This New Book ‘Almost Killed Both of Us’

After writing a sweeping and very newsy biography of Donald Trump four years ago, Maggie Haberman didn’t plan to take on another book project — never mind one on the man who has dominated political life (and her own) for the past decade. But after talking with Jonathan Swan, a fellow New York Times reporter deeply sourced in Trumpworld, Haberman and her colleague signed a book deal in 2023. The intention, says Swan, was to capture the “last act of Trump,” and the pair produced (and have since tossed out) reams of reporting on the 2024 election. “It still pains me,” says Swan, but reporting for the book had to “illuminate what we’re living through right now.” And that’s a consequential story: how Trump, with nearly unchecked power and hell-bent on retribution, is trying to remake the presidency and cement his legacy.

In Regime Change, Haberman and Swan meticulously chronicle the first 14 months of Trump’s precedent-shattering second term, from the DOGE-driven gutting of the federal government to the administration’s pressure campaign against cultural institutions, universities, law firms, and the media. The authors reveal conversations in the Oval Office and, shockingly, the Situation Room, where top officials discussed going to war with Iran and containing the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. In the process, they conducted more than 1,000 interviews with a multitude of sources — how many precisely, they won’t say. One source is clear: Donald Trump. In a vivid scene, the president shows the authors a document written by a golf caddy and amateur historian asserting that he is more powerful than any historical figure, from Genghis Khan to Attila the Hun, Mao to Hitler. “He wants to be the Napoleon of this period,” says Swan, “the figure that we see as the capital-G Great man.”

Documenting private meetings and high-level conversations with such specificity, says Swan, is “a very hard thing to do page after page after page.” The “painstaking” reporting process, says Haberman, took a toll. “This book really almost killed both of us physically and mentally,” she says, “and it was well worth it.”

Given the years of extensive reporting, what made the cut and why?

Swan: We don’t do wispy, like, “Trump has been thinking this amorphous thing.” No, no, no. In this room, at this day, at this time, with these people around the table, this is what was said. And that’s a very hard thing to do page after page after page after page after page. That was the discipline of this book, to actually try to penetrate these rooms, which are very well guarded this time.

It’s a government run by half a dozen people, and the most senior people in the U.S. government across agencies have no earthly idea what’s actually happening. There’s this bullshit kind of line: “We’re the most transparent administration ever.” That’s complete nonsense. They’re the best at performing transparency. They’re actually incredibly good at keeping secrets. And you saw that recently in the Iran negotiations. The memorandum of understanding, to end the war. Basically no one had seen that document until it was published. I mean, no one — forget the public — I mean, senior people at the State Department, Pentagon, U.S. intelligence community. They had no idea —

Haberman: — and White House.

Swan: It was a tiny circle. And so actually, for stuff that they really care about, they’re very good at keeping secrets. And that was the challenge of this book. Totally different from term one.

Haberman: Including, by the way, the number of days that I remember us saying to each other, “No one is calling me back.” This was just repeatedly going at the same targets over and over and over again. We were very painstaking.

I think there is a misconception with books that are written in real time, as real-time histories, that everyone is sitting around sort of, Okay, well, give me this and then I’m going to store it in a jar for about a year and a half. That’s not the case.

In terms of how we dealt with things, one example is the excerpt about how Trump went to war. That was published April 7. So it was like six weeks after this war had started, and we killed ourselves over a very small period of time trying to figure out what had happened. It was for the book. We put it in the New York Times because we thought it was really significant and needed to be there as soon as possible.

Without betraying any sources, can you talk a bit about the challenge of reporting on scenes inside the Situation Room — one of the most guarded places in the world — about what was happening inside around Benjamin Netanyahu making a case for war, and then also this moment where aides are trying to handle the Epstein fallout.

Swan: I don’t know how much I really want to say here. But let’s just say it’s hard. And we didn’t give vague accounts. We gave very detailed accounts. Very specific and detailed accounts, with extensive dialogue. And check our work. Is anyone denying what they said in the Situation Room? Has there been a single denial of any of that dialogue? I haven’t heard it. They might now, if Trump gets angry, maybe they will retroactively. But we published those stories now, it’s been weeks, and I haven’t heard a single participant deny the dialogue. It’s not just the intense effort during this period, it’s also the product of years and years of sourcing. I’ve been covering Trump now for 11 consecutive years. Maggie’s been covering him for even longer. It’s only because of that that we can do something like this.

