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Dave Davies

This is FRESH air. I'm Dave Davies. If you follow news about Donald Trump, you'll find there's plenty of it all the time, and you get used to impulsive decisions, surprising developments and sudden changes. Of course, tariffs rise and fall with dizzying speed. The Iranian leaders he was calling rational days ago he now regards as scum. The pattern is so familiar that when I learned that New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan had written a new book about Trump's second term in office, I wondered, is there really anything new to report here? It turns out there's plenty. Swann and Haberman conducted a thousand interviews for the book, and the result is an account which adds rich and fascinating detail to developments that were generally known and explores stories that had somehow slipped under the radar. There are gripping accounts of top officials meeting to deal with the Epstein files and whether to follow Israel into war with Iran, and stories of rolling bull sessions in the Oval Office, one with a conservative influencer coming in to demand the firing of officials she regards as disloyal. But the book paints a big picture, too, one of an unrestrained Donald Trump remaking the American government and its international relations in profound ways. The book is titled Regime Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. Our guest today is co author Jonathan Swan, who's worked closely with Maggie Haberman covering the White House. Swann is originally from Sydney, Australia. He came to the US in 2014 and previously reported for the Hill and Axios. He won an Emmy award for his 2020 interview with Trump during the pandemic, which went viral and got millions of views. We recorded our interview yesterday. Well, Jonathan Swan, welcome back to FRESH air.

Jonathan Swan

Thanks so much for having me.

Dave Davies

One of the stories that is told here is how important policy decisions are made in this White House. And there's an example I want to talk about February 2025, when Bibi Netanyahu is White House. This is when the war in Gaza was underway, the hostages were still being held, and Trump surprised the world with this new proposal.

Donald Trump

The US Will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it, too. We'll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site. Level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings. Level it out create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area.

Dave Davies

Trump went on to say in that news conference that this could be the Riviera of the Middle east and that everybody he talked to loved the idea. What did your reporting reveal about the development of this proposal in the White House and the kind of vetting it got?

Jonathan Swan

Well, a proposal of this magnitude, which would have entailed the displacement and removal of 2 million Palestinians, sort of unimaginable scale of essentially ethnic cleansing, you would think it would have gone through some kind of a process. You know, Pentagon assessments, what do we need in terms of American troops on the ground? State Department, what are the diplomatic arrangements that we would need to put in place, intelligence assessments about what. What the landmines might be that we might need to circumvent? None of those things happened. This was an idea that Trump had raised in a sort of musing kind of way during his presidential daily briefs. A couple of times, he would see aerial photographs of Gaza, and he would hear about the destruction there, and he would muse about, well, it's great waterfront land. Maybe we could do something with this. But none of the staff had thought that this was anything more than him just musing. So he meets with Netanyahu, and then shortly before that press conference, he's meeting behind the scenes with some of his aides, and he says, what do you think about this idea? And his national security advisor at the time, Mike Waltz, is there, and he, as a veteran, understands the military component of what something like this would entail. And he said he made clear to the president that you need to make clear that we're not going to put American boots on the ground. And then there's this sort of pause. And Trump turns to his communications director, Stephen Chung. He says, what do you think? You like this idea? And there's this sort of pause. And Chung says, it's a strong move, sir. So, you know, this was about as unvetted a proposal as you could imagine. But the way it was presented, it was like people thought this was a fully formed idea. And we talked to senior people in the government who are watching this presentation, and they were just aghast.

Dave Davies

Right. And, of course, Trump wasn't saying, this is a maybe I'm the president, we're gonna do this. Of course, it's gone nowhere. This probably would not have gone the same way in the first term. Right. It was a different White House then.

