No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen - Trump's midterm promise backfires as GOP voters revolt

Episode Date: September 27, 2026

Trump’s $5000 promise to his voters backfires. Brian interviews Jonathan Swan about his new book Regime Change.Order Regime Change: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Regime-Change/Maggie-Haberman/9781668067246Written by Brian Tyler CohenProduced by Sam GraberRecorded in Los Angeles, CASee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Trump's $5,000 promise to his voters backfires, and I interview Jonathan Swan about his new book, Regime Change. I'm Brian Taylor Cohen, and you're listening to No Lie. Just days ago, Trump decided to come out and promise $5,000 to every American, but only if the Republicans won the midterms. It was a lie as transparent as it was desperate, not to mention illegal, but still, Trump told it because, as I always say, he thinks his audience is stupid and never waste an opportunity to show it.

Well, we now have some data backing up that. point, and is not great for Trump. According to Elliot Morris, voters aren't confused about the motive either. 62% said Trump made the promise mainly to win votes in November, and only 13% think he genuinely intends to send the money. Moreover, 71% of adults say it is inappropriate for presidents to promise government payments that depend on this party winning an election, including 53% of Republicans. Only about a quarter think the checks would actually go out, even if Republicans win.

We also asked voters whether Trump's promise makes them more or less. less likely to vote for Republican candidates in Congress. 28% said less likely, 13% said more likely, and 53% said it makes no difference. But many voters in that 13% already told us they were voting Republican in November. Fewer than 4% of adults say the checks make them more likely to vote Republican and aren't already there.

This offsets with large losses among independents who said by an 11-point margin Trump's scheme turned them off. So not only did voters not believe Trump's $5,000, promise, but the people who did believe it were already voting for Trump, and more people were actually turned off by it than it pulled in. Think about that. A net loss of voters after Trump tried to buy people off. And I'd imagine that part of the reason that voters don't believe him is that he's done this before, constantly. He promised a Doge dividend that never

materialized, a tariff dividend that never materialized. Back in his first term, it was a middle-class tax cut that never materialized. This guy has bait and switched his own voters more times than Lucy's pulled the football away from Charlie Brown. So no, they're not buying it. Another pretty funny byproduct of this is that it's undermined the Republicans' ability to frame the Democrats as these spooky socialists or trying to give everything away, like, for example. But the problem is this.

Democrats, by a pretty wide margin, seem to like socialism. Well, they were never taught of the horrors of socialism and the greatness of capitalism. The radical socialist platform that seems to be taking over the Democrats. Party. Socialism doesn't fly. And just days ago, the Senate Republicans official Twitter account wrote, Democrats, socialists love to promise free stuff, but they never mention who pays for it. My dudes, your leader is out here promising money like Oprah. Only difference being that Oprah actually does what she says.

So I'm heartened to see people waking up to the lies from this president and his party. For years, they have been treating their audiences and their voters with utter contempt, assuming that they will fall for whatever they say, no matter how many times they refer. to deliver. But this government has finally put an end to all of that. This is a Republican party that swore prices would go down, they've gone up, they swore no new wars, where in one, they swore the Epstein files would be released, they're suppressing three million documents, they swore cheaper gas and lower inflation, instead they're rising or at record highs. It's bad enough to fail to deliver, it's something entirely worse to fail to deliver and yet still

pretend like you are. And the blue wave that we're going to see in November will prove that that there is just a limit to how much Americans are willing to be lied to. Next up is my interview with Jonathan Swan. No Lie is brought to you by Factor. It is genuinely tough to stick to any semblance of a diet when the weather gets nice and friends start getting together and a box of cookies is just a few taps away on the phone. But as we head into fall, it is definitely time to lock in and Factor makes it easier than ever, even when I'm on the go.

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BTC 50 off at factor meals.com. I'm joined now by the author of the new book Regime Change, Jonathan Swann. Jonathan, thanks for joining me. Great to be here. Thanks. So I argue and have argued that Donald Trump is an autocrat. This is somebody who is seeking to use the military as his own personal police force, who's undermined the Constitution, who doesn't accept election results where he loses.

