Lawfare Daily: Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan Discuss Their Bestseller, ‘Regime Change’

[Intro]

Maggie Haberman: The point is very clear, which is this is a line the administration should not cross. That kind of a memo is not getting written if this is just some kind of idle talk. And it was put back on the shelf, but like all ideas with Trump, you know, these are loaded weapons on the shelf.

Roger Parloff: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Roger Parloff, senior editor at Lawfare, and I'm with Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, White House correspondents for The New York Times.

Jonathan Swan: It was this very strange moment where Trump was essentially affirming our own thesis and doing it in a way that was, I mean, it wouldn't have been my choice. You know, if I was president, I probably wouldn't have handed a journalist a document saying, “here, look, you know, the top 10. I'm more powerful than Hitler.”

Roger Parloff: Today we're talking about their new best-selling book, “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.”

[Main Podcast]

So this is a book of extraordinary breadth. You know, at Lawfare we have, you know, people who specialize in Ukraine or follow Iran or Venezuela or AI or litigation, and this covers everything. So it's really a remarkable book.

So I'm going to start with a quote on the back of it, ask you about that. It's a quote from President Trump. It's, “then I have an Article 2 where I have the right to do whatever I want as president, but I don't even talk about that.” Where did he say this and how did you choose that for the back of the book?

Jonathan Swan: Well, he said it during the first term and the context was him contemplating firing Robert Mueller, the special counsel who was investigating ties between his campaign in 2016 and Russia. I mean, the reason we chose the quote is it kind of says it all, doesn't it? This is how he views the presidency as an unconstrained vessel in which he can exert power. He's never believed in checks and balances, the system of checks and balances. He's always viewed Congress as an irritation at best.

And the story of this book is really a story of a president exerting power, executive power in ways that we haven't seen in our lifetime. In some respects, we've never seen it in the American presidency. So we thought that the quote was kind of perfect.

Roger Parloff: Right. Now, the book has four parts. I want to ask you about the structure. They're entitled “Whirlwind,” “Retribution,” “The Enemy Within,” and “Plunder.” Tell me how you arrived at that structure.

Jonathan Swan: Well, I, I have to give credit to our editor, Jonathan Jao at Simon & Schuster, who's a basically a genius and-

Maggie Haberman: Not basically—is a genius.

Jonathan Swan: He is. He's really an amazing editor. Yeah. And this was the least of his genius. But, you know, when you look at last year, we thought about the first section, Whirlwind. The experience of covering the first three months of last year, that's what it felt like to us, and that was by design. I mean, the Trump team, Stephen Miller in particular, had prepared to flood the zone.

They understand that when they do so many things at once so quickly, that their opposition is overwhelmed, that there are only so much bandwidth, only so many resources, particularly in the center-left's legal community, to resist what they're doing. So when you saw them pump out more executive orders in the first 100 days than, I think any presidency, I'd have to go back and check, but I'm pretty sure.

Maggie Haberman: I think it, I think it was more than FDR. I think it was-

Roger Parloff: Yeah.

Maggie Haberman: That was the…

Jonathan Swan: Yeah. So, so I mean, that was designed to overwhelm the system. Not just overwhelm the legal system, but overwhelm the media as well.

Roger Parloff: It overwhelmed me, for sure.

Jonathan Swan: It overwhelmed us. How can you possibly cover in depth all of these consequential things that are happening at once? And so, so much slips through the net. Some things are blocked, but a lot is slipped through the net. Remind me the sequencing. Whirlwind-

Roger Parloff: Retribution is second, The Enemy Within, and Plunder.

Jonathan Swan: Yeah. The, the second one speaks for itself, of course. It's been a huge threat of this administration. But the enemy within, it, it really captures how Trump views his opponents. He believes his greatest adversaries are not China, Russia, Iran, but actually Americans, people who live inside America who are leftists, who hate Trump, who are, in his view, trying to undermine him.

And, and so, so much of their energy is spent on thinking about how to suppress the left, how to investigate the left, particularly after, we have a chapter in our book about Charlie Kirk and, and when he was murdered. That was a, a real pivot point when they started to turn their gaze onto the infrastructure of, of the left in a, in a sharper way. They've been looking at all these major sources of funding left-wing institutions in this country and wondering how they can dismantle them through the Justice Department and through other means. They haven't had a lot of success yet from their perspective at doing that, but you're starting to see some of the early signs of that.

And then the last one, Plunder, you know, i- in, in a couple of respects. One, we, we have a l- a big chapter on the self-dealing and the profiteering from the presidency. That is one of the most distinctive features of Trump's second term. We've never seen anything like this in American history, full stop, at this scale. It doesn't exist. The examples do not exist at this scale. There is no example of a president and his family monetizing the presidency the way that the Trumps are doing right now.

You've obviously had plenty of presidents' families making money off politics and what have you, but the scale of this is, is unheard of, and the conflicts of interest are breathtaking. So there's that.

But there's also the element of Plunder that fits into Trump's worldview, which is that he's got a very 19th century view of the world. He doesn't see the world as groupings of countries with longstanding alliances with America. He doesn't really put much stock in the history of these alliances. He really sees the world as a collection of countries that owe America something, owe America money, or are ripping America off.