Jonathan Swan

Very much so. I mean, this term is unrecognizable. From term one. And I still think a lot of people view Trump through the lens, or at least his administration and government through the lens of the first term. It just couldn't be more different. One of the ways in which it's different is the team around him. I remember in term one covering Trump, and you would have so many conversations with senior officials, including senior national security officials, and the overwhelming impression that you would receive from talking to these people was a, they thought they were working for someone who was dangerous, and they saw their own roles as protecting the country and the world from the person that they were ostensibly working for. Those type of people don't exist anymore in this. In this administration. They really don't. Not in. Not in any meaningful way. At a senior level, I'm sure they exist. I know they exist at a more mid level, but at a senior level, it's really a group of people who believe in him, are loyal to him, in some cases, went through the campaign with him. Many of them were radicalized on the campaign through the investigations and the efforts to prosecute Donald Trump. Many of them received subpoenas themselves and viewed the stakes of the 2024 election as not so much about policy, but about staying out of prison. So that's the mindset of Trump and his inner circle. And it's created a situation where there's very little friction between a Donald Trump idea that might have just leapt straight from his internal monologue out of his mouth with no filter to an effort to make it actual American policy and execution. It didn't happen in this instance with the Gaza thing, but it's happened in many, many other instances, including starting a trade war with the whole world.

Dave Davies

You know, it's well known that Trump, in his public statements, has a, what we might call a loose relationship with verifiable facts. And when you combine that with a situation in which there's really no one who will confront him with uncomfortable truths, you end up with policy that can be divorced from reality. Right?

Jonathan Swan

Yeah, I think it's slightly more nuanced than that in the sense that there are people at different moments in this government who have confronted him with uncomfortable truths. We have a section that's a couple of areas, but particularly on Iran, where The vice president, J.D. vance, quite aggressively argues against this war and actually cost him with Trump. But you're correct that in the main, that's absolutely the dynamic. It's a group of people who not along affirm Donald Trump when he's not hearing what he wants to hear, he goes elsewhere to get affirmation. So we have a scene in the book, it's kind of an astonishing scene, where this is just before he launches the trade war with the whole world. Last April, Liberation Day. And he's in the Oval Office with his core economic team. And Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary, is discussing tariff rates with him, you know, from China and India. And he's. The data that he's presenting Trump is from the government. It's from the US Government, ustr. It's the official data. And Trump turns to Natalie Harp, who's his young assistant, and she sits in the court, basically against the wall of the Oval Office. You can see her in some of the photographs. But he says, natalie, Google me the real numbers. These are numbers. Get me the real numbers. And of course, so then she starts furiously googling to try to find whatever these real numbers are. And of course, you can't find the real numbers because they don't exist.

Donald Trump

But.

Jonathan Swan

But that's very representative of the way he seeks out information. When he's hearing something that doesn't comport with his instincts, he goes to other people to get validation.

Dave Davies

I want to talk about another memorable anecdote in the book. And this was a case where some expertise was consulted in a crucial decision. This was February of this year, when Bibi Netanyahu come to the White House, goes to the Situation Room, which is rare for a foreign leader, and makes the case for going to war with Iran. He says the time timing is right. They're getting close to a nuclear weapon. We can't afford to wait. Their proxy allies in the region have been weakened. It's ripe for a regime change. Let's get this done. And you write that administration intelligence operatives work that question overnight to evaluate whether this is a good idea. What do they say? What does Trump say?

Jonathan Swan

So, extraordinary moment when the history of this whole war is written. I think this is one of the seminal moments. It was February 11th this year. The Prime Minister of Israel comes down to the White House Situation Room. You said rare. I'm not sure a presentation like this has ever happened. It's possible it has. We couldn't find a parallel for it

