On with Kara Swisher - Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan Take Us Inside Trump’s ‘Imperial Presidency’

Episode Date: July 13, 2026

In their new book, “Regime Change,” New York Times journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan take readers inside President Trump’s return to the White House in 2025 and the chaotic year that followed. It’s an incredibly revealing look at a president and an administration untethered from the historical constraints of the office and willing to take extraordinary risks in pursuit of absolute power.   Maggie and Jonathan reveal what they learned about Elon Musk’s chaotic reign in the White House, why so many of the top tech CEOs were eager to get into the president’s good graces, and what Trump seems obsessed with in 2026. They also discuss the future of Trump's political movement and the challenges Democrats will face from this administration should they regain power in Congress.  Questions? Comments? Email us at [e-mail] or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Come see Kara live in DC. She is sitting down with Former Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo on July 16 at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center, and you can be in the room. ⁠Register now⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

He is the most consequential president, certainly of my lifetime, certainly of Jonathan's lifetime. Depends on how long we live. Maybe it'll remain that way. But he's not just going away. That is very true. Hi, everyone from New York Magazine and the Box Media Podcast Network. This is on with Kara Swisher. And I'm Kara Swisher. Covering President Donald Trump's second term is not an easy job, but few people do it better than New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. Their new book, Regime Change, is out now. It's an incredible account of Trump's return to the White House. House in January 2025 and the chaotic year that followed. We all remember the headlines like

the outrageous cabinet picks, the ice raids, the doge cuts, and the gifted Katari jet to name just a few. But Maggie and Jonathan's book takes readers inside the conversations at Mara Lago in the Oval Office and even in the Situation Room to tell the stories behind those headlines. What comes through is a portrait of a president and administration untethered from the historical constraints of the office and willing to take extraordinary risks in the pursuit of absolute power. I think it's really important to chronicle this in real time, especially the enormous amount of corruption going on with the Trump family, which has essentially monetized the White House for their own benefit.

As I have said, Trump is a coin-operated president, and as you'll see here, a lot of people have been putting coins into the vending machine. And one more thing before we get started, if you're going to be in Washington, D.C. on July 16th, please join us at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center for a live taping of On. I'll be talking to Gina Ramundo, Commerce Secretary under President Biden and former Rhode Island Governor, about what AI means for the American workforce. And as a special bonus before that conversation, I'll be speaking with Johns Hopkins President Ron Daniels

and University of Notre Dame President, Father Robert Dowd, about how universities are approaching AI and workforce issues. You can get tickets and learn more at Voxmedia.com slash Kara Switch. Live. All right, let's get to my conversation with Maggie and Jonathan. They are second to none when it comes to covering Trump. This is a fascinating conversation. Stick around. Support for this show comes from The Guardian and their new show, Stateside, where journalists Kai Wright and Carter Sherman use the entire independent reporting resources of the Guardian to slow down the news and wrestle with the questions we all have about what is actually happening in the world. Join Ty and Carter three times a week as they utilize all the reporting resources

the Guardian has across news, international coverage, climate, culture, wellness, and more. And the Guardians, not owned by a billionaire, they fearlessly report the facts without interference. Go to the Guardian.com slash stateside to learn more and listen wherever you get your podcast or watch on YouTube.

That's theguardian.com slash stateside. Hey, quick thing before we get into it, I'm doing a live taping in Washington, D.C. on July 16th at the Johns Hopkins Hopkins University, Bloomberg Center. My guest is Gina Ramando, the 40th Secretary of Commerce and the 75th governor of Rhode Island and someone who has a lot to say about AI and what it's actually doing to the American economy. She may also run for president, so we should listen to what she has to say. It should be a good one. You can be in the room. Head to voxmedia.com,

Kara Swisher, live, to register. Spots are limited. We always sell out. The link is in the show notes. If you sit in the sun, you may just get burned. But some people are willing to take that chance. There is this certain degree of nihilism of like, oh, well, the world is bad anyway. Why wouldn't I just also get a tan? Tan maxing. That's this week on Explained It to Me. Find new episodes wherever you get your podcasts.

Maggie and Jonathan, thank you for coming on on. I'm excited to talk to you about this book. Thanks for having us. Maggie, you said in a few interviews that writing this book nearly killed you and Jonathan, and you said that unlike Trump's first term, you had to assume people in the administration were not telling the truth to start with. And yet you capture some incredible scenes in the book down to the empty ice cream cartons and potato chip bags that Trump would leave on the floor of the White House bedroom. Talk about adapting your reporting this time. First, Maggie, then Jonathan. We first got this book contract in 2023, and we would always plan on a book. that was going to be the last act of Trump, whatever that was, whether it was him going to prison,