And I remember in the first term when Trump did his first series of foreign leader phone calls, the question he would ask briefers before all of his calls was, "What's the trade deficit?" And the answer to that question would shape his mood and his mindset in that phone call. So if, if in his view the other country was taking advantage of America, didn't matter what else the other country was doing or whatever the history of the country with America, that was the defining feature.

And what you're seeing now in this term is Trump taking that mindset and using it to completely change America's place in the world. NATO has been altered in a pretty fundamental way this term. I don't think you could have a private conversation with anyone serious at a senior level in Europe who would tell you that they have, you know, ironclad faith in Article 5 anymore.

Trump has reoriented America almost as a large regional power with focus on the Western Hemisphere, and when he talks about Venezuela as a 51st state, he's not trolling. That's literally how he views Venezuela. We have a story in The New York Times, colleagues of ours, which, you know, describes Marco Rubio essentially as a viceroy-

Roger Parloff: Yes.

Jonathan Swan: Of Venezuela, and that's, that's absolutely correct. I mean, they view Delcy Rodriguez as a puppet. Trump views Venezuela as a giant oil field, and when he looks at the Western Hemisphere, he doesn't see sovereign nations that have their own, you know, rights and prerogatives. He sees subsidiaries of America and land and territory that should be part of America absorbed into America. So those are the two elements of that last theme.

Maggie Haberman: On the Whirlwind piece, and this was really important to us, and we didn't quite, I, I don't wanna say that we didn't remember because we obviously did, but I think that when we were looking over our reporting, it was really striking to us as we were writing the book and looking at what to include, and we, we had to jettison thousands and thousands and thousands of pages of reporting, which was horribly painful, but the book would've been 2,000 pages long otherwise.

It wasn't just Stephen Miller's prep leading into the return to the White House, although obviously Stephen Miller spent the most time thinking about what a Trump 2.0 would look like and how to make it happen across various fronts. But the Elon Musk piece, it, it's like it's memory-holed, and he was a huge part of that whirlwind. And so you had Stephen Miller doing Stephen Miller's focus, which was immigration, which was putting in place all of these actions that were going to make the border essentially, you know, unpassable, which was going to massively restrict legal immigration and asylum claims and on and on and on.

That was overshadowed by the, the daily shit show of whatever DOGE was up to. And, you know, E- Elon Musk was, was gleefully taking a, a mallet to the government and just sort of indiscriminately getting rid of things. There are f- a few people in the government who still think, they'll say, "Well, there were certain things that he found that we, you know, we had duplicative processes for acquisitions and for purchasing." Okay. But they didn't any, come anywhere near close to saving what they said they were going to. And in the meantime, he just shuttered an entire congressionally created agency in USAID. Marco Rubio was quite unhappy as we write to have to be dealing with the dregs of that and the rump of that agency that got absorbed into the State Department, so, into the larger State Department. And then that just ended, you know, with this, this personal clash with Trump. And so that was a big part of the whirlwind.

Retribution came into focus as the second part because by the spring it was very clear that Trump was getting frustrated that his retribution agenda was not getting acted on, and that was where, and you can see this in the book, Bill Pulte emerges as a figure who is now the acting director of National Intelligence. And if Jay Clayton does not get confirmed, which it does seem likely he's going to, in part because Republican senators are afraid of Pulte. But that is how you see Pulte emerge, as this loyalist just willing to do whatever he thinks Trump will want in the reporting that we have.

And in terms of The Enemy Within, what happened in August and, and September were two very important things to the agenda that Jonathan was talking about. One was that you saw the deployment of the National Guard in Washington, which is something that Trump had been talking about doing, by the way, not just since term one, but you know, w- we have reporting about him talking about this admiringly in 1993 it was, I think, or 1992 as it was being discussed to try to deal with crime when Mayor Pratt was, was running Washington during the Clinton era.

But in September is when Charlie Kirk was assassinated, and that was a really galvanizing moment for this effort on cracking down on the left and on political groups on the left. And you still see remnants of that. That happened just this past week with a, a terrorism conference that Marco Rubio led, that primarily focused on Cuba, but not exclusively, that Stephen Miller spoke at. And so we were trying to show not just what this first 14 months was like, but how much of it has set the tone and the path for what has come in year two.

Roger Parloff: Yeah. Let me follow up on some of the things Jonathan said about Plunder.  In, in July of 2024, the Supreme Court issued its immunity ruling immunity for most official acts, and, and it made clear that even unofficial acts would be very hard to criminally prosecute. To what af- extent do you all think that that shaped his conduct this term?

Jonathan Swan: I think to a very large extent he has said privately, you know, "I'm immune." Thing with Trump is there's not a huge filter between what he thinks and what he says. I mean, w- I mean, there is sometimes when he wants to keep a secret, but in, in this case he's basically said it out loud. I mean, during the first term he felt like he was under siege and, you know, he was being investigated, he had no experience in government, and felt like he was in a defensive crouch. This time around he's acting with impunity.