Dave Davies

with a foreign leader being in that

Jonathan Swan

room, being in that room and pitching the United States president on a war, which is essentially what was. It's not essentially. That is what happened. He came down to the Situation Room. Trump leaves his usual place at the head of the table and sits in the middle of the table opposite Netanyahu. And Netanyahu gives this presentation he's got, you know, he's got the screen on the wall behind him, and he has the head of Mossad and Israeli generals on the screen. And Netanyahu played a video for the president of regime change scenarios and essentially a montage of potential replacements for the ayatollah. So the presentation ends, and Trump was quite impressed by it, and he said something to the effect of, sounds good. His team was much more sceptical. So overnight, the CIA analyzes Netanyahu's presentation to figure out how plausible were these scenarios that he was laying out. So the next day, there's a meeting in the White House situation room, and two agency officials brief Trump's senior team. Trump's not in the room yet. And they lay out the findings. The bottom line is they say that these regime change scenarios were divorced from reality. Now, some of the other things that Netanyahu was talking about, you know, like degrading Iran's ballistic missile capacity, the agency thought were plausible, but the regime changed scenarios they thought were divorced from reality. So then Trump comes in, and the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, described the CIA's findings to the president, and he said that Netanyahu's regime change scenarios were direct, quote, farcical. And then Rubio, the Secretary of State, national security adviser, used even stronger language to describe them. So Trump was briefed. But Trump had a gut feel, just a strong gut instinct that this would be a fast war, that Iran would fold quickly, and that these scenarios that were being discussed, like a closure of the Strait of Hormuz and America running low on weapons, none of this would come to bear because the war would be over before any of that would happen. So it's complicated. You know, there are a lot of people who read our reporting and said, ah, see, I knew it. But, you know, Netanyahu was, you know, the puppet master who tricked Trump into the war. And that very simple narrative ignores the fact that Donald Trump himself has long been quite hawkish on Iran and much more hawkish than everyone on his team. Netanyahu certainly made a compelling presentation, but the skepticism and the risks were brief to Trump, and he chose to ignore them.

Dave Davies

I want to talk more about this belief that overthrowing that regime was some part of his destiny. But you had to cut off your reporting at some point for the book. And as things have unfolded, it was not a short war, and it's been a terrible. Well, it's unfolded in a way that's been very harmful to Trump politically. It's raised gas prices. He can't seem to get out of the. The situation he's gotten the country into. Have you gotten any reporting about whether he regrets this, where he sees himself as having committed a blunder?

Jonathan Swan

Trump's not someone who would admit that necessarily in a direct way, certainly wouldn't blame himself for it. But it's pretty clear that is what he thinks. It's pretty clear he realizes that this war has not gone well, has not played out the way that Netanyahu pitched him or that Trump himself thought would play out, and he's. He's trying to get out of it. I've covered Trump for quite a long time. This is my 11th year of covering him. I can't remember a time, maybe Covid, but, but aside from COVID I can't remember a time where Trump looked as stuck as he looks right now, just doesn't seem to know how to get out of this war and is caught between bad options. You know, one of the big themes in our book is hubris. And I think to some extent, every American president overestimates their own power to affect events. But I think we saw a very extreme version of that with this war. When Maggie and I sat down with the President about two weeks into the war, he was boasting about the Venezuela operation where they seized Maduro, and he described it as a one hour war. And it was just so clear that he had developed this admiration for the American military, which is understandable. They'd pulled off this Delta Force. I mean, there's nothing the American military does better than these special operator led raids. But Iran was so different, and he was told that. And yet he still felt that he knew better.

Dave Davies

Well, he always said, I understand war better than the generals, I understand disease better than the scientists.

Jonathan Swan

Right.

Dave Davies

You know, the subtitle of this book is Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. It seems clear that he wants to be seen as a great leader in history. How much does that explain these aggressive foreign policy moves, do you think?

Jonathan Swan

I think it explains it to a very large extent. In the first term, he took some risks internationally, no question. I mean, they seem so quaint now, but I remember he was warned, don't move the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. You know, that would be a disaster and the Middle east would be up in flames. And then he did it, and the dire scenarios didn't play out. He was warned against withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord. He did it, and in his view, it was just fine. He was warned against pulling out of Obama's nuclear deal, and he did it. And it was just fine. In his view, he killed Qasem Soleimani, the top Iranian general. Some people thought that was a bad idea and that it would cause absolute chaos. And in his view, it didn't play out that way. So in one sense, it's a story of moral hazard. You take big risks, and there aren't consequences, and that just keeps building. It's actually kind of the story, a through line of Donald Trump's life. But his mindset in the second term is so different from the first term. In the first term, he was very reactive to domestic politics this time around. It's not that he doesn't care at all about those things. He certainly does, but he cares far less. And this was sort of brought home to us very starkly when. When we sat down with the president in March and Maggie and I asked him about his power, and he handed us these two sheets of paper, which he said was written by a historian. And it said, Donald Trump is the most powerful man who's ever existed. And he said. And it compares him to what Trump described to us as the top 10. And it was figures like Mao, Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Alexander the Great, William the Conqueror, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, the Caesars. You know, you get the idea. And nothing to do with morality. All just about pure power projection.

