Jonathan Swan on the real Trump White House

New York Times reporter Jonathan Swan has spent more than a decade covering Donald Trump, and he says nothing compares to this term. His new book, Regime Change, co-written with Maggie Haberman, argues Trump's second presidency is being run unlike any other in living memory: driven by gut instinct over briefings, staffed by loyalists chosen for devotion rather than experience, and designed to move faster than Congress, the courts or the media can keep up with. Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app https://radio.abc.net.au/help/apps. Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq

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• 0:45Speaker 03

  G'day, Matt Bevan here. This is If You're Listening. Despite the fact that I've been talking about Donald Trump pretty much constantly for a decade, I've only seen him in person with my own two eyes once in my life, at a rally in Detroit, Michigan in 2024. That's clearly not enough to get an understanding of who he is and why he does what he does. So for that, I rely on the archive and the reporting of others. In Trump's first term, his team leaked like a sieve. When his staff weren't meeting with him personally or sleeping, they were on the phone to reporters, gossiping about him. The second term has been different, much harder to see inside. New York Times reporter Jonathan Swan is one of the journalists

• 1:27Speaker 03

  who has been able to get inside the tent. He and his colleague Maggie Haberman have co-authored an extraordinary book about the first year of Trump's second term in office. The book is called Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, and it details everything from the goings-on in Trump's inner circle, to the way he runs the White House, to the frankly extraordinary things that he gets up to in his spare time. Jonathan has kindly agreed to come on the show to chat about it. Jonathan, thank you for joining us on If You're Listening.

• 2:01Speaker 04

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:05Speaker 03

  Jonathan, there's an interesting new character in Trump's entourage that plays a big part in your book. She wasn't part of his first-term team. It's executive assistant to the president Natalie Harp. You talk quite a lot about her and her role in kind of controlling the information that Donald Trump sees. Can you tell us who Natalie Harp is and what her role is in the current second Trump administration?

• 2:32Speaker 04

  So Natalie Harp is a former TV host. She used to be a host on a network called OAN, which, if your listeners remember, after the 2020 election, Fox News got into quite a lot of trouble for spreading some of the election conspiracies. OAN made Fox News look very, very cautious on matters of election theft and some of these wild claims they were making. So they were very hard right, and she was a host on that network. She was devoted to Trump, obsessed with Trump, and went to work for him after he left office. And we started hearing about her, Maggie and I, in 2021. We would hear some of the other aides

• 3:16Speaker 04

  around Trump thought that her role was unusual, even for Trump world, where there's a lot of sycophants around. She distinguished herself in that, in that area. And so they called her the human printer. She had a portable, battery-powered printer. She would carry it round, and she would print out stories that would make him feel good. This was at a time when he was really at his lowest point. It was, you know, people didn't really want to come and see him. He was still sort of the king at Mar-a-Lago, but most people were keeping their distance in the Republican Party. And she would follow him around. She would be on the golf course with him. She would have the printer. She would just be

• 3:58Speaker 04

  all around there, pepping him up. And then a year later, so 2022, was it 22 or 23? It was 2023. We obtained some letters that she'd written to Trump, which made clear again that this was a very unusual situation. They were, I mean, to call them devoted is being gentle. It was, it contained phrases like, "You are all that matters to me. I wish we could just not have to talk about work all day" and, you know, what have you.

• 4:27Speaker 03

  Like, they're love letters. They're, they're, I mean...

• 4:29Speaker 04

  Sort of, but sort of not...

• 4:30Speaker 03

  Not in a romantic sort of a way necessarily, but it...

• 4:34Speaker 04

  And by the way, we don't have any evidence that anything happened there, and we actually don't insinuate that at all. It's just, anyway, just devotional, like completely worshipful, actually. And the Secret Service thought it was pretty odd. I mean, they were aware, that they became aware of these letters, but Trump liked it, basically. I mean, a bunch of people around Trump thought that she was a bad influence. He evidently did not. And she would just do whatever he wanted very, very quickly. So, "I need this, I need that. Get this done, get that done." But where she becomes much more interesting and much more important is people on the outside who wanted to get to Trump, wanted to get

• 5:19Speaker 04

  information to him, a message to him, maybe something in written form. They started to use Natalie Harp as a conduit, and they realised that she would just go straight to him, no filter. And if you wanted to get around any kind of a vetting process, or the gatekeeper, Susie Wiles, or any of the political team, you could just go through Natalie. So she started to become this very important source of information for Trump. And he gave her the ability to post on his Truth Social. So she became pretty quickly, I don't think it's an overstatement to say, one of the most powerful people in the world. I mean, she is feeding the President of the United States. He's, you know, she is one of his

• 6:01Speaker 04

  primary sources of information, and she is also one of his main disseminators of information. So she moves, she goes into the West Wing, and, you know, you'll see her in the photos, basically every meeting in the Oval Office, she's off on the wall with her laptop open, ready to do Google whatever he wants, fetch whatever he wants, just constantly there.