whether it was, you know, which was a real possibility at the time, whether it was him returning to the White House. And once he was back in the White House, it was very clear that we were covering a radically different presidency than anything we had seen, and certainly in most ways unrecognizable the term one. So we shifted the focus to the first 14 months of this term and ended up jettisoning a solid 99% of our reporting. In some cases, there is material that appeared in the New York Times, such as, you know, some things related to Elon Musk, although we go a little deeper here on that topic. When we were remotely uncertain about something, it went on the cutting room floor because we wanted to have the most accurate version of history that we could about this remarkable

chapter, and we are clear-eyed that this is a first draft of history, that there will be other people who are going to interpret what has happened and probably add onto some of the episodes that we're describing. But we wanted to focus on, A, what was verifiable, B, what explained how this government works and how decisions are made and what their areas of focus are. And you will see that. That's across tech. It's across taking control of how the American story is told at this Mississippi. It is across the Pentagon. It is across various aspects of the government. John, what about working with sources, especially if you thought they were maybe not telling me the truth to start with? Presumably you begin with assuming people.

You begin with false until proven otherwise. And the only thing in your introduction I would disagree with is your characterization of like first term we sort of could trust the sources now. No, actually no, not at all. False until proven otherwise became my default setting in the first term as well. The biggest difference is the shrinking of the circle, which just makes it much more difficult to get information. I will say, again, we don't want to get too much into a sourcing conversation for reasons you that you'll find very obvious. But we've published some very detailed scenes in the Situation Room with very specific dialogue, scenes that are not exactly flattering to the administration. In some cases, are quite damaging to the administration. There hasn't been one denial. there hasn't been one specific denial from any of the participants in these meetings.

The only thing there has been is Trump himself doing a sort of all-purpose denial saying the whole thing is fake. But no one who's quoted in any of those scenes has denied anything so far. Maggie, did you want to add something to that? No, that's exactly right. In fact, the vice president told Megan Kelly that he was concerned that we had recordings because of the specificity and accuracy of these scenes. and, you know, we have not commented on that one way or the other and won't. But I don't assume that any of the people that I deal with in politics or in government are telling me the truth.

And that's not specific to this administration by any stretch of the imagination. We hear something and we learn a piece of information and then we build on that. And then we, you know, look and see how the corners of the information from the various people that we're dealing with overlap. And if there were major disagreements about either what was said or events that happened, they're discarded. You know, in cases where there is agreement about the sentiment, then we characterize it. But beyond that, I mean, I don't think it's just a more rigorous and arduous process to your point about how much smaller this circle is. We benefit from the fact that we both covered him for such a long time. We've covered his world for such a long time.

So we can have a sense of what angle somebody might be trying to comment something from if they're telling us. And that does help. Yeah. I mean, sometimes you can read something, right, Kara, and it's like, it's pretty obvious that, like, the microphone has been handed to one person. And it's like the world according to Garp, you know, and here's my version and whatever. We don't do that. we say on February 11th, at this time, Benjamin Netanyahu went down to the situation room. Here's where they were sitting. This was up on the screen. This happened. Then this happened.

And this said, then that said, okay, you can, if that was wrong, like, if any of those details were wrong, there's a bunch of people that we've named in the room that can come out and say, this is just bullshit. This is a fictional account or whatever. And like, that hasn't happened. Right, right, right. Nobody in any of those scenes has denied any. anything, whether it be the scene we have with all the big oil CEOs, Chevron, Exxon, you know, a very dramatic scene with some of the biggest oil CEOs in the country with Stephen Miller and Donald Trump in the room, with Stephen Miller texting the Attorney General, Trump basically telling the oil CEOs like at some kind of a fun house of no regulations,

they can have whatever they want, very specific dialogue out of the mouths of these CEOs. you would expect if we had something wrong that the corporate affairs department of Exxon or Chevron or Conoco or any of these people in the room might say, this is bullshit. This never happened. The reason that hasn't happened is because for every single one of these scenes, there's like ten scenes that didn't make it into the book because we just had that little kernel, a little bit of doubt or there was a conflicting thing. And so I don't think I'll ever do another book car.

I'm really not being, I'm not kidding. Like this thing was so freaking hard and brutal that like as a reporting process, like by the end of it, I was just like, I never want to even think about a book ever again. I know, I know the feeling. There are a lot of different ways Trump's second term is different from the first. You can make a long list. But one of the big differences this time tech and business leaders are very much behind him. In the first, they were much either on the bubble, didn't thought he was a moron or. sort of cooperated out of massive self-interest, but very little like. But in this book, you write

about how Trump delighted in getting the big tech CEOs to grovel for him, which is precisely what they did. He took joy in showing them flattering texts and messages from Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, like they were trophies. Now, you want to you start? Tell us about the lengths, both how Trump took to humiliate these billionaires, which I'm down for, and why they let him do it and the shift that you perceived here in these relationships. Let's start with you, Maggie. Yeah, sure. So I think there's a couple of factors at play that our reporting showed. And so one is, and you would know this better than we do, but a lot of tech leaders came to really dislike the Biden administration. They felt like there were certain regulations. They were onerous. They did not like DEI policies. Zuckerberg, obviously, has been fairly explicit about that. But it was remarkable to us that Zuckerberg, who once upon a time, funded one of the most known pro-immigration groups in the country,

goes during the transition to go have a, you know, sort of seance with Stephen Miller, basically, where Stephen Miller makes very clear how unhappy he was with that group. Zuckerberg distances himself from it. obviously there were corporate interests. Zuckerberg was in the middle of some kind of, I think it was an antitrust case that the government had brought, among other things. You know, Trump was suing meta over being de-platformed after the January 6th riot at the Capitol in 2021.