It's not just Trump who feels emboldened, it's most of the people around him as well, particularly his family. He has given them essentially a green light to go and make as much money as they, as their hearts, you know, desire. And we have some reporting in the book that Trump has said that he will pardon anyone who came within 250 feet of the Oval Office. So they're all expecting and banking on presidential pardons. We expect based on our reporting that Trump is going to do some of the most wide- maybe the most widespread series of pardons in American history before the end of his term, and many of his top aides will eagerly accept those pardons.

Roger Parloff: Let me change now to a question about habeas corpus. How close have we come to suspension of habeas corpus under this presidency, and why hasn't it happened.

Maggie Haberman: Well, we came very close, and that was a, a chapter in the book that was sort of a w- a, not sort of, it was a white whale of ours. Because as you know, and but I think a lot of people forget, Trump was musing about this publicly. At the very end of April, he did not specify habeas corpus, but in the middle of a cabinet meeting at the end of April, it was after he had been stymied by the Supreme Court to just have a free hand to summarily send migrants overseas.

In that specific case, it was to CECOT, to this, this gulag essentially in El Salvador which was a sen- was originally described as it was going to be used for the, the worst of the worst in terms of migrants in the country illegally. There's a, there's a lot of questions about how, how broad the sweeps are, but in that specific case, a man who had a, a, a judicial order not to be sent to El Salvador because of threats on his life potentially was on one of the planes that, that went on the first flights there.

So, that became its own court fight, and the president was very frustrated. And he mused at the time in a cabinet meeting about, you know, "There's this, there's one thing we have that, you know, three presidents have used very strongly," or something to that effect. And, and CNN reported several days later that he was talking about suspending habeas corpus.

And it, the episode passed pretty quickly, but we were really obsessed with it because it, there's, as you know, habeas corpus is enshrined in the Constitution. It is older than the Magna Carta. It is one of the most fundamental rights of due process, and the idea that a president would think that this was something he could just end, and Stephen Miller was openly endorsing this.

So we went down this rabbit hole to f- to try to understand it, and what we learned was the discussions were extremely serious. There was no what one person described as “administrative consensus” on it. But Stephen Miller had brought up the idea, according to our reporting, prior to that episode. He would bring it up again. The president was interested. Stephen Miller tasked the DOJ with studying this, which was astonishing that, that, that it went that far.

And a reflection of how serious it was, was, you know, we, we found out that there were these confidential memos that the Staff Secretary, Will Scharf, who's a very conservative lawyer. You know, this is not, this is not the era of term one where, you know, there are people who would be identified as squishes or holdovers or whatever. I mean, he was, he has endorsed almost all of Trump's most, most radical and extreme agenda items. But he wrote this memo about how, it was one of two that he wrote, the second was on Insurrection Act.

In this one, it was that there's no precedent for this in American history. You know? That, that the other times that habeas corpus has been suspended, the first formally, I know there's, Andrew Jackson did some form of it militarily, but the first by a president was the Civil War. And then every other act the nation, at the time it had happened, the nation had been under real threat of invasion, or invasion. And so, and that even after 9/11, Bush was not given a free hand to just do sort of a form of military tribunals at GITMO.

And so Sharf, the, the staff secretary, put all of this in a memo and he sent it to Susie Wiles, the chief of staff, and he doesn't explicitly say in the memo, they're very dry, these memos, but the point is very clear, which is this is a line the administration should not cross. That kind of a memo is not getting written if this is just some kind of idle talk. And it was put back on the shelf, but like all ideas with Trump, you know, these are loaded weapons on the shelf.

That one has not come up again, I think for a variety of reasons, but because it is clear that the, the uproar would be dramatic, especially before midterms. But it hasn't totally gone away.

Jonathan Swan: I've gotta say, I, I, I'm, I'm sort of surprised that there hasn't been more attention-

Maggie Haberman: Me too.

Jonathan Swan: On, on these memos.

Maggie Haberman: Me too.

Jonathan Swan: I mean, when the history of this period is written, the fact that the most senior, one of the most senior lawyers in the Trump administration, someone who's in his inner circle, who is, as Maggie said, no squish, no resistance figure.

Maggie Haberman: Yep.

Jonathan Swan: Those people don't exist anymore.

Maggie Haberman: Correct.

Jonathan Swan: It, it's hard for me to explain or to underscore enough that you know, if something like this happened in the first term, firstly, they weren't contemplating something this-

Maggie Haberman: No…

Jonathan Swan: Extreme in the first term. But you know, every day in the first term you'd have a headline, John Kelly or James Mattis was trying to stop this or that thing or what have you, and that was sort of the narrative of term one. Those people don't exist in this term. They don't. In the inner circle, in any position of any meaning in this administration, they don't exist.

So the fact that the staff secretary felt compelled to write these confidential memos to the chief of staff, essentially saying in dry, lawyerly language, "These are two lines that we should not cross," suspending habeas corpus for illegal immigrants, the most basic right, the right to challenge your detention. If the government locks you up, you have the right to challenge your detention. And then to invoke the Insurrection Act for events that don't even come close to what the Insurrection Act has been invoked in the past.