At the same time, in your book, you and Maggie described, a document where Donald Trump compares himself to Mao, to Stalin, to Hitler, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan. So where is the disconnect here? Because the right will lose their minds if you make any reference to Donald Trump acting as a dictator or an autocrat. But at the same time, he seems to relish that comparison. You know, I suppose the word has connotations that people don't want to, you know, deal with. But as you said, Trump himself embraces it. You know, he posted on Truth Social the other day a picture of his face looking at the globe and it says his hemisphere. I mean, he's embracing the idea that he's at a minimum a regional hegemon.

He doesn't view countries in this hemisphere as independent sovereign countries. He views Venezuela as an American colony, essentially. and Marco Rubio is the viceroy of Venezuela. So one of Marco Rubio's many jobs. Right. So, you know, I don't get too hung up on, you know, the terminology. We try to describe in the book what he's doing. And it's indisputable that he has expanded presidential power and used presidential power

in ways that, A, the framers did not intend. And B, in ways that no president in our lifetime, in some respects no president ever has done before. Do you think that there is a full acceptance by the Republican Party that this is not a political movement that's interested in democracy? Like, do you think that what we're seeing right now is just the Republican Party relinquishing their participation in a democracy? I think what we're seeing that is more notable

is a whole branch of government decide to remove themselves. from the field. And this is the legislative branch. Yeah. Last year, we make the argument in the book, and I think it's indisputable, that in 2025, Donald Trump wielded more absolute control

and dominance over his own party in Congress than any president that we've ever seen. And Congress ceased to operate as a check against the executive branch. It ceased to operate as an independent branch of government. It became a subsidiary of the administration. And you saw senators who we know from our reporting felt that people like Pete Hagseth were grossly unfit to be in the jobs that they were put in, grossly. And yet under fear and pressure, they voted for him.

So when you have a whole branch of government decide to essentially seed the field, that's how you get this dynamic. The only way people talk about how do you restore some semifference? of the system that we have, American-style democracy. Well, you can't have the system when one branch ceases to function and pieces out. And then the other branch, the judiciary, is stacked with Trump appointees all the way up. Do you think that these Republicans are realizing that contracting all of their autonomy over to the executive branch was a mistake? As we see brand-new polling, for example, showing that Democrats are now favored in the House and the Senate. Fox News just released a poll a few days ago showing that they're shifting 15 races in favor of Democrats. There were no races that were

shifted in favor of Republicans. Trump himself is now saddled with, according to the American Research Group, polling a 29% approval rating. That's the first time in either of his terms that he's had an approval rating in the 20s. As we know, midterm elections or referendum on the president and the party in power, but the party in power, as you've said, has contracted all of their power over to the executive branch. Do you think that there is some recognition from these other Republicans that they've made a mistake by making their entire identity just Donald Trump, who now himself has become so toxic. Yeah. I mean, you're seeing the evidence of that, right? You're starting to see Republicans distance themselves from Trump. I'm not saying it's happening

on mass because a lot of these Republicans still have the calculation that, well, we need the base to show up in the election. And yes, his approval rating has fallen precipitously. among independence and enthusiasm is way down, but he's still generally popular among Republicans. So they have this balancing act. He's toxic among the general electorate, still pretty popular among Republicans, and they have to figure out, what do I do? So, you know, you see Salazar in Florida come out with an ad where she's to the camera criticizing the president on immigration. You start to see some candidates scrubbing his name from their websites. So you are seeing that.

You don't have to dig inside their minds. You just look at the behavior. But it's too late. It's too late. It's not believable for voters that these people... Five minutes before election. Right. I mean, it's, it's, you know, I mean, it's ridiculous.

You know, someone who's been in absolute lockstep, you know, until the eve of the election, you know, it's okay fine. Throughout this whole process since the book was released, there have been these constant attacks by Trump himself where he's gone after you guys. He goes after Maggie more acutely, but you know, it's not, I wouldn't put him past Trump to attack the woman in a male-female duo to go after the woman more frequently. But did he think that when you guys were interviewing him that you were going to write a puff piece on him and then so or is this like k-fabe? Is this him just pretending to be angry? But at the same time, he kind of relishes the attention that he's given by virtue of being

in this book, even if he's presented as the heel. So there's no k-fabe. You know, my colleagues at the New York Times reported two months ago about serious security concerns with Air Force One. 48 hours after the story, FBI agents showed up at their front doors, serving them subpoenas. He's suing the New York Times. This is all very draining on resources. He's investigating a number of our stories, particularly with regard to the munitions crisis, trying to find our sources. That stuff is just, it's deadly serious. There's no K-Fabe involved. As for Trump