There was a report in Axios that White House officials believed that audio from the Situation Room may have leaked out. Can you say anything about that?

Swan: No comment on that. Obviously, Vance said on the record to Megyn Kelly that that’s what he believes, and we’re just not going to talk about it.

Haberman: We just can’t.

Your reporting on Iran was just within the last couple months. You also had an interview with Trump on March 16. Was most of the book reported when you brought it to him?

Haberman: We had been trying to get an interview with him for fact-checking. We had a very specific, very long list of questions that we wanted to give him a chance to respond to. Look, the whole thing where he can be reached on his cell phone all the time, there’s been actually very good reporting that has come from that in some cases. But it also lets him sort of determine the control of the conversation. So we wanted to be able to talk to him directly in person, and it took a long time to get agreement to do that from him. And so when we went to him, we had a bunch of questions, not all of which we were able to get to, obviously, in an hour, given the size of the book.

Three days before your interview, he goes on a tirade against you, which I guess you’re used to but to me is still shocking. Did you already have the interview set up?

Haberman: It was a hip check. I think somebody had — we don’t know this for certain, but this is what was told to us, was that somebody that we had fact-checked with had gotten him spun up about us coming in.

But it seems he engaged with the questions and he went back and forth, and he maybe pushed back on some things, but it was a pretty civil exchange.

Swan: That’s not unusual. It’s very common for Donald Trump. He threatened to sue us, really went after Maggie in very vicious terms. And then three days later, you sit down with him, and it’s like it never happened. That was exactly what we thought was going to happen.

Haberman: He gave us a bit of a hard time at the end, but it was pretty brief.

You mentioned that at the end he says, “You’re going to be critical, but remember ‘people are tired of your bullshit, always criticizing.’” Is that just par for the course?

Haberman: I don’t remember a parting statement like that in a while, but I mean, I hadn’t interviewed him in a very long time. But there would be versions of that throughout term one or there would be versions of that in the first campaign. It was nothing surprising. It wasn’t just that he engaged; he was perfectly cordial as we were sitting there. It was a surprisingly small group. That was the one thing that surprised me. Often, he will have a phalanx of people and he’ll roll very deep, so you’re outnumbered. But that didn’t happen this time. There were three aides, not 50.

Swan: I remember in term one, I wrote a story he really didn’t like, and I was sitting with someone who’s one of his allies, and they said they told the president they were seeing me and they said, “The president has something he wants me to share with you.” I said, “What’s that?” He said, “You’re a piece of shit.” I said, “Oh, that’s nice.” And then they said, “And he also wanted me to tell you that you’re disinvited from the Australian state dinner.” This was 2019. And I said, “I was never invited. You disinvite me. You have to invite me before you disinvite me.”

Haberman: We’ve both been down this road with him quite a bit.

There’s this moment where he’s demonstrating his power in terms of other historical figures, going back to Alexander the Great, and Attila the Hun up to Mao and Stalin and Hitler. Tell me a bit about getting this document as you’re trying to keep him focused on all the many things that you reported in the book. 

Haberman: We did ask a question that prompted it. We asked a question that was something he himself had said to Tucker Carlson, which we note in the book, but it was that he may be the most powerful president ever. And we noted that he had said recently that nobody else would do the shit I’ve done or something like that. And then it took a pivot.

Swan: He gets Natalie Harp, who’s his sort of ever-present attentive aide, whom they call the human printer, and she runs off, and it was very efficient. She came back with printed pages within what seemed like a minute, and he wanted us to read this document, and the document that he said was written by a historian starts with the line, “Donald Trump is, without question, the most powerful man that the planet has ever known.”

Then it goes on to compare him to Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, William the Conqueror. Trump says, “It’s the top ten.” There’s no comparison on any basis of morality. There’s a little bit of a mention that some of these were terroristic-type figures. But really, it was just about power. What he wanted us to understand is he has more power than they ever had, and he’s willing to use it.

In the first term, he was much more focused on domestic politics, much more swayed by poll numbers or the midterms or whatever. He doesn’t really care much about that stuff anymore. It’s not to say he doesn’t care at all about it. It’s not black-and-white. But really, he wants to be the sort of Napoleon. He wants to be the Napoleon of this period, or the Alexander —the figure that we see as the capital-G, Great man. And seen through that lens, you start to think, Oh, it kind of makes sense why he’s taking these huge risks on the world stage, why he’s trying to reshape the world — the “Donroe Doctrine” — why he’s snatching a sovereign head of state out of his bedroom in his pajamas in a hugely risky raid, why he’s started a new war in the Middle East without even talking to Congress, why he’s building monuments to himself all over the place. This is the Donald Trump phase of putting his imprint on the world and the country far more than it is making what he would see as small-ball decisions based on domestic politics.

