeled out in the rose garden on those foam boards, that was decided the night before. And it was a Peter Navarro idea of this tariff formula with a little bit of help from the Council of Economic Advisors. Howard Lutnick told people he he didn't agree with Peter Navarro's formula because, quote, he graduated from the ninth grade. Scott Bessant, the Treasury Secretary, when people would sort of sarcastically say to him, Happy Liberation Day, he said happy libation day, more like happy libation day. It was a very difficult period for them because Trump was just going by pure gut. This was not something that was rooted in deep analysis. And by the way, you had people like Bessant and Lutnick who had to deal, who were sort of deputized to deal with foreign governments in the weeks before. And they couldn't give the governments any clarity because they didn't know. Trump didn't. So how can you tell them, well, you should expect this tariff rate or this one when the person in charge had no earthly idea what he was going to do? So that was that was the way it played out. And then what we lay out in the in the book, it actually became even more fraught after Liberation Day because you had these very alarming signals coming from the bond markets with yields going up, and it looked like we were on the edge of potential, real potential calamity. And so we have this scene in the book where Lutnick and Bessant are on Air Force One with Trump. This is the Sunday before, I think it was a Tuesday or Wednesday when Trump put out. Yeah. And they're they're not pleading it probably goes too far, but they're really just urging him to just back off, to, to, you know, that they could see that he was pushing the car right to the edge of the cliff. And, you know, they weren't sure where he was going to land. And it took right to the end when all the sirens were going off that Trump kind of pulled back. So it was a very uh frightening moment for many senior people in the government because this was just Trump behind the wheel, foot on the gas. Let's just try it.
SPEAKER_02Well, and it was to just to add one thing to that too, John, you know, and I I think we make this clear in the book that he, yes, he has been talking about tariffs for the majority of his adult life, if not his entire adult life. He has not been sent, he had it it wasn't backed by an economic theory. It was the idea that tariffs are the, you know, the the world is lip the the rest of the country the globe is ripping off America and tariffs are an equalizer because they're a weapon, they're a way to force change from other countries. But, you know, to Jonathan's point about the formula and Trump having no idea what he was going to do, this was something he, you know, he wanted to try. But it was not rooted. I mean, I I know I feel like I'm saying I'm a broken record here, but it was not rooted in some kind of a global economic theory about trade balances. It was and imbalances. It was the rest of the world is screwing with us. We're going to screw back. Let's see what happens. And and the only person who did not look close to terrified during the lead up to the pause, which was April 9th, and I was at the White House for several days leading up to the pause, uh, was the president. Uh, but most of his aides were were pretty ashen because they were aware of how close this came.
SPEAKER_03Aaron Ross Powell And so that leads to a backing off, which leads to, I think it was Robert Armstrong and the FT describing what happened as the taco trade, Trump always chickens out. That had to piss Trump off like 8,000%. But he did, in fact, stand down. I guess the question is, how influential are the markets in sort of quickly altering Trump's behavior or Trump's uh policy initiatives?
SPEAKER_00It's not zero. It's not black and white. It's a bit nuanced, but it less reactive than in the first term, uh, where he was hyper, hyper reactive to not just markets, but also domestic politics, polls, all kinds of there were all kinds of domestic shock collars that are just weakened now. It's not that they don't exist at all. He still cares, as you're seeing right now with Iran, he still obviously cares about the oil price and the markets. There's no question. But in this case with Liberation Day, it's a good example. In term one, the when the Dow plummets, you'd see him kind of re reverse. It actually took almost us to have a bond market meltdown that forced him to pull back. So again, it's not zero, but it's less.
