A gold-colored object engraved with the word “President” rests on the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office of the White House on November 10, 2025.
Jacqueline Martin/AP
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Jacqueline Martin/AP
the new York Times Journalist Jonathan Swan has spent the past 11 years covering President Trump through three political campaigns, his first and now second terms and the ongoing war with Iran. Swann says that other than the COVID-19 pandemic, he can’t remember a time when Trump “looked as stuck up as he does right now.”
“It’s quite clear that they realize that this war (with Iran) has not turned out well, not the way that Netanyahu had pitched them or Trump himself thought (it) would,” Swann says. “Trump is a guy who is naturally arrogant, but I think we’ve seen a very extreme version of that with this war.”
Swann and her co-author Maggie Haberman spoke to more than 1,000 sources for their new book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. The book paints a picture of an unbridled president profoundly changing the American government and its international relations.
Swann says the president, who sat down to be interviewed for the book, was particularly focused on becoming a “great man in history” during his second term. During an interview, Trump showed Swann and Haberman a document that compared him to notorious historical figures such as Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan.
Swann says, “(The list) has nothing to do with ethics, it’s all just about pure power projection. And Trump was choosing to be in their company.” “Maggie and I talked about it afterward, and it really occurred to us that when you look at it through that lens, his second term makes a lot more sense.”
Swann says the president’s commitment to power is reflected in his decisions to go to war in Iran and implement regime change in Venezuela. But he also sees it manifested in the decor of Trump’s White House, which leans on what Swann calls the president’s “interior Louis XIV” style.
“He’s gilded almost every corner of the Oval Office,” says Sway. “The Oval Office at the White House has a history of modesty when it comes to design and decor, reflecting the fact that America is a republic, not a monarchy. That history has no use for Trump.”
one in Post on Truth SocialTrump mentioned regime change As “mostly fabricated, fake news, largely imaginary, as (Haberman) has written about me for many years.”
Interview highlights
How Trump’s second term is different from his first term
This word cannot be identified from the first word. And I still think a lot of people look at (this) administration and the government through the prism of the first term. It couldn’t be more different. One of the ways it’s different is the team around him.
I remember covering Trump in Term One, and you’d have a lot of conversations with senior officials, including senior national security officials, and the overwhelming impression you would get from talking to these people was that, A, they thought they were working for someone who was dangerous. And they saw their role as protecting the country and the world from the very man they ostensibly worked for. These types of people no longer exist in this administration. …
At the senior level, it’s really a group of people who believe in him, are loyal to him, in some cases have campaigned with him. Many of them were radicalized on the campaign through efforts to investigate and prosecute Donald Trump. Many of them received a few summons themselves and saw the stakes of the 2024 elections not about policy, but about staying out of jail.
So this is the mentality of Trump and his inner circle. And it has created a situation where there is very little friction between Donald Trump’s idea, which might have been transformed from his internal monologue straight out of his mouth without any filter, to his effort to make it actual American policy and implementation.
On Trump’s meeting style
Meetings have no beginning, middle, or end. There are almost no illustrations. And what often happens is essentially a meeting that goes on throughout the afternoon with different people joining and leaving. And whether Trump is engaging or not, people who have no business being at the meeting sometimes attend, whether it’s a professional wrestler, or a crypto investor, or some foreigner from a golf monarchy, or some CEO. …
the new York Times Journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan are the authors. Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.
Doug Mills/The New York Times
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Doug Mills/The New York Times
Conversations are non-linear. Trump will become obsessed with something that has nothing to do with the topic and could derail the meeting. There’s a scene in our book where he’s talking, a very small meeting, highly classified, about a defense program, and this guy comes in, just walks into the Oval, salt of the earth, kind of a rustic-looking guy, and he’s taking stone samples for the Rose Garden… and the two go over and start talking, looking out the window, talking about paving and stone and this and that, talking on the phone to another contractor. And before the time was up, the meeting was over, they didn’t actually solve the issue they were setting out to solve.
Higher levels of secrecy in Trump’s second term
When there are issues that Trump really cares about, or that his team wants to keep secret, they can be incredibly secretive, causing huge frustrations in the government. And when it came to the most important issues, like planning to go to war with Iran, we found that very senior people in the government were, A, completely cut out of the loop and, B, had no idea about what was being discussed in the Oval Office.
Trump’s focus on decorating the White House
I traveled the Middle East with President Trump, palace by palace. And it was really enlightening to see him with these Middle Eastern rulers in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE. He was in a state of ecstasy, moving from one palace to another, admiring the marble, seeing the rarest displays of state wealth on earth. And that’s basically what he’s trying to create in the White House. …He’s building this grand ballroom. It seemed as if he was competing with Melania over who had the better bedroom. Their bedrooms are separate and he was moving items he had kept in the middle hall of the residence and placing them in his bedroom.
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On the challenge of Trump’s interview
An interview with Trump requires an enormous amount of preparation if you want to hope for any level of success. He’s a really difficult interview…he has a tremendous presence and you’re faced with a kind of tidal wave of words. Many words and sentences are detached from reality or completely false. And you have to make decisions in real time about what you let go. You can’t fact-check everything. You just can’t. You can choose your moments.
I see my role in every interview as a representative of the people sitting in that chair. You are the one who is fortunate enough to be sitting in that chair interviewing the President of the United States. What would regular people want to know and what would they want me to do in that situation? And I think when you’re interviewing the President of the United States, you want to find a balance between letting him explain himself and not cutting in every two seconds, but finding moments that are really important to puncture the bubble. Trump creates a bubble of unreality. This is his way of working. …Tucker Carlson actually described it publicly as being under a spell and I certainly wouldn’t ascribe a supernatural dimension to it, but I know what he’s getting at.
Thea Chaloner and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper, and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the Web.