Peter Sagal

And.

Jonathan Swan

And Trump was relishing being in their company. He was sitting back in his chair, and he was reading out the names Napoleon. Isn't this interesting? You know, they wielded power by fear. And, you know, Maggie and I talked about it afterwards, and it really occurred to us that when you look at it through that lens, his second term makes a lot more sense. Why is he willing to take these huge risks? Why is he willing to send America back into a Middle Eastern war? Why is he willing to send Delta Force into Caracas to snatch a foreign leader, Maduro, out of his bedroom? Well, if your goal is to be a capital G, great man of history, then it's worth taking the risk of, you know, potential disaster. But then, potentially, you're the first American president in 47 years to finally deal with the Islamic Republic, this. This malign regime in Iran. And so you start to see the puzzle kind of fit together and possibly

Dave Davies

expand the territorial area of the United States to include Greenland or Canada.

Jonathan Swan

That's absolutely a big part of his mindset. He really does want to. You know, there's all this sort of talk of, oh, is he trolling when he says Venezuela is a 51st state? No, he means that quite literally one of my colleagues had a story about how he's running Venezuela from Washington. That's how they view it. They view this new leader, Delsey Rodriguez, as essentially a governor of an American oil field. That's how they view Venezuela.

Dave Davies

We need to take another break here, so let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Jonathan Swan. He's a White House correspondent for the New York Times. He is the author with fellow White House correspondent Maggie Haberman of the new book Regime Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. He'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies and this is FRESH air.

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Dave Davies

This is FRESH air. I'm Dave Davies, and our guest is New York Times White House correspondent Jonathan Swan. He's the author with fellow Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman of a new book about Donald Trump's second term in office. The book offers rich new detail on major stories that were covered over the past year and a half. And it makes the case that Trump, now free from constraints he worked under in his first term, is dramatically reshaping the American government and its relations with the rest of the world. The book is Regime Change Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. We recorded our interview yesterday. You know, one of the points you make in the book is that Trump has far less interest in domestic political issues than he did in the first term. And there are some pretty critical ones. I mean, the midterms present a real threat to his administration. If the Republicans lose control of the House, but he's not traveling that much and helping candidates. And you have an interesting anecdote about this. When a government shutdown was looming over the Democrats insistence in restoring cuts to the Affordable Care Act. And in this case, the deadline is near. And so Trump hosts a meeting at the White House. He gets Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader of the Senate, Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, Hakeem Jeffries there. What role does he play in this meeting?

Jonathan Swan

Well, he's basically in sort of provocateur trolling mode. It's the first time, and so far the only time in this administration where he's in the room with all four leaders, the Democratic leaders in the House and Senate and the Republican leaders. And the conversation is, as most conversations with Trump go, not linear. It's not really focused on what would actually be required to get a compromise or a deal. Instead, he's throwing things out there, like, why don't we just, you know, get better health care? Why don't we just come up with a whole new health care system? And so, you know, the Republicans sort of have to gently steer him around that. And then there's this moment partway through the meeting where Trump gets one of his aides to bring out. There's a room off the Oval, which Trump has essentially turned into a sort of gift shop or sort of merchandise type shop, where you've got MAGA caps and all kinds of other trinkets, and the aid brings back these caps that say Trump 2028, which is Trump's, you know, troll. But, you know, there's a sort of, Is he trolling? Isn't he, you know, about running for an unconstitutional third term. And he puts the caps on the table so that the photographer, the White House photographer, can photograph Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, the two Democratic leaders with a Trump 2028 hat in the foreground. And this sort of awkward exchange ensues where Hakeem Jeffries asks Vice President Vance, who is there? Are you okay with this? You know, obviously, given he's the successor. And he sort of says, no comment. So that was the. That was the vibe. It was just the meeting ended up achieving nothing. Trump seemed to be basically focused on creating a spectacle, embarrassing the Democrats wielding power, flexing. But nothing came of it. And of course, then the government shut down.