talking to reporters, we tried to get an interview with him for a couple of months through the front through the press office and the thing. And everyone thought it was, we learned subsequently, was trying to block us getting the interview. They thought it was a bad idea, right? No one was saying, oh, president, you should really sit down and, you know, do this interview. So we went directly to President Trump. And the fact is, every reporter in Washington has his phone number, and he will pick up the phone and talk. So we went directly to him, and that's how we ended up getting the interview. Trump will talk to anyone. He just will. And he will, and he will, take anyone's call. He will believe that he's his own best spokesman and generally speaking he'll

think that it's worth his while to put his message out there and see how it goes. I don't think he had any illusions that this would be a puff book or a flattering book or what have you. But I also think he has known Maggie in particular for a very long time and felt it was worth his while to sit down with us. Isn't he busy? Like, the notion that somebody would take anybody's call and talk to anybody. I mean, I know what I do as a YouTuber on a daily basis. I don't have that much time if somebody, like, the amount of calls that I have to screen because I just don't have enough hours in the day, and I'm not, you know, leading the U.S. military.

What percentage of his presidency does it come across seems like him marketing his own presidency versus the actual governing aspect of things? Well, you know, it's interesting. I think there's a split. Particularly last year, we were watching what looked like this frenzy of action, which it was, particularly the first three. With the executive orders. And it was very well, they planned it all out and what have you. But when you talk to people who go in and meet with Trump, they say it's like he has all the time in the world. You know, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, they used to have their schedule down to like 10,

minute increments, you know, this, a meeting with Trump meanders can meander for two, three hours with people wandering in and out, way off the agenda. You could spend an hour talking about the ballroom and the Corinthian columns and the type of marble that he's putting in the bathroom. I think somebody asked him, like, how his meeting with President Xi went. And the first thing he said was that we spoke about granite. Right. Like, two global superpowers. I completely believe that. That's not the part I doubt. But when we went in and saw the president for this book when we interviewed him, he was seemed

completely unhurried. It was the 17th day of the war with Iran. And the war seemed to be the furthest thing from his mind. He had printouts of photographs of maple trees on the resolute desk because he said he was buying maple trees for the White House. And then he had different angles, images of the ballroom. And that was what he wanted us to see first. That was the first probably 15 minutes of the interview. And you talk to anyone who spends time with him. He spends an inordinate amount of time essentially on interior decoration and trying to figure out how to put his name on more physical, you know,

monuments and other aspects of Washington, D.C. The way that I think about this, and this is coming from somebody who is, you know, both a cynic and contemptuous of him, which is that, like, you move to honor yourself by, by, you know, etching your name into all these structures now, because in the future, you don't have that much faith that somebody's going to do it for you. And so you have to honor yourself. now before he leaves office because really what history is going to show is that he was the first autocratic president of this country, that he left office kind of ushering in the

second gilded age where folks are more desolate, hungrier, sick, or poorer than they were before. And so, you know, like, if he doesn't do it, who's going to do it? I don't know if you have the same read on things or if it's just some degree of malignant narcissism. What do you make of the fact that his sole focus here seems to be shoving his face? and name onto as many structures as possible. I hope I'm not misremembering this, but I don't think I am. Ben Terrace from New York Magazine wrote a piece recently about Trump's interior renovations and projects in D.C.

And I think Trump himself admitted out loud that if he doesn't do it, no one else will. Yeah, okay. And so I actually think he said that. he remember one of his great sources of rage when he left the first time was his name being taken off buildings was you know PGA event being taken away from his golf course yeah and so I think a big part of his determination when he came back to office was I'm going to put my name in a way on so many things that it would be permanent you know it was a big deal for him that the Palm Beach airport became the Donald J. Trump Airport. The library, which no one talks about, it's not actually

a library that he's being built. It's a tower. It's a giant tower that looks like the freedom tower in Miami on gifted land. And we report in the book that they're soliciting money from the Saudis to bill it. This is the story of the administration. But he is trying to make sure that he is unerasable because I think he realizes because he's gone through that experience. He's, that he will be, that there will be efforts to take his name off. What do you think the reaction will be if you have a Democratic president and the ballroom gets renamed because Democrats have full control of government? Like in that hypothetical situation where you have a Democratic president, House, Senate,