Haberman: Part of it, too, in terms of his mind-set, and I think we capture this in the book, is he’s not under investigation. He doesn’t have a special counsel investigation. In fact, he has what he would frequently talk about: immunity. And that has really dictated a lot of what you’re seeing too. You pair that with a quiescent GOP House majority and a slightly less quiescent GOP Senate majority. You pair it with tech leaders who are coming to give him trophies.

“First-class groveling,” as Elon Musk said in the book. 

Maggie: It was not an imprecise description.

You pair it with a president who is not just willing to use power of the government taking stakes in companies this way. Actively suing every news organization that he gets angry at — many of them that he gets angry at. As a person suing his own government for $10 million and making a deal to give himself a tax-audit immunity retroactively. That’s part of the mind-set too. And one of the definitive quotes, actually, of this period is something that he said to our colleagues in an interview earlier this year, which was about his sons and the company and deals, and he said he prevented them from doing deals last time, and he found out nobody cared. Until there is some kind of a civic reaction to things that he’s doing, it’ll —

Swan: And maybe not even then. His popularity has waned substantially. But that’s not really a check or a mechanism to check him. It’s very hard to imagine an accountability mechanism at this point. One thing we have in our book, he’s been telling people that he’s going to pardon anyone who’s come within 250 feet of the Oval Office. Sometimes he says 200 feet. Sometimes he says 25 feet, but there’s some number of feet around the Oval Office.

Haberman: It’s a big radius.

Swan: And so what does he have to fear? Absolutely nothing.

Haberman: We’re not seers, and we don’t pretend to have a crystal ball, but most of the time when you’re in a mid-presidential midterms cycle, I can generally guess what an arc is going to be. Democrats will likely take control. There will be a lot of subpoenas. What happens if there is Democratic control of the House, and possibly the Senate, and you have an entire government that ignores the subpoenas, not just certain agencies and a Congress that — they don’t have a congressional jail.

We are looking at something we haven’t seen before.

As you said, there’s not a congressional jail, but past administrations would’ve followed precedent, and they’re not going to follow anything. 

Haberman: Very unlikely. Maybe they will, but there is nothing that we have seen that indicates that they are going to see efforts to check their power as anything other than —

Swan: It’s hard enough to get them to follow the law, let alone norms. There’s very heavily documented work that others have done showing just how many times they’ve been defying court orders on immigration cases. So those are laws. Norms, you think he cares? Of course not. And the notion that the Trump, DoJ, which is completely responsive to Donald Trump himself, the notion that they would take action against someone who declined to appear before Congress, that they would enforce contempt, is almost laughable.

You have fresh reporting about ABC settling with Trump prior to him taking office and then CBS parent Paramount settling with Trump over the 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris as Paramount was trying to close its deal with Skydance. Using government pressure on media companies seems to be a major difference from the first term.

Haberman: No question about that.

Where do you see the difference in how Trump and the administration has engaged with the press or tried to keep the press in check from term one to term two?

Haberman: The ways are countless. One is, there’s the press that covers him, which they have tried keeping in check by removing access to upper press, which is where the press secretary’s office is, where reporters have been able to walk in freely, as long as we had a hard pass to the White House, for decades. You can only do it by appointment. They banned the Associated Press for refusing to say “Gulf of America,” continuing to say Gulf of Mexico. They took control of the White House press pool, and they pick who goes in that pool. One of the people who I think does a very admirable job in these scrums is Kaitlan Collins at CNN, who takes a huge amount of abuse from him and doesn’t react. But she also doesn’t have what one used to have in term one, which is colleagues who will then follow up with the same question.

One other piece that’s quite striking is everything that you just described about CBS, ABC, that we report in the book, doesn’t just involve government pressure. It involves the president’s personal legal adviser, Boris Epshteyn, who is central in a lot of these efforts. And this inside-outside factor is different than what we saw last time too.

Swan: What they’ve learned is that if there is any exposure that your company has to the government, if there’s any lever the government can pull to pressure and coerce you, they will use it. And we’re both fortunate.