Dave Davies

The details here were just fascinating. At one point, he says, hey, let's all have some Coke. So he brings out soda and then brings out what he calls the poison, which is Candy. And then he closes his eyes for a while and then asks Vance to kind of take over, presiding over the meeting. Right?

Jonathan Swan

Yep.

Dave Davies

Just not really serious about getting a deal. When, of course, it went on for weeks after that. Right?

Jonathan Swan

That's exactly right. And, you know, one thing we try to do with the book is not just tackle the weighty issues like Iran, but actually give people a real intimate sense of what life is like inside the White House. And, and, you know, we have a lot of stuff about his private life inside the residence and the way meetings tend to work in the United States.

Dave Davies

I was gonna ask you about this. The phrase you use is rolling bull sessions.

Jonathan Swan

Yeah, I mean, anyone who uses the word meeting might think that a meeting has a beginning and an end and is sort of locked up, you know, in a calendar. You might say the meeting begins at 10:30, it ends at 10:45. These are the people that will attend. Here's the agenda. You know, in previous presidencies, it's even more rigid than that. You know, George W. Bush used to schedule himself in 10 or 15 minute increments. Obama too. That is not how it works with Trump. Meetings have no beginning, middle or end. There's almost no delineation. And what often ends up happening is it's essentially one meeting that just rolls throughout the afternoon with different people joining and leaving. And Trump, you know, engaged or not engaged, people who have no business being in the meeting, sometimes joining, whether it's a pro wrestler or a crypto investor or foreign, you know, somebody from a Gulf monarchy or, you know, a CEO. And so all of this is happening. The conversations are non linear. You know, Trump will get fascinated about one thing that has nothing to do with the topic, and that can derail a meeting. We have scene in the book where he's having a conversation, very small meeting, which is highly classified, about a defense program. And this guy comes in, just walks in to the oval, you know, salt of the earth kind of country looking guy, and he's holding stone samples for the Rose Garden because Trump was planning to pave over the Rose Garden. And he just comes in and Trump gets up from his seat and the two go off and sort of start conferring, looking out the window, talking about the paving and the stone and this and that, gets on the phone with another contractor, and before you know it, time's up, you know, the meeting's ended. They haven't actually resolved the issue they were going to resolve. So that's a dynamic. But again, like most things with Trump, it's not so simple because if I just told you that, you would think, okay, well, this thing is loose and chaotic and, and, and leaky and everyone knows everything. It's actually the opposite. When there are issues that, that Trump really cares about or his team wants to keep secret, they can be incredibly secretive to the point of great frustration across the government. And when it comes to the weightiest issues, like the planning of going to war with Iran, we found that very, very senior people in the government were, A, completely cut out of the loop and B, had no idea about the conversations about what was being discussed in the Oval Office. The upside from that level of secrecy is no leaks. The downside is Trump is not given access to the expertise that he needs to make big decisions. And I think this is a very stark example of that.

Dave Davies

Yeah. We need to take another break. Here we are speaking with Jonathan Swan. He is a White House correspondent for the New York Times and the author with fellow White House correspondent Maggie Haberman, of the new book Regime Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. We'll talk more in just a moment. This is FRESH air.

Jonathan Swan

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Join me for Are We Doomed? Part of the NPR network. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts. This is FRESH air. And we're listening to my interview with Jonathan Swan, a White House correspondent for the New York Times. He's the author with fellow Times correspondent Maggie Haberman of the new book Regime Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. You know, you refer to the imperial presidency in the title of the book. And part of that is Trump's expansionist foreign policy, you know, flexing America's power throughout the world. There's a domestic side to this, too. He's also expanded executive power by, you know, firing the members of independent government agencies. And the Supreme Court has essentially supported that. He's also engaged the Justice Department in these campaigns of retribution, which he's open about. And there are some very public examples that are well known. James Comey, Letitia James, the Attorney General of New York. It gives us a sense of how people are targeted.

