‘It’s so tempting to cover Trump like a cartoon character’: Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s new book exposes an imperial presidency

Enough books have been published on US president Donald Trump during his two terms as president that a reader might struggle to get through them all between now and the 2028 election. One volume recently added to the list is Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. The New York Times reporters have extensively covered and repeatedly interviewed Trump. Both know what it is like to have Earth’s most powerful individual decide that you, personally, will be the catch of the day on social media. 

For the book, the pair conducted more than 1,000 interviews with people in and around Trump’s second administration. The book is also studiously impartial, adhering to a just-the-facts approach which – the facts being what they are – makes it all the more damning. 

Haberman and Swan know that the big picture is already well understood. It is not news that Donald Trump is ignorant, impulsive and interested in little beyond his own glorification, and that his administration is overwhelmingly staffed with toadies and grifters. What is notable about Regime Change is the detail: the obsession with gilt accessories, some of which the president personally affixed to the walls with superglue; his enquiries into whether his proposed triumphal arch in Washington might be adorned with a statue of himself; the delighted vindication that he draws from an analysis comparing him to Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Adolf Hitler and Attila the Hun, which turns out to have been written by no less an authority than Gary Player’s caddy.

The reviews of Regime Change have been good, and deservedly so, though none more persuasive than that of its subject, who called it “mostly made up, fake news, largely fiction” and one of its authors “Magot Hagerman… a third-rate writer and fourth-rate intellect.” Monocle spoke with Haberman and Swan on The Foreign Desk about the book, their decade covering Trump and the president’s impact on US press freedom. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

You’ve both covered Donald Trump extensively, so let’s talk about his relationship to the media. With statements calling journalists ‘enemies of the people’, do you think he’s baiting the press? Is that a schtick or does he actually feel that way?
Maggie Haberman: It’s certainly not just shtick. He gets very angry about his coverage and about things that, at least in our experience, he can’t control. Trying to figure out whether he’s sincere or not is a fool’s errand. He had the DOJ [Department of Justice] subpoenaing reporters recently over specific [stories]. It sounds like those subpoenas may have been withdrawn but [he ordered them] because he was angry about leaks. You don’t do that only for show.

Your coverage of Trump has not always been sympathetic and your book is extremely critical of him on many points, yet he agreed to be interviewed. Are you surprised that so many media organisations have capitulated to him?
Jonathan Swan: What Trump has done this term is use every lever of the federal government to squeeze organisations that he opposes. We go deep into this in the book; it’s not just media organisations, it’s civil society, universities and law firms, and he weaponised the government to try to force companies to bend the knee. Luckily, Maggie and I both work for The New York Times, [which is an] independent organisation. We don’t depend on the government for anything. There are no licences that we need but that’s a fortunate position to be in. Trump understands the power that he has over broadcast networks and other forms of media, so he’s using it very aggressively.

Trump must be aware that he has the power to drive audiences to the media, that he is good for ratings and he attracts readers.
MH: He says that constantly and there has obviously been a fair amount of interest in Donald Trump. There has also been Donald Trump fatigue that every news organisation has seen at various points over the course of the past six years. [The interest in this book shows] that there is a desire for a deeper understanding of how this government is functioning. That is much harder to establish this term than it was in his first term. As a reporter, it’s very different now: he has a hunkered down tribal group around him. It’s not just that he has cowed so many in the media, it’s also that the media landscape has changed by virtue of the industry itself – and that really isn’t about him at all.

Your book is a good illustration of Trump’s tactic of ‘flooding the zone’. It feels like every other page has yet another jaw-dropping revelation or scandal, which would end the career of any other politician. Has the volume overwhelmed even the most diligent attempts by the media to make any sense of this for readers and listeners?
JS: In daily coverage it certainly can. But in the book, we make sense of it and give it shape, meaning, context and depth. Maggie and I hoped that this book would find an audience but I don’t think we expected a Fifty Shades of Grey kind of interest. It just shows that there is a deep hunger for people to understand how the most powerful country on Earth is being run. It’s so tempting to cover Trump like a cartoon character, and he certainly can behave that way sometimes, but there’s a lot more to the story. That’s what we try to lay out in the book.

Tell me about your conversations with Trump. Because you talked to him when you were verifying the material, he was presumably aware that your book is not an advertisement for him. What was the tone of those discussions?
JS: We spoke to him at the very end of the reporting process. Three days before the interview, he attacked Maggie viciously on Truth Social and threatened to add us to the lawsuit that he already has against The New York Times. [For the interview,] we were fully expecting that he would be in salesman mode, even though he had just threatened us, and that’s exactly what happened. That’s the way he is; he’s not someone who does interpersonal conflict in a very comfortable way, so he was relaxed, unhurried.

He showed us the ballroom pictures and then we asked him about his power because Trump had been telling people that he was the most powerful American president there ever had been. He asked one of his aides to get the document that he said was written by a historian. He hands us this document, [which] he clearly is quite excited about and wants us to read. The first line [says] Donald Trump is the most powerful man who has ever walked the planet and then it goes on to compare him to what Trump says is the top 10, including f Napoleon, Adolf Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun. There was no discussion of morality in this document. It was just about the metric of raw power. 

[The document wasn’t written by] a historian; it turned out to be a former golf caddy of Gary Player. What he’d written, with a few modifications here and there, was the basis of our book. It was sort of this amazing moment where Trump basically handed us our own thesis from a different perspective.

Maggie, Trump has gone after you personally several times, not just before you sat down with him for this book. What is it like to have Earth’s most powerful individual come for you? Do you think that has an inhibiting effect on press freedom more generally?
MH: He has come after both of us a number of times over the years. It’s certainly surprising the first time it happens but [it’s not as surprising] the 10th or 12th time it happens. I suspect he hopes that it will have a chilling effect – and it may on some people. But it doesn’t impact our reporting one way or the other. We are also very fortunate to work for an independent institution such as The New York Times that has no levers that the federal government can pull, [as is the case with other American broadcast media organisations]. But in terms of the attacks, he’s going to do what he’s going to do. It is what it is.

To hear more on press freedom in the US, listen to the latest episode of ‘The Foreign Desk’. 

Further reading: Trump biographer Michael Wolff on the ‘moron’ president’s ‘incredible incompetence’