SPEAKER_03One thing that's fascinated me about the Trump administration is if you go back to the end of the first term, and you look at what happened thereafter, he was banned from Facebook, he was banned from Twitter, he was, you know, I can't imagine that he did anything but despise the mi the big tech folk in Silicon Valley. And lo and behold, by the time that the second term begins, big tech has more influence, it seems to me, than any single quote, interest group end quote around. What accounts for what accounts for that? Is it just money or is it that they they offered a path to more power, I guess? Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_02It's a combination of factors. Uh and Jonathan should should answer this too. But in the case of, say, Mark Zuckerberg, you know, this was somebody who had funded a pro-immigration group for many, many years that was pretty antagonistic toward Trump. He's not involved in that group as far as we know anymore. He also did not like a lot of the policies around DEI that the Biden administration favored and supported. You know, he he was pretty clear about that in a meeting, a pretty remarkable meeting that we wrote about between himself and Stephen Miller and some other folks uh down at Mar-a-Lago during the transition. Yes, he has Zuckerberg has interests that he needed to solve, but for Trump, there was a personalist aspect to it with folks like Zuckerberg, which was that he was deplatformed, uh, to your point earlier, after he left office in disgrace in 2021. And these folks were restoring him, and they were restoring him with financial tributes too. It was, you know, donations to super PACs. Or, you know, in the case of Elon Musk, certainly, during the summer of 2024, Musk spent a ton of money uh to try to help Trump. The idea of these folks groveling to Trump at at the this the social media tech firms was very appealing to him. In terms of AI, you know, Trump had a a pretty deep conversion. We have this incredible scene in the book in 2024 in the summer where he's meeting with two of the open AI top brass, and uh Sam Altman couldn't make the meeting because he was sick. But uh, they're they're showing him how it works. And Trump expresses this concern. What if somebody fakes my voice about launching a nuke, right? Or a nuke is coming at the US. I forget the specific. But, you know, he was having pretty reasonable concerns, but it has completely transformed into, you know, Trump is like the biggest, you know, shit poster of AI slop, excuse my language, um, from a prominent perch. I mean, he posts that stuff a lot. And in that case, it was some combination of sort of being wowed by the tech, but also obviously, you know, donations and interest or, you know, the possibility of. And then there's the chips aspect, which is in Trump's mind about dominance over China. And so there's not one single reason, but he has in many cases done things like with Intel reaching into corporate boardrooms that we just wouldn't see in outside of an emergency situation. Jonathan, they have a smarter thought than I do about that.
SPEAKER_00No, look, I think it's a couple of things. Firstly, I I also think it's not very deeply rooted, and you're seeing that right now with their 180 on AI policy. Seems to be the start of a 180 on, oh, actually, we need to start thinking about risk management with some of these models, which was not their posture at all last year. And he doesn't really have many people on his senior team who know anything about AI anymore. So that's another issue. But Trump understands attention. And what you saw on the dais at his inauguration was someone described it as this way, so I'm stealing someone's phrase, but sort of the lords of the attentional universe. Right? You had line. You had the the great masters of the attentional universe Google, Facebook, Apple, X. And Trump gets that. Of course. Someone whose whole life, one of, you know, besides amassing wealth, has been about amassing fame and amassing attention and amassing influence. And, you know, if there's something he understands at, you know, a sort of cellular level, it's that. So I think that's part of it. And if he knew during the first term that these people could become boosters and allies, he would have leapt at that, but they were in a you know a hostile posture throughout the first term. And once they started genuflecting in the latter half of 2024, he welcomed it. I mean, we we have a he bragged about it. I mean, we have a scene in our book at his golf club in Durral showing off for guests text messages from Zuckerberg and Bezos. You know, look at this. Basically, they quote unquote, they're kissing my ass. And, you know, a letter from Zuckerberg's child that was very flattering. So this is what he was doing. He was showing it off. And, you know, what a flex, right? The richest, most powerful men in the world running the most powerful companies in the world that account for an inordinate amount of the stock market. Of course, Trump didn't even know Trump had no idea who Jensen Wong was or what Nvidia was, Nvidia was until the second term. I mean, he used to say, who's who's this Jensen? What's this Jensen thing? And then Jensen Wong, Trump suddenly realizes he's quote unquote hot. And then, you know, Trump himself becomes a shareholder in NVIDIA and he's checking that, you know, each time you look at the the vet cap, it's, you know, add an extra trillion. So there's a sense of just awe at the the sheer sums of money involved. And there's another aspect to it, which is during his first term, Trump was still very wedded to this idea of bringing back heavy industry to America. You know, the sort of coal mines and and that kind of thing was his vision. I I think Trump realized by the second term that's not really happening.