you have the, you know, what I'm sure will be the Donald J. Trump presidential ballroom. Strike that name. It becomes the Barack Hussein Obama presidential ballroom. what happens in the aftermath of that moment, as far as Trump is concerned, based on your interactions with him? I think the way he sees the ballroom is, regardless of what name, I mean, obviously I'm sure he would want it to be the Donald Trump, whatever, but he built it. And everyone will know that. And that was, you know, he's changed the White House in that way. And it's not really conceivable to me that it would be bulldozed, you know.

Right. I agree with that. Well, let's expand the scope of this question. all of the things he's trying to etch his name into. You've got, you know... He'd be enraged. I mean, look at the Kennedy Center. Right. They took his name off the Kennedy Center,

and he's talking about bulldozing the Kennedy Center. Okay? So, you know, that's the reaction. I mean, you have, you drive down, you know, near the White House Washington, C. You see the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. By the way, an institute that they tried to shut down during Doge, and then he stuck his name on it,

I mean, I don't think it takes a genius to realize that if a Democrat comes into the White House, that's just going to not be called the Donald J. Trump Institute of P. So, you know, he'll be watching all of that very closely. Okay, so the fact that we're talking about this and the fact that he's doing all of this obviously underscores the extent to which his focus is on these vanity projects and not regular people. Is there any recognition on his behalf where, you know, his focus is on, you know, kind of this, this like let them eat cake type deal where he is just focused on building himself a ballroom.

and a triumphal arch, and encrusting the Oval Office in gold, and redoing the reflecting pool. At the same time that his election was predicated on this idea that people felt forgotten in this country and they couldn't afford grosser. I mean, he talked about like this elusive, old-fashioned word, groceries. Like, that was the focus of his campaign. He had a quote, a clip that I often throw to in my videos

where he says the reason he won the election was, yes, immigration, but also the cost of groceries. And now all of those costs that left people feeling so destitute have been exacerbated. And yet all the while, his focus is just on these interior design projects. One thing we found when we were reporting the book just again and again and again when we were talking to people who were either working for him in the government or people who would come in and visit him is his mind was not on domestic policy or cost of living issues or any of the things that you were talking about. In fact, he wasn't even

particularly worried about domestic politics. Yeah. You know, his staff were desperate for him to care more about the midterm elections, to be more invested in the results of the midterm elections. But if you look at it from Trump's perspective, his existential victory, his great victory, was 2024, where he saw the stakes as I may end up in prison or I may end up back in the White House. Yeah. And after he won that, it was, all about a legacy in his mind, which is imprinting himself all over the world, doing quote-unquote big things, which is overwhelmingly in the field of foreign affairs. He thought he could be the first president in 47 years to depot, you know,

get rid of this Iranian regime. He obviously did regime change in Venezuela. You know, you get the idea there. The cost of living issues are very low down. on the hierarchy. And what's really interesting, Brian, is we're seeing for the first time, say what you want about Trump, but historically he's been pretty good at getting on the right side of populist issues, right? He's now on the wrong side of some of the biggest populist issues in the country. AI, right? One of the most, the clearest cut polling you will see. We talk to

Republican strategists, talk to democratic strategies, data centers. People are overwhelmingly opposed to them, fearful of this technology. And Trump sounds, if you transcribed one of his comments about AI, it might as well be Jensen Huang. Might as well be Sam Olme. He is an evangelist about this technology, completely on the other side of this populist issue. The Iran War, you know, go down the list. The public does not find it endearing that he is building this ballroom and gilding everything and that his family is making orders of magnitude more money than they've ever made.

It's coming through in focus groups. It's coming through in polling. His team knows that. I mean, we got private focus groups in polling for the book. And this was like early this year. It was horrific. Yeah. It was alarm bells just ringing out.

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That's Q-U-I-N-C.com slash BTC. That suggests that he is acting, I mean, obviously it's amplified, you know, orders of magnitude higher, but that he's acting like a lame duck, which I guess raises the question, what do you think he will do as it relates to a third term? He's not exactly acting like somebody who is going to run for a third term, but at the same time, this kind of thing has been floated, and, you know, he obviously refuses to rule out the prospect. but just curious, you know.

