Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, the New York Times reporters behind the 2022 book “Confidence Man,” have returned with “Regime Change,” a detailed account of Donald Trump’s second term based on interviews and internal documents. In an interview published Tuesday by The Guardian, the reporters described an administration extraordinarily adept at withholding information, even from senior officials.
Swan said the administration is run by a “tiny group of people” and that “there’s this canard that Trump puts out that, ‘I’m the most transparent president ever.’ It’s complete nonsense.”
One of the book’s most sensitive areas, according to the authors, is Trump’s health. Haberman said Trump’s health “has always been a very specific lockbox for him, going back decades.” She noted that the last time the White House provided real information was in 2018. “They were not honest at all about how sick he was during Covid in 2020, and so we’ve never really known the extent of that, or any after-effects,” Haberman said.
The book also portrays a president who, Haberman said, “perceives illness as weakness.” She said the number of people who actually know what is happening with Trump’s health is shrinking. Even the names of specialists at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center who examined Trump are not disclosed, she said.
Swan and Haberman also wrote about Trump’s decision to take the U.S. to war with Iran, including bombing nuclear facilities last summer and joining Israel in an all-out air assault this year. Swan said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, the two officials “that would have to handle the biggest energy shock in world history,” were not in the meetings leading up to the war and learned of the war the day before.
On the Iran Memorandum of Understanding, signed the previous week, Swan said almost no one inside the U.S. government had seen the document before it was publicly announced. “The tiniest inner circle had seen it,” he said. “Very senior people in the White House hadn’t seen it. Very senior people in the state department and the Pentagon hadn’t seen it. There are parts of the intelligence community almost monitoring these talks like it’s a foreign government.”
The book also addresses the White House’s response to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and Trump’s links to the late financier. After the Times published an excerpt, other reporters revealed White House worries about how the material was obtained. Swan and Haberman declined to detail their sourcing.
Haberman described Trump’s “mania for remodeling his surroundings,” including being found in the Oval Office trying to glue gold appliques over the fire. She connected it to his long-standing desire to emulate the 1986 Wollman Rink project in New York’s Central Park, which he completed after taking over a stalled public project. “He never really got over the fact that his name was being torn off of buildings in New York,” she said.
In the concluding interview of the book, Trump told the authors that a “historian” — who turned out to be golfer Gary Player’s caddie — had compared him to a list of military conquerors that included Alexander the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin.
Haberman said the book’s focus was Trump’s return to power and “how he and a small group of people prepared for it, the events that drove it.” She said this exercise of authority was “fairly effective for a time” but added, “Now you are seeing obviously less so.”