The other thing that we show in the reporting is that these definitely remain loaded weapons on the shelf, particularly the Insurrection Act. We have a scene in the book a few days after Alex Pretti is killed in Minnesota. So you have the, the killing of Renee Good, you have the killing of Alex Pretti. There are huge protests. Trump himself is feeling discombobulated. He's seeing the, the coverage. He's not liking it. He's considering pulling back.

And we have this extraordinary scene in the book where Susie Wiles, the chief of staff, convenes her senior staff meeting in her office in the morning, and the vice president comes in and sits down, and he says, "I think we need to invoke the Insurrection Act." This is a few days after Pretti is killed, and he says, basically paraphrasing, "We need to stop these protesters, these left-wing protesters."

Maggie Haberman: Paid  agitators, et cetera.

Jonathan Swan: He called them paid agitators. There is no evidence-

Maggie Haberman: There's no evidence of that, correct.

Jonathan Swan: that Preti or, or Goode were, were paid. But basically his, his view, a- as expressed in that meeting, was we're going to endure some short-term political pain, but it's worth it in the long term. And they have this conversation where, you know, Will Scharf, the staff secretary, is pushing back, Stephen Miller saying, "Well, we haven't really explored whether, you know, the, the law will stretch to accommodate this."

And they end the meeting in this sort of no man's land. They basically decide to put it aside. But it wasn't sort of this definitive decision, we will never do this. It's something that Trump himself has expressed a desire to do many, many times. Stephen Miller is clearly, has expressed an eagerness to do it.

So it's just waiting there. It's waiting there for the moment. And that's one thing we, I think, try to make clear in the book is this is not like, oh, they, they flirted with these things and-

Maggie Haberman: Right ...

Jonathan Swan: You know, now, you know, it's the furthest thing from their mind. Not the case.

Roger Parloff: Yeah. A couple points I wanna follow up on there. One is that Will Scharf does play a sort of important role in the book, and I, I don't think he's really a household name. And this staff secretary is an important position that like Brett Kavanaugh was staff secretary, under, under Bush. Am I correct? He's, he was in John Sauer's firm in, in Missouri. Is that-

Maggie Haberman: I don't think, I don't know that he was in his firm. He may have been. They certainly worked together on the immunity-

Roger Parloff: Okay.

Maggie Haberman: Case, on the, on the post-J6 case. Yeah. And, and Scharf was you know, Scharf ran for office himself. He's clearly an ambitious guy in Missouri.

Roger Parloff: I see.

Maggie Haberman: He was one of Trump's most vocal defenders on television during the Manhattan DA's case in 2024. But you're correct. I mean, if you, if you didn't see him on Fox News or I think occasionally on CNN, he's not somebody people would know existed. And he's, by all of our reporting from everyone in, in the West Wing, like a tremendous stickler for process. Which is not an easy way to live in this particular White House. Yeah, you know, the first one was difficult, too, for people, but this one in particular.

Roger Parloff: Yeah. The, the other thing is you have an insight there that I had not appreciated, which is that the, we've spent a lo- at Lawfare, we've spent a lot of time on the mandatory immigration detention policy that comes in around July of 2025.

Maggie Haberman: Yeah, the ch- the change that was put in place.

Roger Parloff: Yes. Yeah. From 29 years of prior interpretation.

Maggie Haberman: Right.

Roger Parloff: Which allows you to, keep people detained during their removal proceeding even if they've been here 30 years-

Maggie Haberman: Yes.

Roger Parloff: Live in Kansas, have-

Maggie Haberman: Yes, everyone was tr- everyone is treated as now as if they had just arrived at the border.

Roger Parloff: Exactly.

Maggie Haberman: Yeah.

Roger Parloff: And this as you d- portray it, this is sort of suspension of habeas corpus light.

Maggie Haberman: Yes.

Roger Parloff: This is af- which I hadn't appreciated. They d- they, they sort of go down the habeas corpus suspension route, they decide, no, it's too far, and then they come up with this. Is that fair?

Maggie Haberman: Yeah, that's our understanding. I mean, I think, you know-

Roger Parloff: Yeah.

Maggie Haberman: We- we're both quite aware of the fact that there is more to learn about this entire, both of these episodes, both in terms of the habeas corpus piece, we, we wrote the, the, the best and most detailed first draft of what was happening there that we could, and as I said, it took us absolute months.

But yeah, I mean, the, the, our understanding is that the, the, the ICE change in policy came as a result of trying to figure out ways to fundamentally alter process, and if they couldn't legally have a free hand to just summarily eject people no matter what, then you could take an you know, a, a piece of the, the INA, which I think was 1996, right? And that's, that was when the-

Roger Parloff: I think so, yeah.

Maggie Haberman: Bill was first put into place. And you could just, you could just reimagine it because it was an interpretation. It was not a, a stricter definition. Now, as you would know better than we do, their interpretation has been challenged over and over and over by judges. I know they have more recently had some favorable rulings, and I think they are primarily from Trump-appointed judges, but those are the minority, to put it mildly. But yes, those, our understanding is that these things are related, that they found a way to gum up the works regardless.