So I make a practice of never like glibly dismissing any, like after January 6th, I don't sort of say, oh, no, every, you know, right, right, whatever. I don't sort of preemptively rule out anything. But I'm not seeing any signs in our reporting for the book, for the newspaper, that Donald Trump is preparing for a third term, or that he even wants to. Think from his perspective. Or at this point that he could. I mean, like, his approval ratings.

So, you know, he, he, he. And I don't even legally, I mean like approval rating wise. I understand. But, you know, for example, we have scenes in the book where he's, Rupert Murdoch's over for dinner and he's asking Murdoch to assess who he likes better J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio. He's constantly asking people, what do you think of J.D.? You're thinking about the primary.

You know, more of a sport for him. It's almost like he's a color commentator talking about this stuff. But so I don't see any indications privately, publicly, publicly that he, is contemplating that. And, you know, from his perspective, his family make $2 billion or more, probably way more than we know, way more than we know. He, you know, he is remaking Washington in his image. He is doing whatever he wants in the role. He's going to, he has said we report in the book that he's going to pardon anyone who came with. within 250 feet of the Oval Office.

He has sweeping immunity from the Supreme Court. He has nothing to fear legally. Right. So, you know, I think probably the thing he will miss most is the attention. The book obviously made a ton of news as it relates to the first question I asked, which was about the different dictators and autocrats throughout history. Natalie Harp was a big story as well. Was there any anecdote or aspect of the book that you thought would make more news and maybe

for maybe because of some other new cycle that that overshadowed it didn't. The fact that they were seriously contemplating, suspending habeas rights, which we, I mean, we got private memos that the White House staff secretary wrote, which, you know, very dry legal language, but very clearly sounding the alarm bell, that this idea that Stephen Miller was pushing that the president was contemplating, one of the most fundamental,

they're basically, this is a, these are rights that, predate the constitution go back to the macon carter you know the right to if you are if the government detains you they lock you up the right to challenge your detention doesn't get much more fundamental than that and the fact that they were people we knew that they i mean they talked to stephen miller talked about it but the fact that it was taken seriously enough internally that a hardcore loyalist will shaft is the staff secretary now the white house council the fact that he felt compelled to put this down on paper and we reported this in the book and disclose this in the book. It got attention. We reported it in the New York Times, but I mean, it's a pretty big deal. And I feel like with all

the things that are going, it just sort of was just one of the things that, you know, kind of glossed over a little bit. Yeah. When you were with Axios during Trump's first term, obviously that was, I know we were speaking with my team, you know, right here in this room just before this interview started. I think the best interview that any of us have seen with anybody who'd sat down with Donald Trump, what was his demeanor like off-camera in the lead-up to and the aftermath of that interview? Because obviously, like any human being

with some modicum of self-awareness, which, you know, waning, though it may be, he has, can recognize that that did not go well for him. So I'm just curious, the lead-up to and aftermath of that interview what that was like. So the immediate aftermath, he thought, seemed to think it was a good interview. Immediately after. Yeah.

And then, so I had a little exchange afterwards, and it seemed like he thought it was a good interview. And obviously contentious, but, you know, sometimes Trump can sort of enjoy the, the conflict, right? But afterwards, when the coverage started coming in and when he started to see just the overwhelming amount of, you know, the clips going around and everyone, you know, replaying moments from the interview, it was relayed to me that the present was not happy. And some strong language was used. And certainly his staff didn't think it was a home run afterwards.

So, you know, I think his view changed when he consumed the coverage of the interview more than the interview itself. Yeah. I mean, I haven't had an interview with him since on camera. The first time I'd done a sit down with him was six years later. Yeah. Basically six years later for the book. Did he mention anything?

No. Yeah. And, you know, we don't rely on authorized access. For Maggie and I, it makes no difference to us whether we're allowed in the White House again or not. You know, he's banning organizations and letting him back in. Makes absolutely no difference to us. Because everything in this book, just about, every sensitive scene, situation room, oval office, whatever. It's not like we're walking in the front door of the White House and you walk up to the press secretary's office.