• 6:24Speaker 03

  Or post whatever, whatever he wants, yeah. It's funny to think of, you know, having read many of Trump's posts on Truth Social, it's kind of funny to think of a 30-year-old woman typing them, going, "Oh no, this bit, all caps. This bit, you know, four exclamation marks." And it's interesting, there was a video that was released of Trump, sort of a documentary video, which showed him dictating his tweets. And he's so calm about it, but he's like, "All right, and the next bit, all caps. Angry, you know, sound very serious in that bit." And she's just typing it all out. But yeah, it's an extraordinary window into that. Did you get a chance to speak to her, to get what her perspective is on her role and the incredible influence that she has?

• 7:09Speaker 04

  Unless someone's, like, on the record in the book, we don't say whether we talk to them or not.

• 7:14Speaker 03

  Sure. Sorry. Yeah, yeah, fair enough. I understand. One of the people who does get to speak to Donald Trump is Benjamin Netanyahu. You describe an incredible scene from February this year where Netanyahu comes into the Situation Room of the White House, which is an unusual thing for a foreign leader to do, to speak to Donald Trump about Iran. This was in sort of early to mid-February of this year. Can you take us into that room and tell us what happened?

• 7:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, so this is one of the, you know, when the history is written about this period and how we got into this war with Iran, you know, I think this is going to be one of the seminal meetings. February 11th, Benjamin Netanyahu arrives at the White House. And what is not known at the time, but we reported it in the book and also in the New York Times, is that he didn't just do his normal ceremonial meeting with Trump in the Oval Office or what have you. He actually went downstairs to the White House Situation Room, which for any of your listeners who are unaware, it's essentially the National Security Command Centre of the US government. It's where presidents plan wars. It's where they monitor

• 8:26Speaker 04

  high-stakes military operations. You know, there's that famous photo of President Obama and Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton watching, you know, on the edge of their seats during the raid that ended with the killing of Osama bin Laden. That was in the Situation Room complex. You know, it's actually not just one room, it's a, it's a complex of rooms. So anyway, he goes down to the Situation Room. And we could, I mean, Maggie and I, when we first heard about this, we didn't think it was true. I mean, we were pretty sceptical.

• 8:54Speaker 03

  Oh, right.

• 8:55Speaker 04

  Well, I've never heard of a head of state going down to the Situation Room and pitching a United States president on a war. I've never heard of that happening. I'm pretty well-read in American history. I'm not aware of that ever happening. And I'm still not aware of that ever happening. I've talked to quite a few people by this point, you know, after, a few months after we published the story. But nonetheless, that is what happened. He went down, and Trump usually sits at the head of the table, but he moved. And so he's sitting opposite Netanyahu. And it was extraordinary. He essentially commandeered the room. He had, you know, on the, on the wall behind him, the big screen, you know, they've got screens on the wall. And he has on the video screen, the head of the Mossad,

• 9:36Speaker 04

  the head of the Israeli spy service, and top Israeli generals. And he basically gives Trump, it's a pitch. That's what it is. It's a pitch on how this regime change war will play out. And of course, it's a very rosy, optimistic, from Netanyahu's point of view, scenario where, you know, the Kurds get involved, they come across, they help overthrow the regime. He had a video montage that he played for Trump with potential replacement leaders once they take out the Ayatollah, included people like Reza Pahlavi, who's the son of the last Shah, Ahmadinejad, you know, the former leader of Iran. Anyway, all of this happens, and Trump is very impressed by this presentation. I'm sure your listeners have

• 10:20Speaker 04

  seen plenty of footage of Netanyahu, but in small settings, he's incredibly powerful as a speaker.

• 10:27Speaker 03

  He's an incredibly good speaker. Whatever you think about him, he's an incredibly good speaker. And I've seen him, you know, at the, at the UN, he's very compelling. Whenever he's doing, you know, you know, these are the Iran nuclear files presentations, he's very good at this.