Jonathan Swan

And here's another thing that's really important when it comes to the retribution campaign, and that's that for Donald Trump, the process is the punishment. And his former deputy Attorney general, now, now, Attorney General Todd Blanche had real doubts about the validity and the strength of the evidence that the DOJ had against Letitia James.

Dave Davies

This is the Attorney General of New York who had. Had brought a case against Trump alleging business fraud, right?

Jonathan Swan

Yes, exactly. And Trump, she was right at the top of Trump's enemies list, and he wanted her prosecuted. And Trump told an advisor, I don't really care if we get a conviction. I just want to make her life miserable. And so Trump understands, partly because he went through it himself, that the process of being investigated by the federal government is itself a punishment. And he is directing his Justice Department to. To put his enemies through that punishment, regardless of the facts.

Dave Davies

How would you say that campaign is going for Donald Trump? Because, you know, a lot of the efforts to charge his adversaries have been thwarted. It's been publicly reported that this didn't work, that the evidence wasn't there. And we now have the spectacle of the Justice Department charging the former Olympic athlete David Hearn of felony destruction of property for touching the peeling paint at the bottom of the reflecting pool. I mean, this can't be good for Donald Trump. Can.

Jonathan Swan

Well, one of the reasons why he. Maybe the main reason why he got rid of Pam Bondi, his first Attorney general, was because he was dissatisfied with the pace of prosecutions and the effectiveness of this campaign to imprison his political opponents and enemies. That being said, what I just said before about the process being the punishment, he is also happy just to see all these people have to go through the pain. You know, being investigated by the government is expensive. It can ruin your employment. It can put your family through all kinds of stress. And so all of these people in Trump's crosshairs whether it be James Comey, Jack Smith, Letitia James, John Bolton, go down the list. Their lives have all been turned upside down to different degrees, and most of them don't publicize it, but many of them have to pay for their own private security. They live under threats. Their lives have changed. And Trump is very happy about that.

Dave Davies

One of the other things you notice is President Trump's focus on decorating the White House. This was kind of interesting. What's all that about?

Jonathan Swan

When Trump returned to the White House, the resident staff had made everything basically the same way it was when he left in the first term. When Trump got back, though, he immediately concluded that there was room to have more gold there. He said publicly and privately that he would have liked to have done more with the White House in the first term, but was hard because he was under siege from investigators and so forth. This time we write in the book, you know, he really could unleash his inner Louis xiv. You know, the history of the Oval Office in the White House has been of modesty when it comes to design and decoration, reflecting the fact that America is a republic, not a monarchy. Trump has no use for that history. And and in fact, I traveled with President Trump to the Middle east, you know, palace after palace, and it was really instructive to watch him with these Middle Eastern rulers. He was just in a state of absolute pleasure, you know, going from one palace to the next, admiring the marble, looking at the most rarefied displays of state wealth on earth. And that's essentially what he's trying to create at the White House. You know, he's gilded almost every corner of the Oval Office. Like you walk in, it's like the inside of a jewelry box. It just glows with gold all around you. He's building this grand ballroom. We have in the book that he seemed to almost be competing with Melania as to who had the better bedroom. They have separate bedrooms, and he was taking objects that she had placed in the center hall of the residence and putting them in his bedroom. You know, he's long had a taste for gold, but this time around he's just put his own stamp on the White House in a way that he didn't do in the first term.

Dave Davies

We are speaking with Jonathan Swan. He is a White House correspondent for the New York Times and the author with fellow White House correspondent Maggie Haberman, of the new book Regime Change Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. We'll be back after this break. This is FRESH air.

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Jonathan Swan

It's the experience we're having right now, what it is like to eat chocolate or to look at the blue sky.