Roger Parloff: Let's turn to Retribution. Next week, James Comey's team is gonna probably file their motion to dismiss in the seashells case, the second case against him. And then in September, I think we'll have oral argument on his first case the, the government's appeal of the dismissal of his first case and of Letitia James' case.

You have some, I think you advance the ball some in the reporting on those first indictments. You say that on September 24th, Trump was actually considering firing both Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche. Can you talk a little about that?

Maggie Haberman: Yeah. So, you know, this was after Trump had been very frustrated as we mentioned, that this all started coming into deeper clarity in the spring of last year, that Bill Pulte was becoming his, who was at the time running, and I guess still is, which is its own oddity, an obscure housing agency. And he was, he was making repeated accusations of mortgage fraud, first online and then he would do criminal referrals.

Roger Parloff: Is he, is he currying favor or why is he getting involved? Do we know?

Maggie Haberman: Yes. He's, he's, he's trying to please Trump. I mean, you know, Pulte has no government experience prior to this that we know of. He was squired around Mar-a-Lago during the transition by Roger Stone, who is Trump's, you know, longest serving on and off political advisor. He wanted to be the HUD secretary. That job did not go to him. There was some other job that they were talking about for him instead he ends up running FHFA.

And mortgage fraud becomes this hobby horse. Now, with James, I should note, and we didn't go into this in, in depth in the book because, or really at all in the book, 'cause it's just sort of you have to make choices about length of a book, frankly, but this issue of mortgages has come up with James before in her local races in New York, but it took on a much broader tint here. And we should note that Roger Stone actually was, I think, the first one promoting this idea in February of last year online.

But Pulte, you know, runs with it. He sees an opportunity. This is going to make Trump happy. He starts showing up at the White House or Trump's golf course with these foam boards where he's got, you know, pictures of, of the, the U.S. attorneys and, and even Trump's own appointees can't be trusted according to him because the Democratic senators in Virginia voted for the prosecutor to be confirmed, so therefore he's suspect.

But the reality is that the prosecutor in, in Eastern Virginia, in the Eastern District of Virginia, was, was more than fine in our reporting trying to come up with a case against both Letitia James and James Comey, but couldn't make either stick. And in the case of Letitia James, it was that mortgage fraud requires intent, which is something Todd Blanche tried explaining to White House officials at the time, again, according to our reporting. And in the case of James Comey, it was about a possible perjury charge related to his congressional house, I think his Senate testimony from 2020, which was online. And even that was very hard to discern. They just didn't, the prosecutors just didn't feel they could make the case.

And at the time, what Blanche was telling White House officials was basically in line, Roger, with what you would expect a career prosecutor would say, which is, "I'm fine bringing a case. It has to be able to be taken to a conclusion where we're gonna get a conviction."

And in our reporting, and I, I'm still surprised this has not gotten more attention along with the memos, but Trump, who had viewed Letitia James as his top target before he came into office for retribution because she had focused on his money, among other things, because she had brought this New York civil case against his company and had this eye-popping judgment issued by the judge in the case.

He told an advisor that Blanche needed to understand that he didn't care if she was convicted. He wanted to make her miserable. And that was the goal of the indictments. The process was the punishment. And in tr-- in the world of, of Trump advisors, I'm not endorsing this view, I'm just saying that's how they view things, they believe that that was what was done to them, and that was done to him in the interregnum period.

So that was all the prelude, and Pulte kept repeatedly suggesting to Trump in our reporting that Blanche was not, Aad this also hasn't gotten much attention, Pulte told the president, according to what the president was telling other people, that Blanche wasn't going after the mortgage fraud piece because Blanche had his own problems on this front, which Blanche was pretty irritated about to have to explain wasn't the case.

But all of this leads up to September 24th, where it's right before the statute of limitations expires on James Comey and this perjury charge that did not stick, and Trump was furious and wanted to get rid of the top, both the top, number one and number two at the Justice Department. And the White House chief of staff in our reporting told people she was mindful that there was only so much tumult that could be tolerated.

Roger Parloff: Susie Wiles?

Maggie Haberman: Susie Wiles. And so there was this, Susie Wiles has a long relationship with Pam Bondi, who was not Trump's first pick for the AG job. It was Matt Gaetz, who we don't need to go down that rabbit hole. And Todd Blanche had been one of Trump's personal lawyers. And this sets in motion this just enormous anxiety about what might come next. But what ends up coming is indictments that don't s- don't stand up.

Roger Parloff: And apparently Blanche, according to the book, anticipated that the-

Maggie Haberman: Yes.

Roger Parloff: Halligan appointment wasn't gonna stand up.

Maggie Haberman: Correct. It was the, Lindsay Halligan then gets picked by Trump to become the acting U.S. attorney to replace Eric Seibert, who Trump ordered fired. And Lindsay Halligan did not go through any normal process. She has no prosecutorial experience. She was working actually under Will Scharf in the staff secretary's office at the time. She was another personal lawyer for Trump during the interregnum.