SPEAKER_02Although he will not say, although he won't say that. He won't he won't articulate that, but he's yeah, you get it.
SPEAKER_00The coal industry is not gonna um be what it wants was. But what AI and these companies are promising is capital expenditure on just a plane that is almost unimaginable. And so Trump can see, obviously, that this is a way to reindustrialize America, give him huge investments coming into the country, et cetera, et cetera. So it's an obvious winner for him if you come from his point of view.
SPEAKER_03Aaron Powell Yeah. The shift, uh the beginning of a shift on AI, I thought was perfectly captured by Sam Altman offering Trump five percent of AI. I guess the US government five percent of AI, although I'm not sure about that. Aaron Powell But the argument of the AI community has always been if we don't get there first, China will. Right. Therefore, we have to, you know, keep you know the horses out of the barn, and we should never even think about putting the horse back in the barn because otherwise China will get first and and we won't, and that'll be the end of the United States in some way. This is not an argument that is resonating uh with what is called the MAGA movement, and a big part of the MAGA movement is white evangelical Christians who see big tech almost uniformly as a menace given that split. I I'm curious because I saw an interview with Steve Bannon in which he said 90% of the MAGA movement is opposed to big tech. The Trump admin, you know, the Trump White House is off completely off message, et cetera. How much of the pushback from the quote MAGA movement end quote has made a difference or had an impact on the Trump White House?
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell They're certainly aware of it, but John, there's nothing in our reporting that has so far that has suggested, and maybe that'll change, that that's why. Our understanding is actually that a lot of it is coming from Scott Bessent, uh among the Treasury Secretary, but also, you know, obvious concerns about about hacking and cybersecurity that I think just weren't necessarily anticipated. And it wasn't anticipated what the models might be maybe capable of doing. I am I have no doubt that there are people who are in Trump's ear directly talking about this. And I do know that the White House is aware of these kinds of concerns from folks like Bannon, but I don't believe that again, maybe there'll be something that we turn up in our reporting going forward that suggests otherwise, but I don't believe that that is the driver. I think if anything, they are they are seeing the the split over AI as significant as a threat to their coalition. And other, and I'll actually give you a I'll give you a perfect example as to why. You know, so we got hold of private polling memos and focus group memos that Trump's top pollster Tony Fabrizio conducted over the course of the last year and a half, and one, well, I should say the 14-month period we were writing about, and one related to affordability, which was in December of last year, but the other was summarizing two focus groups that two days of focus groups that were done in March, one of which overlapped with the day that we were in the Oval Office. And it's pretty clear that that the Jeffrey Epstein saga and crisis and ongoing questions about what might still be the unreleased material, voters were bringing that up proactively. And it wasn't just, you know, hardcore MAGA folks, it was various folks, according to the memo that Fabrizio wrote up. And it ranked, it outweighed serious issues for these voters, like crime and safety, like data centers. So I don't think that this is the huge engine that Bannon, who no doubt will light me up on his show for saying this, you know, believes it is in terms of the White House. I do believe it is with some aspects of the MAGA base, but I don't think that's why the White House is doing what it's doing.