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Dave Davies

This is FRESH AIR. And we're listening to my interview with Jonathan Swan, a White House correspondent for the New York Times. He's the author with fellow Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman of the new book Regime Change Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. You grew up in Sydney, Australia. Right. Your dad was a journalist.

Peter Sagal

Still is.

Dave Davies

Right. You went into the business, did newspaper stories exposing official corruption and self dealing and then came to the US in 2014. Right. A year later, got a job at the Hill, which is a publication that follows Congress, went on to report for Axios and then eventually the Times. When you were at Axios, you did an interview with Trump in 2020, early in the COVID crisis, which went viral, won you and Emmy. There are millions of views on the Internet and it became inspired memes. Let's just listen to a little piece of that conversation.

Donald Trump

We've done 55. It'll be close to 60 million tests. And you know, there are those that say you can test too much. You do know that.

Jonathan Swan

Who says that?

Donald Trump

Oh, just read the manuals. Read the books.

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Manuals.

Donald Trump

Read the books. Read the books.

Dave Davies

What books?

Donald Trump

What testing does?

WHYY Promo Voice

Wait a minute.

Donald Trump

Let me explain what testing does. It shows cases. It shows where there may be cases.

Dave Davies

And that's Donald Trump speaking to our guest Jonathan Swan. You know, Trump is such he's a difficult interview because he's such a salesman, a talker. He Kind of bum rushes the interviewer. Right. He interrupts, he deflects questions, takes the conversation where he wants to go. And what we hear there is you are cutting in very quickly and just saying, wait, wait, wait. What was this something that you consciously prepared to do in that interview? I mean, I know it wasn't the first time you'd spoken to him.

Jonathan Swan

Yeah. An interview with Trump requires an enormous amount of preparation if you want to hope to come out of it with any level of success. He's a really difficult interview for all the reasons you described. He's an overwhelming presence, and you are confronted with a sort of tidal wave of words. Many of the words and the sentences are detached from reality or completely false. And you have to make judgments in real time about what you let go. You can't fact check everything. You can pick your moments. But I saw my role as the representative of the people in that chair. You're the one who's lucky enough to be sitting in that chair interviewing the President of the United States. What would. What would regular people want to know and want me to do in that situation? And I think that when you're interviewing a president of the United States, you want to find the balance between letting them explain themselves and not cutting in every two seconds, but finding moments that are really important to puncture the bubble. Trump creates an unreality bubble. It's the way he operates. It's very powerful. Tucker Carlson actually described it publicly as like being under a spell. And I would certainly wouldn't ascribe a supernatural dimension to it, but I know what he's getting at. Trump will say, we have won the war in Iran. They're begging us. They're on their knees calling stuff that's just manifestly false. And you have to sort of make a decision. If you're one of his advisors, do I just nod along with it, or do I, you know, push back and whatever? And at some point, you just have to let it wash over you. Your job in an interview is to puncture that unreality bubble, but you can't do it every sentence. So it's more of an art than a science. And what I tried to do in that interview is hold him accountable, but also let him explain himself at the same time.

Dave Davies

You know, you and Maggie Haberman have made quite a team. Journalists are notoriously individualistic. I worked at a daily paper for 20 years and collaborated with other journalists that time. And that's tricky because journalism is filled with judgments, you know, to be made about who to trust. Who to what value to assign to information, Whether you share sources and information with your partner. Could you just share a bit about how you connected and formed this partnership?

Jonathan Swan

So I admired Maggie as a reporter. When I competed against her, she would just break stories almost every day about Trump during the first term. Just a completely relentless, well sourced reporter. And we were friends, even though we were competitors. When I joined the New York Times in January of 2023 and I got to actually work with her, I was more impressed. Often when you see someone up close, it's kind of disappointing. You know, you've admired them from afar, then you take a close look and you sort of think, okay, this kind person's kind of a fraud. It was the exact opposite. I was much more impressed once I had worked closely with her and I understood how vast her sourcing networks are, how relentless she is as a reporter. And we just very quickly formed a very natural reporting partnership. Very complimentary. We're in a rhythm now where it's hard to even articulate. It's like we almost share a brain. And one of the reasons the book was really hard was because you are making hundreds and thousands of those judgment calls. You know, it's not like one person can just unilaterally say, well, this is how it is. It's good that we both know how each other think enough at this point that we tend to land in the same place. We also sometimes have disagreements and we talk those out. And, you know, one person is more persuasive than the other. But I can tell you one thing, I could not do a book of this on this compressed timeframe, this difficulty on my own. And I don't wanna speak for Maggie, but I don't think she could either. And it was only with this combination that we could produce what we've produced.