And there were serious questions about how the grand jury process went in the James Comey indictment when Halligan brought it. Pam Bondi ended up signing it, signing off on it, but that was all used by Comey's lawyers. And according to our reporting, Blanche had warned multiple people that this was going to be an issue, that Halligan's appointment was going to be seen as illegitimate, and it was gonna render the indictments illegitimate, and that was exactly what happened.

Roger Parloff: You also make an interesting point which I hadn't really focused on, which is sort of the dog that didn't bark here. There, there hasn't been much attempt to prosecute Alvin Bragg. Why is that?

Maggie Haberman: Well, there's, there's two lanes here. So one is this weaponization working group that Todd Blanche had put in place last year. But that was separate. That's about the office among other things. It is about how prosecutions work. And as I understand it, as we understand it, it was trying to figure out whether there was this conspiracy that, you know, Trump's folks have been alleging that Biden directed everything from the White House. We have no reporting to suggest that that's the case. And in fact, you know, as I think is pretty well known, the Biden White House was pretty frustrated that Merrick Garland was not doing more. So I don't know why anybody would have taken a circuitous route to Alvin Bragg in a case that has been pretty criticized for var- various reasons.

But the president would not talk about Bragg. And our, our understanding was that, from our reporting was that, you know, he, he convinced himself, again, according to what he would say to people, that Bragg was being puppeteered by Biden. And Trump is very dismissive of both Alvin Bragg and Letitia James, both of whom are Black. “Equal opportunity hires” is what he, even though both are elected officials, you know, they could never get, I'm paraphrasing here, but they “could never get jobs” outside of, you know, this agency. Whatever, you get the point. And so, but he, his personal animus about Bragg was, was just far less significant. Now, that's ticked up a little bit ever since Michael Cohen has suddenly decided to say that he felt coerced by the prosecutors. But, but yeah, it's been, it was very notable to a lot of people.

Roger Parloff: It's interesting. And I, I just want to add that the, that conspiracy theory that Biden was behind the Bragg prosecution was one of the craziest, thinnest, emptiest theories. But anyway I… There was something I wanted to ask you. How should I think about Pam Bondi? 'Cause, like, when she was nominated, she seemed like “Team Normal” compared to Matt Gaetz, at least to me. And then she got into it, and it seemed she was all in. And then she leaves, and things get even worse. So how do you, how should I think about Pam Bondi?

Jonathan Swan: I don't think it's a particularly complicated psychological portrait there. She's someone who you know, has her own background in Florida, is an absolute dyed-in-the-wool Trump ally, loyalist, represented him during impeachment, you know, someone who will not do everything that he wants or anything that he wants, and I think that that was fatal for her ultimately.

When Maggie and I went and saw President Trump in March and interviewed him, we had reported, this is before she was removed, we had reporting that Trump had been complaining about her, and that he was very frustrated that she wasn't in, you know, moving fast enough to prosecute his enemies. Surprise, surprise, Trump had tweeted, you know, accidentally. That was supposed to be a private message, but he'd, he'd tweeted a, a version of that. So everyone knows that was the case.

And Trump didn't really deny it. He sort of, you know, he sort of went, "Oh you know, when did you hear that?" And, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then he basically sort of said, "Oh, she's good at PR," which I mean, talk about a little knife in the, in the, in the ribs. And then he just sort of pivoted quick. He didn't, he didn't criticize her. Oh, he said, you know, "I'd like her to move," I think I, Maggie, you'd have to remember the quote, but it was something that she ...

Maggie Haberman: I want, there, there, it was like “things.” I want her to do more better.

Jonathan Swan: He, no, he, she said, "We've gotta move faster with respect to things."

Maggie Haberman: Things.

Jonathan Swan: And we said, "What things?" He said, "Just things."

Maggie Haberman: Just things.

Jonathan Swan: Things. You know. Who can say, just things.

Maggie Haberman: Who can say really?

Jonathan Swan: Who can say what the things are?

Maggie Haberman: And, but it was also notable just, and I, I don't, I don't wanna interrupt you, Jonathan-

Jonathan Swan: Yeah

Maggie Haberman: But just very quickly, and then you should finish. We also asked him about criticizing Todd Blanche because it was about the reporting that's in the book from September. And he, he, he drew a clear line. He was like, "Todd? When was this?" So, no, no, Todd's great.

Jonathan Swan: No, he said, "Todd's the greatest." Yeah, Todd's wonderful. Yeah, yeah. So he, he pivoted to just, you know, fulsomely praising Todd, Todd Blanche. So look, without being able to get inside Trump's head, it, it seems fairly clear from what he's told advisors, what he's said publicly, that he believes that Todd Blanche is going to move more quickly, more competently toward prosecuting the people that Donald Trump wants to see prosecuted.

Roger Parloff: Okay.

Jonathan Swan: And I, and I, both of us have seen indications from our reporting that lead us to think that if those objectives are not met in a reasonably timely fashion, who knows? Maybe, maybe Donald Trump will wanna have someone else lead the Justice Department. But certainly when we sat down with him he praised Todd Blanche fulsomely. Absolutely the, the greatest, you know, imaginable.