Hey, tell us what happened in the situation. I mean, do people think that's how it works? It's not how it works. Of course. you're cultivating sources who are not authorized to speak about things that are happening. And it makes absolutely no difference to us whether we have direct access to him or authorized access, you know, from the press side. On this point of Donald Trump banning various press outlets, you know, this is happening at the same time that we're seeing, obviously, this consolidation between CBS and CNN as this Paramount Warner Brothers merger seems to be going through. how are you thinking about the broader media ecosystem

and our ability to come back from a place where it just feels like, because it's true, a lot of right-wing figures are consolidating control of all of this between, you know, Zuckerberg, who's been very cozy with Trump and Republican administrations, Jeff Bezos, obviously David Ellison, and Barry Weiss. And, I mean, Elon Musk owning Twitter,

you know, the media is not, not liberal. Like, at least the folks at the top of the media are not liberal. And we've already seen that kind of play itself out with CBS's coverage and who knows what CNN will look like moving forward. But just, you know, how are you thinking about this broader ecosystem moving forward? To me, and I'm not sure, it sounds self-serving, but it's just what I think. the New York Times is sort of a unicorn in this environment because to do the type of reporting that Maggie and I do, particularly the national security reporting,

we need an infrastructure around us. I couldn't do, we couldn't do this type of reporting as independent journalists on Substack. I love independent journalists. I support it. I pay for all kinds of substacks. I think there are great journalists who do it. But the type of reporting that we do needs and infrastructure around it.

Because when you have the President of the United States suing you, when you have them coming after sources, you need not just great lawyers, you need great digital security. We have extremely sophisticated digital security at the New York Times. And you also need something else that's really important, which is independence. You need an owner,

and this is what we have at the New York Times, who does not rely on the government for anything. Yeah. A.G. Salsberger doesn't need anything from the government. Yeah. He doesn't need licenses. He has no business before the government. He's not in any other industries.

This is everything to the family. Okay? The New York Times is everything. And so you don't see A.G. Salzberger sucking up to Trump. You don't see him making donations. to Trump. You don't see him on the dais at the inauguration. He does none of that. But he's also not someone who is pushing anything ideologically on the journalists. I have never been pushed in an ideological direction at the New York Times. I've always been encouraged to follow my interests,

have an open mind, you know, dig in. So that's why I work at the New York Times. And I'm not naive enough to think that those conditions are easy to create or they apply across the industry because the fact of the matter is journalism is really expensive, the type of journalism we do. Commentary is much cheaper, but when you're doing investigative journalism, it costs so much money. There's travel involved. There's digging. There's so much time. It's expensive. You're never going to make, it's never going to be a profit center. It's always subsidized by something else. And it's really hard to build those businesses. So I'm not naive enough to well, it's just so easy. It's just a matter of like being righteous and having, you know,

to create that business is really hard. And there was no guarantee the New York Times was going to survive. You know, 15, 16 years ago, the New York Times was in a very precarious place economically. And they managed to build a digital subscription model and it's worked and they had the brand and everything else. Not so easy. And so, you know, often you do have businesses where media is just part of it and they have other things that require government approval or or whatever else and it creates problems totally i speak about this very often with mark alias who i do a show with and uh and you know we've both recognized how you have these these major media conglomerates that seem so big and powerful because expressly because of their size and how many other entities they own but that's also their

Achilles heel. That is their fatal flaw because they can be leveraged by the government. They always need something. They need approval for a merger or an acquisition or something that will eventually go before the federal government. And they've all felt, you know, felt that pressure at the hands of this administration, which is why we see so much capitulation at the hands of all of these outlets that otherwise feel, you know, too big to fail when in fact, that that's the very thing that kind of becomes their downfall in the end. And the thing that distinguishes Donald's, Trump, as he has shown more aggressively than any president in recent memory, that he's willing to use the levers of government explicitly. He wants them to know that, that he will use the

levers of government to try to force changes in these organizations. Now, it's not the first time my president has done that. LBJ was famous for doing that. He did it a lot more privately behind the scenes. But in the modern era, the recent era, we haven't seen anything like this. in terms of leaks within this administration and I know that that's been a pretty prominent theme are there people that you know of obviously without you know I presume feel free to name names but I presume that that

isn't going to be on the table but are there folks within this administration who may seem outwardly like loyalists who recognize the danger posed by Trump and some of the folks who are actually lifers in terms of the public faces of the administration, these are people who they may disagree with Trump on certain decisions, for sure, but none of them think he's a danger. Like in the first term, you would have private conversations

and it seeped into a lot of the reporting with senior officials in the Trump White House and administration who thought he was a danger. Right. And who saw their own job as protecting the country and the war from Donald Trump. That is not the case in this administration. all, just not, of anyone of any significance and stature. What do you think would be a red line for any of these people? Or would there be no red line for these people?