Dave Davies

You know, you say in the acknowledgments to this book that it was the hardest thing that either of you, you and Maggie Haberman have done professionally, that you pushed yourselves to the physical brink over the past three years. You know, you're both veteran reporters. Why was this so hard and physically punishing?

Jonathan Swan

Well, I think it's hard to convey this to someone who's not a journalist, but for anyone who understands what it requires to render a scene inside a room when you weren't in the room, and then add the level of difficulty that these are some of the most guarded rooms in the world, the Oval Office and the White House situation Room. And then you add the second layer of difficulty, which is that These are in many cases sensitive conversations that are not, you know, information that the administration necessarily wants to be made public. And then add the third layer of difficulty, which is unreliability of narration and, you know, a president who is extremely paranoid about leaks. All of those factors make just doing one scene extremely difficult. One scene that we are certain is correct, that we feel comfortable putting under our names. And then to do that page after page after page. You know, most of this book is original reporting that has never appeared anywhere else. So for all those reasons, it was a pretty miserable experience and we were both pretty relieved to finish the thing.

Dave Davies

I do want to note that President Trump in a social media post, called the book garbage, fake news and boring. But I don't know that he or anyone has really seriously challenged factual assertions or quotes. Are there any disputes about anything that you've reported here?

Jonathan Swan

The only dispute is Trump's all purpose thing that you just read. In fact, we have highly detailed scenes in the Situation Room that now have been out there for weeks, actually months on Iran, but weeks on Epstein and whatever, where we have very detailed dialogue attributed to people in these meetings. Not one denial so far. Now, maybe Trump asked him to deny it. And in fact, the vice president, J.D. vance, told Megyn Kelly on a podcast that he thinks we have recordings which we're not commenting on, whether we do or we don't. But anyone who can listen to that would come to the conclusion that he's essentially validating accuracy if he's saying that.

Dave Davies

And before I let you go, I have to ask, you know, you've continued to report on the administration and it's been a rough time for Trump. You know, the war in Iran has not gone well. His poll numbers are bad, and there are some signs of restiveness among Republicans in Congress. The, you know, the midterms are looming. Do you think he's losing some of his grip on the party?

Jonathan Swan

I think he's got a stronger grip on the party than most commentators right now are willing to admit. He's certainly lost a lot of altitude when it comes to independent voters, and he's very unpopular generally. Most of his problems in the Senate are down to a small number of senators that he's either defeated and so they're hanging around until they leave or have retired after falling out with Trump. So, yes, he does have some issues in the Senate, but it's sort of less than meets the eye, I think. I think he has demonstrated that when it comes to the Republican Party, his grip is still pretty tight.

Dave Davies

Well, Jonathan Swan, congratulations on the book. Thank you for speaking with us.

Jonathan Swan

Thanks so much for having me.

Dave Davies

Jonathan Swan is a White House correspondent for the New York Times. He's the author, with fellow Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman, of the new book Regime Change Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. We recorded our interview yesterday. On tomorrow's show, we speak with Nephi Craig, founder of the Native American Culinary Association. He'll talk about growing up on an Apache reservation and how cooking Native food saved his life. After years of alcohol addiction, he left his job as a chef at a fine dining restaurant to run a cafe affiliated with the reservation Substance Abuse Treatment Center. I hope you can join us to keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews. Follow us on Instagram prfreshair. Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support from Adam Stanischewski. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bowen and Nico Gonzalez Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly C. V Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show for Terry Gross and Tonya Moseley. I'm Dave Davies.

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