When Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan sat down with President Trump in the Oval Office earlier this year to interview him for their new book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, he eagerly produced a two-page letter from a supporter he described as a historian. The letter’s premise was extraordinary: that Trump was more powerful than some of history’s most consequential figures, including Napoleon, Joseph Stalin, and Adolf Hitler.
The author of the letter was not, in fact, a historian. He was a golf caddy. But Trump’s evident pride in the comparison revealed something to the two New York Times reporters about what drives his second presidency.
“Trump was visibly in a state of pleasure to be in their company,” Swan told Vanity Fair. “He wants to be a great man of history.”
Based on more than 1,000 interviews and three years of reporting, Regime Change paints a vivid and deeply unsettling tableau of a chaotic period during which Trump has governed with awesome power and unprecedented impunity. He is a president, as the authors put it, who’s become “a walking moral hazard, rarely saddled for long with the costs or consequences of his risk-taking and rule-breaking.”
Published 17 months into Trump’s second term, Regime Change pulls back the curtain on Trump’s hostile takeover of Washington. There are details about his peculiar existence in the White House residence and portraits of the figures around him—like Natalie Harp, the devoted aide who writes “adoring letters” to Trump that she leaves in his “private spaces,” including one declaring, “You are all that matters to me.”
The book, which publishes today, has already generated anxiety inside the White House. Trump has been fuming about its revelations, and a parlor game around who-leaked-what has been underway in DC since excerpts first appeared in the Times. Some of those contained verbatim recountings of highly sensitive meetings between top officials in the Situation Room.
Haberman and Swan spoke with Vanity Fair about their “grueling” reporting process, how writing the book almost killed them, and what they learned through it all about the extraordinary nature of Trump’s second presidency. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Vanity Fair: We’re a year and a bit into Trump’s second term. Tell us why you decided to write a book so soon into this administration.
Jonathan Swan: Well, it became clear to us very early on that we were covering, firstly, a presidency that was nothing like the first term, basically unrecognizable in many ways. And secondly, that it had many elements that made it the most consequential presidency of our lifetime. And when you are covering something that feels as high stakes and important and urgent as what we were covering, it’s not something that you want to sit on. We’re both newspaper reporters. We both want to disclose. Our whole job is getting information out to the public. So, immodestly, I think this book is a pretty extraordinary effort of real-time reporting. It covers the first 14 months of the administration. It’s published in month 17. You understand publishing. This is a kind of miracle of publishing to get this done—and credit to Simon & Schuster for doing that.