• 10:41Speaker 04

  And he speaks with complete confidence. There's no room for doubt or second guessing, utter conviction. Everything he says is just, you know, carved in stone. So Trump says, you know, that he absorbs all of this, and he says at the end of it, he says, "Oh, sounds good." And there were some people in the room who took that as meaning, "Well, this is, looks like he's quite likely to actually join Israel in this very consequential decision."

• 11:12Speaker 04

  But what happened next is actually kind of more interesting in some ways. So overnight, the CIA says, okay, we need to analyze this presentation that Netanyahu's given Trump. We need to actually test these scenarios that he's presented and see how viable they are. And so overnight they do that. And the next day, there's another meeting in the Situation Room. And this is before Trump comes in, it's sort of a pre-meeting. And these two officials brief Trump's senior team on what they've found. And the gist of it is, they say, look, some of what he says is plausible, you know, degrading their ballistic missile capacity and what have you,

• 11:54Speaker 04

  potentially taking out the leadership assassinations and what have you. But the regime change scenarios are divorced from reality, completely divorced from reality. We don't think they're viable. We don't think that the Kurds are going to pull this off. We don't think that these other leaders, just none of this really makes sense to us. And so what happens next is Trump comes down and the CIA Director John Ratcliffe tells Trump that the assessment of the agency of Netanyahu's regime change scenarios is that they're farcical, direct quote, farcical. And then Rubio, Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, says, in other words, it's bullshit. So Trump hears that from his top

• 12:38Speaker 04

  two, you know, very senior national security officials. And his response is really interesting because people often portray Trump in a cartoonish way, but actually, this decision, what he says next is sort of reveals that this was much more Trump's decision than Bibi slipped him a hypnotic.

• 12:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, tricked him. Yeah, yeah.

• 12:57Speaker 04

  Tricked him into it. Trump listens to it and he says, you know what, maybe it is, maybe it isn't. That'll be up to them, regime change. He goes, but he thought it was worth going ahead with anyway, even if the regime change didn't work. He thought it was worth, you know, taking out the leaders, trying to take out their ballistic missile capacity. But at a deep gut level, based on all of our reporting, Trump really did believe that the regime was going to fall and that there would be regime change, even though the intelligence assessments, everything he was hearing from his actual experts in the government, he felt that he had a better gut instinct for this. So he rolled the dice, an extraordinary gamble that has not turned out to how he imagined,

• 13:42Speaker 04

  to say the least.

• 13:43Speaker 03

  The thing is that, you know, the first thing that you, any expert at the time would have said is if you try this, they will close the Strait of Hormuz. They have said that they will close the Strait of Hormuz. They've promised this for years. They have all this infrastructure and equipment set up for that specific purpose. It wouldn't be very hard for them to make the Strait of Hormuz dangerous enough that insurance companies wouldn't insure the shipping that needs to go through there. So it's not actually that hard for them to do it. I mean, did that information get to Donald Trump and he ignored it? Or did they not tell him that stuff? Or what do we think happened?

• 14:21Speaker 04

  Couple of things. One is, yes, there was a conversation or several about the prospect of the Strait of Hormuz being closed. Yes, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Kane, warned Trump about the risks of American munitions stockpiles being depleted, which, my lord, shocking how bad the stockpiles are right now, particularly with air defence.

• 14:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:42Speaker 04

  Munitions.

• 14:43Speaker 03

  The interceptors, they're almost out, you know, it's terrifying.

• 14:47Speaker 04

  There's two things. One is, three, I would say. One is, Trump, again, comes back to what I said before, Trump felt at a gut level that the war would be over so quickly, the regime would collapse so quickly, that none of these things would play out. Yes, maybe they're possible theoretically, but he had concluded, I think particularly from the 12-day war the year before, where Iran responded very tepidly. I think Trump had concluded that this regime was a paper tiger and that they were going to fall. So that's number one. If they fall very quickly, none of this stuff happens. Number two, the circle was so small that he wasn't hearing from a couple

• 15:29Speaker 04

  of people who could have made that case, the economic and energy case, much more forcefully. So in order to limit leaks, they kept this to a circle of, you know, I could just name them, you know, six people really, six, seven people. The two people who would have to manage the energy crisis that would result from the Strait of Hormuz, Treasury Secretary Scott Besant, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, they weren't in the room. They weren't in any of these meetings in the lead up to the war. So yes, the topic came up, yes, people talked about it, but you might have had a much sharper case made if you had Besant and Wright in the room specifically