No, I mean, there have been, in some cases, strong policy disagreements. The most obvious that I think about, because I just thought it was so striking and surprising to me anyway, and I think to Maggie as well, was in the leader. up to the Iran war, J.D. Vance in those meetings was really the only one in the group meetings with the president who was arguing against this operation. What was interesting about that is J.D. Vance really has one job ahead of 2028 politically, which is to get Donald Trump's approval and blessing. And if he gets that, he's almost impossible to beat him for the Republican nomination. what he did in the lead up to the war really irritated Trump.

It did not endear him to Trump. Trump was complaining about it to others privately. He was irritated by it. He didn't like to hear it. The interesting thing about that was Vance was not alone in thinking this war was a bad idea. Many others on that senior staff were at a minimum skeptical. But in those meetings, they did not raise their objections in an aggressive way or an assertive way with the president. And that's the difference between term one and term two.

If you had the team in term one, you would have had the chairman of the joint chiefs, Mark Millie, saying, so, this is a terrible idea. You know, very forceful arguments. You would have economic arguments. You would have all kinds of arguments. And it's just such a different team around him now that is not, you don't get that kind of pushback.

It's very, this episode was interesting because it was so striking and unusual. And in almost every other aspect of policy, Vance is completely in lockstep. And of course, in the Iran war, he's been out there defending it publicly and what have you. So that stood out to me as just a rare example of a senior official coming out. Do you think he gets to have his cake and eat it to where he gets to both claim that he was the lone skeptic in the room while at the same time publicly coming out and defending the exact war that he's trying to claim credit for opposing? Well, he's not, so it's just a fact he opposed it in those rooms. Like those meetings happened, you know, we've talked to people who don't like vans.

But does that matter once you've already kind of squandered your credibility by going out and also selling the very thing that you want credit for opposing? I don't give him, I don't think it matters, like, I don't think he's going to get political credit for opposing it. I don't think this is something that like, oh, in the 2028 election, in the general election, people are like, oh, well, there were those reports that private, you know, like, this is not something he's, like, going to be able to campaign on, okay? The vice president of an administration.

If answers the nominee, he's not going to be campaigning against Trump, okay? He's not going to be out there. It's not possible. There's no distance allowed. It's just a plain fact. Which is ironic because one of the biggest albatrosses around Kamala Harris's neck was her inability and or unwillingness to distance herself adequately from Joe Biden. Obviously, there was that question on the view that plagued her. And Republicans benefited from exactly that.

And that's the same trap that they're, you know, going to fall into with the JD fan situation, but that they're falling into right now. Like, do you think Donald Trump is going to be tolerant of the nominee of his vice president being out there, even if he wanted to? Yeah. Of course he's not. And it's not going to happen. Yeah.

So the credit thing's kind of irrelevant because I don't think he's going to get any political credit for this. It's just a thing that happened. It's like a fact that happened. And I thought it was interesting because it's one of the things. the only examples I can think of where it was a big decision and there was like really forceful opposition from a senior inner circle person. So the book, again, is regime change, obviously a behemoth of a book.

Congratulations on the monster run that you and Maggie have had. And for folks who are watching right now, if you want to read more, I'm going to put the link to regime change right here on the screen and also in the post description. If you're listening on the podcast, I'm going to throw it in the show notes. Jonathan, thanks so much for taking the time today. Thanks for having me, Brian. Appreciate it. Thanks again to Jonathan Swan. That's it for this episode. Talk to you on Wednesday.

You've been listening to No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen. Produced by Sam Graber, music by Wellesie, and interviews edited for YouTube by Nicholas Nicotera. If you want to support the show, please subscribe on your preferred podcast app and leave a five-star rating in a review. And as always, you can find me at Brian Tyler Cohen on all of my other channels, or you can go to bryantylercoen.com to learn more.