Maggie Haberman: I, I also wanna just, I just wanna add one point, too. I was thinking about what you, the question, Roger, which was the “team normal” line, which I know I think was initially put into the, into the lexicon by Bill Stepien during the J6 hearings. I'm not endorsing the idea of, you know, normal versus not, but, but what I will say is that is, that is, it, that is a, a construct that applies to term one. It does not apply here.

And so what I think people mean when they say, say “team normal” is, you know, somebody who is going to argue that, you know, "You can't do X, Y, Z. You can't do this." You know, there are people who are doing that. You know, we, we just talked about Will Scharf as an example, for instance. But the debates are not, it's not what it was in term one. It's just radically, radically different.

And Bondi is you know, she's a former attorney general herself, but she also aggressively defended Trump during impeachment one. She has been one of his most aggressive defenders on television for a long period of time, or was before she had that job. That doesn't mean there are not lines that she would not cross, and I think that we will probably learn more of them as we go on. She wasn't being accused of, of paying for sex, which was what Matt Gaetz had been accused of as a House member, and he always denied that he had done anything inappropriate.

But if that's the bar, you know, then probably must- much of Trump's government would be what is being described as, it's just, I, I, I think that she is, look, she, she still wasn't doing enough of what Trump wanted, right? That's why she's gone, to Jonathan's point. But she, I think, was, was quite eager not to be attacked by Trump and didn't wanna be fired, which all of these folks are mindful of the term one firings, and they don't wanna be fired by Truth Social post.

Roger Parloff: I want to try to touch on something quickly where we might be running down on time, but, you know, the word surreal is maybe overused, but I don't know what other word to use. You have this vignette or scene about Laura Loomer coming to the White House, the Oval Office, and emerging with basically causing the firings of six people in the National Security Council. Can you just go over that a little bit? It's one of the most remarkable, for me, scenes in the book.

Jonathan Swan: I mean, it's just what I imagine it was like when Brent Scowcroft used to come and sit down with George H.W. Bush and have a conversation about, you know, the NSC stuff. But yes, so Laura Loomer, I, I don't know if the law fair, I'm sure your audience is, is at least somewhat familiar with Laura Loomer, but-

Maggie Haberman: Passingly.

Jonathan Swan: Google, Google her and you'll very quickly gain an understanding. Yeah, so, so look, just to give you one highlight of her career she has called for creating a new form of Uber or Lyft that is for non-Muslim drivers.

Maggie Haberman: Right.

Jonathan Swan: So a non-Islamic form of Uber. Anyway, y- y- you get the idea. So, she's a very, very influential, I guess you would call her an influencer online.Calls herself a journalist as well, but really what she has made a specialty of is investigating people who work for Donald Trump, and proving, this is from her perspective, that they're disloyal or that there's something in their background that would give reason to think that they would be disloyal. Maybe their wife worked for Joe Biden, you know, even if they're a career prosecutor or something. Maybe this person had, you know, often the links are quite, you know, several degrees of separation. But she has been very successful this term at raising suspicions about people on Donald Trump's staff and getting them fired.

And we have this extraordinary scene in the book. It was last April, it was actually Liberation Day, the, the, the very day that Trump announced a trade war against the whole world. That's right. So she, she buys a new, I think it was a red pant suit, got her nails done, got her hair done, everything, and got professionally or properly printed her dossiers that she had o- o- on Trump's staff so that she could present them to Trump and everyone in the room.

And she goes into the Oval Office and gives Trump this document, and essentially begins to describe, you know, the horrors and the sins and the disloyalties of very senior members of his administration in the national security apparatus, including top members of the National Security Council. And Trump is just, you know, furious. He's listening, he's like, "How did these, how did this happen? How are these people on staff?" He's not verifying or, or saying, "Okay. Well, let's take this and get someone to check it." He just says, "We need to fire them. We need to get rid of them."

And within a very short period of time, many of the people on her list were just summarily fired, removed from their positions. Extraordinary. I, I don't think anything like this has, has ever happened in the Oval Office.

Roger Parloff: It's very troubling. And, and, and in fact the way, toward the end, Michael Waltz walks in or arrives. I don't know if he's summoned or walks in.

Jonathan Swan: No, he just walked in. He was supposed to be, yep. He didn't know about the meeting.

Roger Parloff: Okay. Yeah. And he begins to debunk, totally de- debunk-

Jonathan Swan: Right.

Roger Parloff: Like, the, one of the most important examples, and it, it, but it's too late. He's, Trump is in a lather. He's, he's beyond debunking.

Jonathan Swan: Yes. I, although, I will say the p- one of the particular people that he defended didn't end up getting fired at that moment. But yes, generally speaking, he, he, he was overruled, and essentially the staffing decis- some of the most important staffing decisions in the national security apparatus were being made by Laura Loomer.

Roger Parloff: Yeah.

Jonathan Swan: That's just a fact.