SPEAKER_03Aaron Powell I wanted to ask the question of, you know, the presidency, you have the formal advisors, and then you have the people who sort of you talk to at night or talk to over the weekend. Who are the most influential outside voices or outside friends who are on the phone with Trump? And I'm curious as to who they are before we get to the greatest scene ever, which is Epstein and the Situation Room.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell Well, one of them is we just mentioned him earlier, Boris Epstein. Trump talks to him all the time. It's it's sometimes hard to trace his his influence and involvement because he's very secretive in the way he operates, but he has his hands in all kinds of things. He was, for example, an intermediary, which we document in the book in dealing with the law firms when Trump was trying to get these huge pro bono pro bono commitments out of law firms that employed or represented people that he considered enemies. Boris Epstein was in those meetings negotiating on Trump's behalf. So he's one. And then I think it's it's sort of issue specific. So for example, on the lead up to the Iran War, Trump was, I think pretty much everyone in his inner circle will tell you that Mark Levin, the conservative host, had a significant sway on his thinking. Very hawkish, pro-Israel voice. Mark Tyson as well, actually, who writes columns for the Washington Post. Jack Keane, who's a former general that you see on television. So there's people like that on Iran that have had a significant say. And then it's less clear because, you know, a lot of it is sort of his interactions are, you know, he'll be on the Mar-a-Lago patio at night with his iPad, playing Pavarotti and James Brown, and people will wander over to the table, have a little chat. He'll play golf with someone, he hears from a lot of business people and what have you. And so he's very easy just to get to directly. So it's actually sometimes quite hard to trace a lot of his conversations because they're not going through intermediaries. They're just people calling Trump. And there's a lot of it.
SPEAKER_02One person who used to have a fair amount of influence just from I was just thinking about the Senate and lawmakers before he went into the government, or at least had frequent interactions with the president. The president really liked him, was Mark Wayne Mullen. And I wonder about what that ends up looking like now that Mullen is at DHS and leading an agency that uh Stephen Miller considers to be pretty broken and is now being led by somebody who has direct access to Trump in a way that Christian Ohm just never did. But it it just, it's like what Jonathan said, it really does depend on the issue. Uh I am struck though at things like, you know, Trump having, you know, his whatever he described, you know, my pool guy as doing the reflecting pool or reflecting whatever the hell we call it now. I I can't even remember. He's used so many different terms for it near the Lincoln Memorial. He's more open about the fact that his inputs are uh much more personalist and not governmental than he was in term one, even though some of them were the same.
SPEAKER_03Aaron Powell I mean, the subject of Jeffrey Epstein is is one that uh, you know, as you point out, it's something that voters proactively bring up. It comes up at dinner parties, it comes up at lunch counters, it's it has and it has remarkable staying power. On the other hand, if you're an advisor to the president of the United States and you're gonna walk into the Oval Office and say, let's talk about Epstein, you're probably buying yourself a one-way ticket out of the Trump administration. So you have this wonderful scene in the book where a Epstein meeting is held, how to deal with the Epstein problem, but it's it's held in the Situation Room. Um, can you describe that meeting for the listeners?