• 16:10Speaker 04

  with respect to energy. And the third thing is, when you look at the core group that he went to war with, that he had these meetings in the lead up to war, none of them, even though basically all of them were skeptical, really none of them thought this was a great idea. Maybe Pete Hegseth at the most, but really none of the other core team thought this was a great idea. The only one who actually made a vocal case in front of the others to Trump, a case against the war, was JD Vance, the Vice President. He did that on a couple of occasions, quite forcefully, and actually cost him with Trump. It really irritated Trump. He complained about it afterwards and what have you. Most of the others, in fact, all the others, kept their views largely to themselves, unless

• 16:53Speaker 04

  they had one-on-ones with Trump that I'm unaware of, where they, you know, made their case. They weren't doing it in the big room meetings. So he wasn't really hearing forceful pushback. He was hearing, you know, Dan Kane saying, well, on the one hand, we could execute, but on the other hand, we might have these issues. And, you know, Trump doesn't deal that well with nuance. He hears what he wants to hear. Yes, we can do it, sir, what you want. The second part washes away a little bit. So, you know, if he had his first-term team, there would have been, Mark Milley would have said, sir, this is crazy. This is absolutely crazy. You're gonna, you know, whatever. It would have been very dramatic, very forceful. And that those characters don't exist anymore

• 17:38Speaker 04

  around Trump.

• 17:39Speaker 03

  Yes, I mean, not only would they have pushed back, but then they would have left the room and just gone, actually, we're not doing it. They were constantly just sort of slow-walking various orders from him in the first term. But as you describe, it absolutely isn't happening now. I've been reading your book while writing our recent episodes on how Trump and his family's business interests are intersecting in office. He's made this spectacular amount of money from cryptocurrency ventures. And you write about how the income, reported income from his cryptocurrency ventures seems to make him happy. He likes to hear how much money he's made. But I haven't seen all that much in your reporting in your book that indicates that his business interests are necessarily

• 18:23Speaker 03

  specifically influencing his decision-making, as much as people seem to think that it is. You know, he's obviously making these stock trades and sort of people accusing him of doing insider trading. And, you know, oh, you signed this deal with Nvidia and then you bought a bunch of Nvidia stocks. What's the deal with that? But it kind of just seems to be an example to me of just someone who's bullish about the market dumping his money into big companies. What's your read on whether he is actually taking actions to maximize the amount of money he's making with his office? Or is it just sort of like, this is sort of happening to him rather than because of him?

• 19:08Speaker 04

  Well, I set the stock trades aside, right? Because, you know, who knows?

• 19:12Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 19:13Speaker 04

  We don't have any evidence that he's directing these or interacting, you know, he says that it's

• 19:19Speaker 03

  And there's so many who would know.

• 19:20Speaker 04

  It would, I mean, it'd be a great thing to report out, you know, trust me, there's plenty of reporting firepower aimed at that question. But there's been no evidence that he's been making decisions and directing these stock trades. So let's just set all that aside.

• 19:35Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 19:35Speaker 04

  So take the crypto, the Emirati investment in the Trump-Witkoff crypto deal. Now, that also coincided with Trump changing US policy to sell chips to the UAE, which are very valuable, and that previous administration, the Biden administration, did not want to do because of ties between the UAE and China. So you don't, I mean, we don't have, you know, no one has a scene of Trump in a room with smoke all around him saying, so you put your money into World Liberty and I'll give you this. Like, that doesn't exist.

• 20:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 20:13Speaker 04

  But guess what? They kept it a secret that the Emiratis were the silent partner.

• 20:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:17Speaker 04

  And had already put hundreds of millions of dollars into the pockets of the Trumps and millions of dollars into the pockets of the Whitcoffs and spent, you know, two billion dollars for a transaction with the Trump stable, the Trump Whitcoff stable coin, which immediately made it, you know, one of the most lucrative stable coins in the world. So he's conducting major pieces of foreign policy with his business partner.

• 20:39Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 20:39Speaker 04

  That's just never happened before on that scale. It's astonishing. It's just never happened before. That's before you even get to, you know, the suns being on boards of companies that suddenly get massive Pentagon contracts or involved in mining deals and what have you. I mean, it is just, you, you, you could spend every waking minute of your life trying to cover this stuff and you'd only scratch the surface. I mean, I don't think we, I think we only know five percent of what's going on there.

