Inside the Trump ‘Regime Change’ with Jonathan Swan
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New York Times journalist Jonathan Swan is famous for this interview with Donald Trump at the height of COVID.
I think it's under control. I'll tell you what. How? A thousand Americans are dying a day. They are dying. That's true. And it is what it is.
Now he's exposing the US president again with a forensic look at what he says was the most consequential year of an American presidency in our lifetime. Donald Trump's first presidency was defined by chaos, but also by the people around him trying to contain it. Sworn says the second term is different. Trump has returned to the White House with a tighter circle of loyalists and far fewer people willing to say no. In a new book, Regime Change, co-authored with Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan goes inside the first 14 months of Trump's return to power, documenting a presidency using the machinery of government to punish enemies, pressure institutions, and test what one president can get away with. I'm Ruby Jones, and you're listening to 7am.
How did Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman decide to pivot their reporting into Regime Change?
Today, Jonathan Swan on Trump's second term and how he's changed America forever. It's Monday, July 13. Jonathan, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
So your new book, Regime Change, it chronicles the first sort of year, 14 months of Trump's second presidency. And people would know you and your co-author, Maggie Haberman, as New York Times journalist. But I thought to begin with, would you mind telling me a bit about the reporting of the book, about how you approached it and what it was that you were trying to show?
So Maggie and I have covered Donald Trump for a long time. This is my 11th consecutive year. Maggie's covered him for more than 25 years. I mean, she had her first byline about Donald Trump in 1998. So Maggie and I were approached by publishers because we were working together at the New whatever was coming next with Trump was going to be an epic story. We were going to write a book about the final act of Donald Trump, whatever that was. And at that time, it could have been a story that ended with Donald Trump going to prison. Or it could have ended up with him going to the White House. So we did the book deal, and we basically just started reporting. We'd sort of done about a year of hardcore reporting by the time he's sworn into office, January 20 last year.
We could already see that all of the reporting that we'd done from the campaign, the vast, vast, vast majority of it we were going to throw out.
The office of President of the United States... The office of President of the United States. And will, to the best of my ability. And will, to the best of my ability. Preserve, protect, and defend. Preserve, protect, and defend. The Constitution of the United States. The Constitution of the United States. So help me God. So help me God. Congratulations, Mr. President.
So we made like a very painful decision to basically throw out a whole year's work. But it focused us and we realized that what the project needed to be was documenting Donald Trump's return to the presidency. And we both believe he's the most consequential American president of our lifetimes. And that last year...
was the most consequential year of an american presidency in our lifetime so we just we just report the hell out of it and uh that's kind of how the book came together and so what was it that really made you realize that that you needed to make that pivot that this second trump presidency had the power to to change u.s politics and and global politics for good so you
We've seen in the United States over the last few decades an expansion of presidential power. Presidents have been exercising unilateral power to a greater and greater extent. So it's not like Donald Trump came from nowhere. He didn't. There's a lineage before that. But it was very obvious early on. when Donald Trump appoints the world's richest man, Elon Musk, as essentially a co-president and allows him to run roughshod over the whole government, the whole federal government, when they shut down an entire agency over a weekend, USAID.
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