Trump calls the New York Times treasonous and traitors, and he would love nothing more than to shut down the New York Times. But thank God we have an owner who is resolute, and it’s a very challenging environment when Trump has shown he’s willing to do things that other presidents are not willing to do. It creates an environment where the powers that be, and not just in media, but across civil society and institutions, that they’re constantly asking themselves a question. “If I say this, what might happen here?” And it creates a chilling effect. It creates a self-censorship effect, and we see that across universities, law firms.

You’ve seen some pushback. ABC, for instance, on the FCC’s clampdown on The View. Do you feel after the pressure that the government has put on law firms, universities, and media, there may be a shifting back a little bit, as the administration has lost cases?

Haberman: On the executive orders. Definitely for the law firms.

In terms of the media piece, I’m not totally convinced yet. The government has a lot of leeway. I know that there are talks about state attorneys general in Democratic states trying to block the Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger. It may slow it down. I’m not sure what they’ll necessarily be able to do. But do I think that there is more of a public backlash? Yes. I think that might make it easier for companies like ABC/Disney to defend The View.

What you’re describing now, which is the tide turning, there’s always this sort of anticipation with him: Things are about to shift dramatically. But there is often a desire by Trump’s critics to say, “Well, that’s it.” And after January 6, 2021, I don’t know how anybody says that. And frankly, after his four-year comeback, I don’t how anybody says that.

In addition to media, it was striking on Inauguration Day to see all the tech CEOs right behind Trump, and that seems to be something that he has enjoyed a tremendous amount in this term, having several of the richest, most powerful men on the planet who control huge platforms and information either in his corner or not willing to push back. Could you just tell me just how having the tech world as no longer an obstacle, how much does that make him feel like he’s almost untouchable?

Swan: He understands how much power runs through those companies. We’re talking about companies that have the power of nation states. They control the most powerful technology in the world, in some cases, artificial intelligence. They also control the most powerful platforms in the world. In term one, most of them were either neutral or run by people who are with various levels of hostility toward Trump. Now they’re run by people who are enthusiastic supporters of Donald Trump — in the case of Elon Musk, his biggest donor.

It conveys a huge amount of power. Trump understands how much attentional value runs through those companies, and he makes sure that those guys know there’s always the lingering, lurking kind of menace behind all the friendliness. Remember, he published a coffee-table book saying that Mark Zuckerberg will spend the rest of his life in prison if he dares to interfere with the 2024 election. So behind all of the bonhomie is menace, real menace, and these guys are not stupid. They’re seeing what he’s doing to companies that are led by people that he doesn’t care for or other institutions.

You got a review in the New York Times recently by Fintan O’Toole. You write in a book about Trump’s superpower of being shameless, and he writes, “What can journalists do in a world where there is no shame and, apparently, no consequence?” So how do you think about your work in terms of impact or what you hope comes from it?

Swan: We both just believe that there is value in putting something out for the public and informing the public. If you spent your life as a journalist judging yourself on metrics of whether you affect public opinion or change political outcomes or X, Y, Z on Congress, you’re really in the wrong job. You should do something else, be a political activist or whatever. All we can do is put the information out there, and people can be more informed, hopefully — make up their own minds and make better decisions. We’re not arrogant or deluded enough to think that we’re going to change any political outcomes. Journalism is a very powerful tool. It also has very clear limits. We don’t have subpoena power. We don’t have the power to compel Congress to do anything. This book is a primary document. I think people will find a lot of things in there that will be very useful for many forms of accountability, but that’s outside our hands.

Haberman: We were quite literal about doing the first draft of history, and there are increasingly fewer people who are doing real drafts of history as opposed to just news that cycles out. We’re all in that same business right now, but we wanted to do something that was durable.

One of the chapters in there that we’re really proud of is about Trump’s efforts to take over the Smithsonian and programming. And those are very, very cloistered meetings. Those are not meetings where there are recordings. There’s no tapes of the meetings that the Smithsonian makes. There’s not a transcribed meeting. It’s not like a court proceeding. There’s minutes, and the minutes sort of deal with a brief topic. It took us months to reconstruct this, and so far, it’s the most detailed accounting of what happened in those rooms that I’ve seen. And I think there’s a lot of value in that. It may not be for everybody, but if people want to understand what is happening in some of the premier institutions in this country — at the DoJ, in the White House — I think this book will help them do that. And that’s really all we’re here to do.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.