• 21:07Speaker 03

  It's, it's a, it's a juicy five percent though. Uh, you, you, uh, your book is called Regime Change because you and, and your co-author Maggie Haberman's observation is that this is such a radically different way of running a presidency than any other presidency in living memory, particularly Trump's second term. Can you talk about what led you to that observation? Because I also want to ask you if you think that there's any chance of it reverting to the norm at any point?

• 21:35Speaker 04

  Well, so the subtitle of the book is Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. And the concept of an imperial presidency is not new. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote a book, I think it was 1973, called The Imperial Presidency. And that was about the consolidation of power in the presidency with Richard Nixon as the apex of that and largely with respect to foreign policy. So, you know, the constitution stipulates that Congress is the branch of government that has the power to declare war. But actually, what had, what had been happening is American presidents were going to war essentially without Congress. I mean, the Korean War, Vietnam War were essentially undeclared wars prosecuted by the President

• 22:18Speaker 04

  of the United States. And then you had Nixon with all these other abuses of power. So the imperial presidency becomes popularized as a term. And then you have a whole bunch of, uh, reaction against that. So the, the post Watergate years were full of, you know, good government campaigning and efforts to try to reassert Congress's power in different ways and enforce ethics, uh, codes. The, the norm of, uh, independence of a Justice Department from the president, uh, was a post Watergate, uh, phenomenon. So the idea that we don't necessarily want the President of the United States saying, you know, calling up his Attorney General, saying, hey, guess what? I want you to prosecute Matt Bevan. He's a scumbag.

• 23:03Speaker 04

  I want you to get, you know, stick the SDNY onto Matt Bevan. So that was a post Watergate thing. And then you actually get this sort of recession of the presidency almost. So, so by the late nineties, you were starting to have people talk about the end of the imperial presidency, you know? Bill Clinton was getting impeached. Congress was very assertive and, and really steered him toward welfare reform and all the rest of it. And then with Bush coming in, you have a reassertion through the post nine 11 buildup of the surveillance state and his, how to even describe the levels of abuses that you saw torture and, and what have you. Everyone's very familiar with it. But so you basically have the building up

• 23:45Speaker 04

  of executive power. And of course Obama was, you know, known for the pen and the phone and using power much more unilaterally. But what we're seeing in Trump's second term is of a different order. Yes, it's part of a continuum. It doesn't come from nowhere. But he is expressing power and using power in ways that we've never seen in our lifetime from an American president. And in some respects, for example, his retribution agenda, turning the Justice Department essentially into a revenge operation to try to imprison his enemies. We've never seen this in American history. Never. And that's, you know, separate and apart from starting a trade war with the whole world without talking to Congress,

• 24:29Speaker 04

  deciding himself that fishing boats carrying cocaine are enemy combatants in a war. And so instead of intercepting them with the Coast Guard and arresting them, he just wants to kill them. So he just kills them. Um, I remember in the first term of Trump, talking to Trump about Xi Jinping and, and Kim Jong-un. And he used to say, you know, they don't have a drug problem in China or they don't have a drug problem in North Korea. Do you know why? Because they just kill them. They just kill the drug dealers. He wanted to do that himself and he's now doing a version, or he has been doing a version of that in the Caribbean.

• 25:05Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 25:05Speaker 04

  So again, you're just seeing this unilateral assertion of power. He took America into war in Iran without any type of consultation. In fact, Congress has been pushing back, but he doesn't care. When George W. Bush took America to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, there was a vote in Congress.

• 25:23Speaker 03

  Months of debate, yeah.

• 25:24Speaker 04

  Of course. So again, we could talk about this for two hours. I think it's, it's pretty indisputable that Trump is using power in, in a way that isn't just the normal, we've shifted from a Democratic president to a Republican president. And we felt that in the book, we had to try to underline that and highlight it in a way that actually cut through to people. And so for us, it was the concept that actually we're covering a form of regime change in this country, the United States, that we're working in, that we live in.

