Second term marked by secrecy, loyalty, gilded decor
Swan describes Trump’s fixation on power and historical legacy
In an interview with NPR’s Dave Davies published Wednesday, Swan said the document Trump presented to him and Haberman during their interview for the book “had nothing to do with morality, all just about pure power projection.” In addition to Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, the list included Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan, according to Swan.
MSI previously reported that Trump republished a similar document on Truth Social in June, writing “Sounds good to me!” in response. Trump attributed that version to “presidential historian Dave King.”
Swan told NPR that he and Haberman discussed the exchange afterward. “It really occurred to us that when you look at it through that lens, his second term makes a lot more sense,” Swan said.
The book describes a second-term White House where Swan said “there’s almost no delineation” in meetings, which he said “have no beginning, middle or end” and often become “essentially one meeting that just rolls throughout the afternoon with different people joining and leaving.” Swan said participants with no apparent business in the discussions — including a pro wrestler, a crypto investor, and a foreign visitor from what he called “a golf monarchy” — sometimes join meetings.
Swan recounted one scene in which Trump was in a small, highly classified meeting about a defense program when a man entered carrying stone samples for the Rose Garden. Swan said Trump and the man began conferring about paving and stone, and the meeting ended without resolving the issue it was intended to address.
The president’s focus on White House decor has intensified during his second term, according to Swan. He said Trump has “gilded almost every corner of the Oval Office,” adopting what Swan called an “inner Louis XIV” style. Swan contrasted this with what he described as the historical tradition of “modesty when it comes to design and decoration, reflecting the fact that America is a republic, not a monarchy.”
Swan said Trump’s travels to Middle Eastern palaces in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates influenced his approach to White House decoration. “He was just in a state of absolute pleasure, going from one palace to the next, admiring the marble, looking at most rarefied displays of state wealth on Earth,” Swan said. “And that’s essentially what he’s trying to create at the White House.”
On the issue of secrecy, Swan told NPR that when Trump and his team want to keep matters secret — particularly regarding the planning of the war with Iran — “very, 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.”
Swan said Trump’s inner circle during his first term included senior officials who “thought they were working for someone who was dangerous” and “saw their own roles as protecting the country and the world from the person that they were ostensibly working for.” Those officials, Swan said, “don’t exist anymore in this administration.” He described Trump’s current senior staff as people who “believe in him, are loyal to him,” and who, in some cases, “viewed the stakes of the 2024 election as not so much about policy, but about staying out of prison.”
Swan noted that aside from the COVID-19 pandemic, he cannot remember a time where Trump looked “as stuck as he looks right now.” He said Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran was driven by what Swan described as Trump’s natural hubris. “It’s pretty clear he realizes that this war has not gone well, has not played out the way that Netanyahu pitched him or that Trump himself thought would play out,” Swan said.
Trump responded to “Regime Change” in a post on Truth Social, calling it “mostly made up, Fake News, largely fiction, as have been most of the things Haberman has written about me for so many years.” The book is published by Simon & Schuster.