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell There's a handful of meetings that we focused on. There's three in particular that were large in the situation room. And as you say, you know, th there were many that were held during this period of time in which Donald Trump just wanted Epstein to go away. And anybody, as we write in the book, who was bringing it up was getting snapped at or ignored. And so, you know, to your point, they knew this was not a winning track to have conversations with him on. But it couldn't go away because there was a clamor for much more information, because there was a widespread feeling in the administration that Pam Bondy had committed a huge error by appearing to confirm there was a client list sitting on her desk in an interview in February of 2025. So all of this and uh, you know, efforts to tamp it down didn't work. There were, there were a series of these crisis, Epstein crisis comms meetings by the top levels of the government in this room that is incredibly private, that is usually used for monitoring wars or for national security. One in particular that we wrote about was in August of last year. And this really is evocative of why every path these aides had, and to be clear, I'm not saying, you know, this is not a poor them tale, just describing that the situation they were in. They had built a beta version of a website. So by they're under subpoena in the house by then, they were going to put everything Jeffrey Epstein related out, civil cases, of which there are many, DOJ-related material. That was the initial plan. Before one of these other large meetings in the situation room, one of the aides had just entered Trump's name and up popped this secondhand, unverified allegation that was already public, by the way. It had been unsealed in a in an unrelated civil case year and a half earlier, that Trump had abused some woman's nipples, uh, that he had a nipple fetish and like to flick and suck this woman's nipples and the quoting from the document, and the they were looked swollen and painful to this other person who relayed this. So this Trump person says in this meeting, you know, this is out there. This is, you know, this is there. And J.D. Vance, who along with Dan Bongino were the most vocal about just transparency, Vance actually wanted to release all of the unverified stuff, including about Trump. And he says that he doesn't think the president would mind. He's been accused of worse. And Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, pretty quickly said actually, no, he he would mind having this put on this website. And so then that's the end of the website conversation, and that's the end of trying to do something that was proactive. One of the participants told us it was just surreal to be describing, you know, nipples in the situation room. You know, we really couldn't think of any kind of an analog or find any kind of an analog, and we checked historically. So this was just a I don't know how else to describe it. It it it is, I would urge people to read this reporting because it speaks to so much about not just how, you know, rooms in the White House are used and who's making decisions, but how that was the moment where Trump really started losing altitude with his own base. And you could see it, and it really paralyzed them, unlike anything since the Mueller investigation had.
SPEAKER_03And you described the lead up to the war. And the thing that's astonishing about the reporting, and the reporting throughout the book is astonishing, but the it's the, I guess Trump would call it his gut guiding the decision-making process. You have people uh you describe General Kane as being as non-opinionated as he possibly can be, but uh clearly he thinks this is not a good idea. J.D. Vance doesn't think it's a good idea. Mark Rubio doesn't think it's a good idea. And boom, Trump says, let's go. When you did the reporting on this, was it was it just were they as or the people who know them as surprised by Trump's decision making on this as as you were, as we were?
SPEAKER_00Well, Trump is always there's a sort of an element of not seeing what's in front of you with Trump on Iran. Yeah. And there are a lot of the people in this sort of anti-interventionist isolationist camp who have refused to see that Trump has always been more hawkish about Iran than they have. During the first term, a number of his advisors counseled him to stay in the Obama nuclear deal. He pulled out. There were several people around him who thought it was risky and a bad idea to kill Qasim Suleimani. He obviously went ahead with that. And then, you know, from Trump's point of view, the world didn't collapse. During the interregnum period, he was briefed by the FBI that Iran was trying to kill him, that they'd hired kill teams inside the United States. So, you know, that probably had a personal effect on him. We have some reporting in the book that Netanyahu's top advisor, Ron Derma, visited with Trump after the election and came away from that meeting telling associates that he thought there was an 80% chance that Trump would join Israel in a war against Iran. So he came away very much of the view that Trump was willing to act more aggressively in a second term. There's a little bit of Trump tells different people different things and what they want to hear. So through the early administration, he was definitely telling people like Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk, I'm not going to get dragged into this war. BB's, you know, a disaster. He he described Netanyahu as a con man, uh direct quote, con man, to some of his uh aides at different times. He's obviously had a fraught relationship with Netanyahu. But I think that the combination of the 12-day war last year, which Trump saw as a spectacular success, and it concluded with Iran very tepidly firing off a pretty small number of missiles that didn't kill any Americans. I think Trump concluded that the regime was not all they were hyped up to be, that this was a paper tiger regime. Netanyahu could be very persuasive. He was very aggressive and relentless in pushing for this. And we have a scene where he comes down to the White House Situation Room and gives Trump a presentation about regime change scenarios. But, you know, Trump didn't the idea that this was sort of Netanyahu puppeteering Trump, it just doesn't comport with our reporting at all. Trump had a gut instinct that this regime was going to fall, that he was going to be the president to deal with this problem once and for all after 47 years of US policy failure. And despite what the CIA director John Ratcliffe told him about the implausibility of Netanyahu's regime change scenarios, despite what Rubio said, despite the risks that were raised to him by Dan Cain, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Trump just felt what he felt. He felt this was going to go the way that it was going to be a quick war and that none of these problems would happen, the closure of the strait or the munitions issues, because the war would be over before any of that happened. Obviously, it was a major miscalculation, but it was, again, Trump gut-driven decision making. And I think there's one other thing that we we draw out in our reporting that's really important to understand, which is even though you can't actually find anyone in his inner circle who thought that this war was a good idea. I mean, the closest you'll find is Pete Hageseth. But basically all of them were skeptical. The only one who really vocally made a case against the war to Trump in the room was the vice president. And it cost him with Trump. It irritated Trump. Trump was getting, you didn't want to hear it. But others really kind of either kept their concerns to themselves or delivered them in such a neutral and diluted way, like Dan Cain, that Trump didn't really hear them as concerns. He just sort of saw it as, on the one hand, this, on the other hand, that. And that's how it happened.