• 25:56Speaker 03

  Do, do you think, I mean, obviously all of these tools were available to every other president. If they pushed on that wall, then maybe it would give way and they would be able to do that thing or whatever it was. Trump is sort of discovering, you know, new boundaries of what the president can do. And of course, the, the Supreme Court decision that he has basically got immunity from prosecution for crimes for things that he does in office is helping him a lot. But do you think that subsequent presidents, you know, Donald, Donald Trump is not going to be around forever? Do you think subsequent presidents are just going to continue to do this? Enrich themselves, run massive business operations while they're in office, declare war without bothering to talk to the Congress about it? Uh, and, and

• 26:39Speaker 03

  all the other things that you describe in this book. Is there anything stopping them doing that at all? Or is this just the reality of a US president from now on?

• 26:47Speaker 04

  Well, some aspects of it, there's a, there's a long line, you know, Obama went into Libya without Congress and had

• 26:54Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 26:54Speaker 04

  pretty spurious legal justification for it. And of course, I started by talking about the Korean War, the Vietnam War, whatever. So in terms of foreign policy, there's a long history of American presidents, you know, acting unilaterally. So I, I fully expect that will continue unless Congress, the, the really, the, the much more important question is at some point, will Congress decide to wake from its slumber and reassert itself and become a co-equal branch again? And until they do that, until Congress does that, the presidents are going to have a very, very free hand. And the question about whether they engage in this particular expression of power or abuse of power is largely going to be determined by their character and who they are. I mean, Trump told my colleagues,

• 27:37Speaker 04

  my colleagues at the New York Times said to Trump, is there anything stopping you? What is the limit on your power? And he said, my own morality. He said that, that's what he said. And so, you know, the self-enrichment thing, again, there's nothing stopping them. There's nothing stopping them. I mean, as long as Congress isn't going to impeach and convict, uh, there's no, there's no plausible way that the president is going to face any type of accountability, uh, for this. I don't think so. I can't imagine what the mechanism would be. So it just depends on who you elect. And, and I think that a lot of these powers are going to be very, very tempting, particularly if you've made all sorts of promises to the electorate, wild promises. Maybe, you know, you're a progressive and you're saying, we

• 28:22Speaker 04

  need to change everything and do blah, blah, blah. And, you know, then you get into office and you realize, oh, there's this annoying thing called Congress and legislation and what have you. But actually, there's a whole lot that Trump has shown you can do without Congress. And so I feel, I fully do expect that parts of this will be very hard to pull back into any kind of constitutional balance.

• 28:43Speaker 03

  Well, speaking of people who have been, uh, within 25 feet of the Oval Office, you have a number of times. One of the most extraordinary things in your book, uh, that comes from your interactions with Trump is how not busy he seems. Can you tell us a bit about the stuff that he's been doing to pass the time in between, uh, you know, having, you know, declaring wars and, and that kind of thing?

• 29:09Speaker 04

  So one thing we wanted to do in the book is Maggie and I feel pretty strongly that we're covering one of the most, if not the most consequential periods of American history, you know, right up there with some of the great disruptions in America's past.

• 29:25Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 29:26Speaker 04

  And it's a real turning point in this country. And Trump is a sui generis figure, of course. And so when you, if you step back and think about, well, that's the project we're covering, this figure that we might be talking about centuries from now, you want to give people a sense of intimacy, a sense of, well, what is life actually like in the court of Trump, you know? And what's life like inside the residence of the White House? And so this is some of the, I think, most kind of revealing aspects of the book. But you see a lot of it. I mean, he, he's really, in the first term, he didn't change the White House so much architecturally or in terms of his interior design. Now he's

• 30:04Speaker 04

  just full Louis XIV. He's, he, he's, there's gold everywhere. He spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about what's the next thing he wants to gild, what objects he wants to get from which museums to be put into this place or that place. We have in the book, there was some tension early on between him and Melania over the decorations in the White House residence. She, there were certain objects that she had in a certain place and he was taking them and putting them in his bedroom. And so, I mean, I can't tell you, I mean, you talk to aides, it's truly an inordinate amount of his time is spent redecoration, renovation, the ballroom, but also building

• 30:49Speaker 04

  monuments and naming things after himself. It's become an obsession. And we have a scene in the book, actually, in the Oval Office last October, where he's talking to a couple of visitors about, he wants to build essentially a replica of the Arc de Triomphe in Washington, which they call internally the Arc de Trump.

• 31:10Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 31:11Speaker 04

  You know, he's got different models of it. There's a huge one, a middle one, a small one, you know, he wants it to be bigger than the Lincoln Memorial.