Maggie Haberman: One other piece too, just to note for you, Roger, before we move on, on this one and very quickly, but Loomer is another person who had been a Roger Stone protege.

Roger Parloff: Yeah.

Maggie Haberman: She and Bill Pulte, who are among the two most aggressive in terms of telling Trump that other people are failing them, and that they are, they are laying out the reality, were both brought into that world by Stone.

Roger Parloff: Interesting. Let's go to the epilogue. You guys go to see, is it, is it March? You go-

Maggie Haberman: Yeah.

Roger Parloff: This March, you go to-

Maggie Haberman: 16th. March 16th. Yeah.

Roger Parloff: Okay. You go to the White House, and you want to run past him some of the things in person that you're saying. Tell me about, and then he brings up sort of unsolicited conversation with Gary Player's caddy.

Jonathan Swan: So we go into the Oval Office, and we were expecting, you know, at least somewhat the war to be on his mind. The Iran war. It was the 17th day of the war. Americans had already been killed. And instead he greets us, he's very relaxed, which itself was striking given that a few days earlier he had threatened to add us to a su- a lawsuit and had gone after Maggie in very personal terms. But he was smiling, relaxed wanted to show us photographs of maple trees that he was buying for the White House.

And the moment that you're describing in the epilogue happened when we asked him a question about his power. We had reporting that he had told Tucker Carlson that no American president had ever been as powerful as he was. So we asked him about that, and instead of answering it directly, he told us this story about the golfer Gary Player, who's a friend of his, and he said that, you know, he was playing golf with Gary Player, and Gary Player had this friend who was a historian. And he said the historian had written something about him, and then he says, "You know, Natalie," you know, who's, who's his aide, Natalie Harp, who sits, sits by the wall in the Oval Office

Maggie Haberman: In almost every meeting.

Jonathan Swan: In almost every meeting. G- go get them the, the, the document. So she, she rushes off, and within a flash comes back with these printouts and hands them out. And it took us a moment to sort of absorb what they were. He wants us to read them, and he's sitting there with his own version, and he's so excited by it that he starts reading parts of it.

And the document basically starts by saying “Donald Trump is the most powerful man on the planet who's ever lived,” you know, by far. And then it goes on to compare him to what Trump describes to as the Top 10. And it's Adolf Hitler, Stalin, Mao, William the Conqueror, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Tamerlane, the Caesars, Napoleon. And he's reading, he's like, "Napoleon, very interesting. Hitler, Stalin, Mao." He goes, "You know," and he's reading from this. He goes, "These people used fear. Who would do a thing like that?" You know, et cetera, you know, being sarcastic.

And look, it wasn't a moral comparison in any sense. It was, it was really just an argument that Donald Trump, as the commander in chief of the U.S. military, the most powerful military that's ever existed, as the leader of the most powerful economy that's ever existed with the most powerful technology that's ever existed, and someone who is willing to use American power in ways that previous presidents have not been willing to use it, those factors make him the most powerful person, not just American president, but person who's ever existed.

And the document was unusual, to say the least, and we certainly in our book hadn't compared Donald Trump to any of these people. But the, the, the thesis was actually not so different from the thesis of our book, which is that Donald Trump has expanded presidential power and is using presidential power in ways that we've never seen before. So, it was this very strange moment where Trump was essentially affirming our own thesis and doing it in a way that was, I mean, it wouldn't have been my choice. You know, if I was president, I probably wouldn't have handed a journalist a document saying, "Here, look, you know, the top 10. I'm, I'm more powerful than Hitler." But that's what he did.

And what was very interesting was the moral dimension was very secondary. For Trump, what he wanted us to understand was these people had power, but their power was local. They could only project power in a, you know, regional sense or in even just within their own country. He, his power was completely global, and he wanted us to understand that.

Maggie Haberman: And he wanted us to understand, too, that he's willing to use it. That was the other really, really important piece of it.

Roger Parloff: Yeah. Although it comes from a caddy, the point is, is real. I mean, he really does have unprecedented power. I mean, it's hard to think of somebody, the Supreme Court has handed him power, Congress has handed him power. And your whole book, you know, there are a lot of points in the book that are funny if you divorce yourself from the fact that this is reality, that this is not a Joseph Heller novel or a Jerzy Kosiński novel.

And that part sort of brought it home. He re- this is no joke. This guy, who does have more power than him in history? And I think it's a, a remarkable close to the book. It's very, it's very troubling. Anyway we- we'll have to leave it there, but thank you so much for coming. I- it's a real honor to have you both. The book is remarkable, as I said, and I recommend it without reservation.

Maggie Haberman: Thanks so much.

Jonathan Swan: Well, we, we appreciate it. Yeah, very much. And we're very gratified by the response. We just, we wanted to make sure that we got our best reporting out while he's still president so that people could understand how their country's being run, which even as with someone who is as covered as Donald Trump is covered, as saturated as, you know, the conversations about Donald Trump we did think that we could add something original and, and hopefully unique to that.

Roger Parloff: I, I think you did. I think you did.

Jonathan Swan: Thanks so much.

[Outro]

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