SPEAKER_03I have one last question before we let Maggie go, and you go, uh, Jonathan. Which is people marvel at Trump's energy and stamina and just, you know, just keep on plowing along. And pretty much the same people are concerned about his health. They think he looks terrible. They think he's getting more forgetful. Um and you're reporting, you know, how do you square that circle of this incredible energy and stamina with a person in his 80s who was clearly, if you look at film from 2016 and compare it to today, it it's almost like two different people. How do you square that circle? How what do your sources tell you on it?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean, so his health is is is not an area of success. It is the most closed-off black box in his world, has been for decades. You know, his his former doctor, Harold Bornstein, who has since passed away, but told a story to the New York Times' Larry Altman about how Trump aides came and just absconded with his his files when the president was elected the first time. He does not like people knowing about his health. By the way, which doesn't mean that there is something there. He's just incredibly closed about it. And he sees he sees health-related issues and and illness and disease as signs of weakness or, you know, indicators of weakness. I do think two things can be true at once. You we all can see the ankles thing, although I don't think I've seen his ankles lately. Uh the chronic venous insufficiency, the bruising on the hands, that their explanation, I I don't entirely understand how that is handshaking and and people scratching him. You know, he's he's got he's 80. He he he he has clearly slowed down in terms of how he speaks. I mean, as you said, I can look at the same videos you do. Um, and then I can look at them from 30 years ago, and his speech is even crisper there. So I don't know whether it is something beyond that, you know, and it may not be, but there's a reason that there have been very few 80-year-olds who are president of the U.S. And it's because they tend not to be as spry as they once were. That said, you know, he is doing these foreign trips with these insanely compressed time frames. You know, he had some he had some screw-ups when he was talking that were obvious. You know, the the the well, I forget what he said, but he called he called Iran Japan and Zelen Zelensky Putin. Right. And so he's tired. But, you know, that he wouldn't be the first president in the world who had that either. I I just I don't know what we don't know. But what we knew what we do know is he's 80 and he's he's clearly not in in tip-top shape. That doesn't mean that he doesn't have significant stores of energy. And I guess the only other thing I would say, John, is that there is this comes up often and you know over and over again about the comparison to Biden and coverage of Biden's health. Well, I mean, we see Trump much more than we saw Biden. We just do in terms of the day-to-day. And that is uh that is a factor too, and I think how people make these assessments, just as viewers. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_03That really comes through in the book that Trump, you know, is engaged and he's not is not Biden at all. He's he's in those meetings, he's traveling all the time, he's you know, as you say, transparent uh almost to a fault. I mean, it you know, Biden didn't. But I mean he's available to press gaggles all the time. And so anyway, taking more than enough of your time. And I appreciate your doing it for the listeners again. The book is Regime Change, authored by our guests, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. It's this tells the story of inside the imperial presidency of Donald Trump. I urge you to buy not one copy, but two. Thank you very much for listening.
SPEAKER_00Thanks for having us, John.
SPEAKER_02Thanks for having us, John.