• 31:18Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 31:19Speaker 04

  And anyway, he's in the room with some of his aides and he says, let's call Emmanuel, let's call Emmanuel, ask, because he had some questions he wanted to know about the Arc de Triomphe, which presumably he could have just Googled. But anyway, he gets Emmanuel Macron.

• 31:32Speaker 03

  Natalie could print him off some files, for sure.

• 31:35Speaker 04

  But instead, he gets Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, on the speakerphone. And he starts asking Emmanuel, you know, does your arch have a viewing platform? Do people jump off it? You know, all this, how big is the arch? You know, all these sort of questions about the arch. So I just, there's no way that I can overstate how much time is spent on these matters.

• 31:58Speaker 03

  What was he doing when you went in there with Maggie to speak to him? He had not maps of Iran.

• 32:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:05Speaker 03

  Out, displayed out on the table.

• 32:06Speaker 04

  No, no.

• 32:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, go on.

• 32:08Speaker 04

  Well, so we, no, I mean, we went and saw him in the middle of the war. I mean, early stages of the war, very intense period of the war, about two weeks and a bit into the war with Iran. And the thing, the first thing he wanted us to see, he was holding up photographs of maple trees. And he's saying, you know, I'm buying these maple trees for the White House. Turns out I'm good at buying trees. And then underneath it were photographs of the ballroom and the columns. He wanted us to know the columns are, I think, bigger than the Supreme Court's columns, or more of them, or what have you. And one side was inspired by Athens and the other side by Rome. This occupied probably first 15 minutes of our time with him, before we got to anything to do with the Iran war.

• 32:54Speaker 03

  One of the great things that I think you do, that I think a lot of other reporters don't do when talking to Trump, both for your book and in interviews that I've seen you do with him, is you kind of follow his rhythm. And you go, oh, you want to show me a piece of paper that apparently proves something that you think? Okay, well, give you the piece of paper, I'll look at it. And then you go, okay, well, now I'd like to, you know, come back to you on these things. This thing can't be true, that thing can't be true. Do you have any other proof of that? And I think it's just the only way that people can get actual information out of him is by following him down his little rabbit holes. Because, you know, you see in these interviews, people trying to pull him back to policy

• 33:37Speaker 03

  discussion and, and, you know, go, no, I don't want to talk about the ballroom. I want to talk about what's happening in Minneapolis right now, or whatever it is. Why is it that you think that it's important to follow him rather than pull him back to where you think that he should be in your conversations with him?

• 33:54Speaker 04

  Well, I don't know that it's such a black and white thing. I think it's situational. When I'm with Trump, I always try to be so well prepared that I can just listen. And if he says something that I think is interesting, or that opens up an area that is interesting, I don't just go back to my script and say, next question. Follow him and be prepared to, you know, you know this as an interviewer, you're constantly making judgments about, I mean, I don't know if you do this, I bet you do, I certainly did it when I did it. You have a clock running in your head, right? And you're like, well, this question's eating up 10 minutes or five minutes or whatever. And so you're constantly making judgment

• 34:32Speaker 04

  calls about how much you're going to let him go off piece. And the interview you referenced, actually, when he brought out those sheets, the topic couldn't have been more important. I mean, it was about COVID and death rates.

• 34:46Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, of course.

• 34:47Speaker 04

  I'm not sure, you know, that I would indulge 20 minutes on the ballroom or what have you. So, you know, you just make judgments, I think.

• 34:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:56Speaker 04

  But I think the key thing is being open and going into the interview so well prepared that you're not looking at your notes. You're just present and you're listening and you're following where you need to follow and pushing where you need to push.

• 35:11Speaker 03

  I think that was the interview that you did with him that day, with, you know, that spawned all those memes of your face. Looking at that piece of paper was, I think, something that, you know, people should be taught in journalism school. It was an excellent, excellent interview, Jonathan. And this book is an excellent, excellent book. And I really appreciate you giving us some of your time to talk about it today.

• 35:32Speaker 04

  Appreciate you having me. Thanks so much.

• 35:41Speaker 03

  Coming up on Thursday, there's been a noticeable increase in assassination attempts against Donald Trump from all sorts of directions. Lone gunmen, domestic terrorists, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. The thing is, this increased intensity of threats against the president is putting pressure on the US Secret Service, an agency that is in the midst of a years-long crisis. We'll look into that crisis next, on If You're Listening. I'll see you on Thursday.