But it wasn't a black and white thing of, you know, I'm doing these things that I really don't want to be doing. In our reporting, these tech officials were delighted to be sort of shedding what they saw as, you know, constraints that had been placed on them for a variety of reasons. So another example is Jeff Bezos, who goes to dinner with Trump and, again, at Mar-a-Lago, and he says, he's trashing the Washington Post, you know, and Trump is, too, they're sort of commiserating. Trump is doing it from a coverage perspective. Bezos is lamenting the business side and describing them as, quote-unquote, terrible,

says, you know, describes this as his worst financial investment. whatever he thinks of the financial piece of it, independent journalism is really under siege in this administration in particular. And so it's remarkable that he's having this conversation. When Zuckerberg went to dinner with Trump, Trump sits on the patio, in addition to the texts that they send him that he, you know, is showing off at his golf club that led Elon Musk to describe it as first class groveling,

when Zuckerberg is there, Trump keys up on his iPad as he's DJing a version of the, national anthems sung by what is called the J6 choir. Yeah, the Star Spangled Banner. Right. And it's people who are who are in prison for their role alleged or for which they were convicted in the riot. And everybody, when Trump would play this version, would stand on the Mar-a-a-Patio and, you know, put a hand on heart. Zuckerberg did too. And it's a pretty remarkable moment of buy-in to Trump's worldview, not just bringing him a check, not just bringing him a gift. And then you had this inauguration where you had all of these tech leaders on stage behind him,

whether it was the head of TikTok, who needed some kind of a questionable maneuver to be allowed to continue to operate in the U.S. Vig is what I call all of them. A law to sell of TikTok or declared a national security risk that Trump had backed in term one. And so there are various reasons why these folks. are all with him. But at least for some of them, it was quite happily. It was quite happily. Yes, Sergei Bryn would be one, the former who had protested at the San Francisco airport,

the immigration policies in the first term, was now enthusiastically embrace him. I think Bezos was always conservative. That was always my, he was a Wall Street guy through and through. John, how do you look at this? I mean, were you surprised by the press? We'll get to Elon in a second, because he's his own singular sensation. but talk a little bit about why you think this happened beyond just regular self-interest, which I think was very clear in the first term when they went up to Trump Tower for that meeting

that all of them went up that one time in 2015. What was the difference here from your perspective? And did it surprise you? It started to change. I started to notice the change after the Butler assassination attempt when several of them called him. That seemed more sincere to me. I think it was this sort of shocking moment for the country, the president, or the potential next president, you know, gets shot in the ear and almost dies and stands up and raises his fist,

there's blood coming down. You know, a lot of these guys saw it as this heroic moment. Bezos called him, Zuckerberg called him, et cetera. Look, I don't think it's that complicated. Trump has shown very clearly that he's willing to use power, government. power to crush his enemies and to reward his friends. Tim Cook is a very low-key, rational guy. He felt compelled to bring a literal golden tribute to the Oval Office in full view of the news cameras to the president. You don't do that unless you, there's some level of concern,

I think, about what the president could offer you, sorry, either due to you or offer. or desire for him to do something for you. He's incredibly transactional. He's made clear to all of these people that he's a personalist leader, that he demands a personal interaction, that you can just go straight to him. Jensen Huang of NVIDIA had no real footprint in Washington

before this term. I mean, it was a very light footprint anyway. Trump didn't even know who he was during the first. He sold game chips before. It was for games. Yeah. They start to be used, the GPUs start to be used for something different. But InVideo was a, you know, recently big deal during the first time.

Trump had no idea who he was. Anyway, he gets very active. And we sort of chart that relationship in the book as well. He goes down to Mar-a-Lago with his wife. All of these people understand there's a playbook with Trump. And if you don't play it, your competitors are playing the game. Bezos, you know, we have a scene in the book where he comes into the Oval. And this is when Elon Musk is sort of out on the outs with Trump.

My recollection was July last year. And Bezos is basically pitching Trump on this concept of contract of diversity at the Pentagon, meaning don't just give everything to SpaceX, you know, think about us, Blue Origin. So if you're Bezos and you're watching one of your competitors become the best pal of the next president, you've got to get in there. You've got to get in the game. You've got to get in the game. And the only way to get in the game, you've got to get in the game.

to be all in. You've got to have both feet in, both arms. You've got to be, I mean, we have, when Trump was showing off the text messages, Bezos had sent him this smiling selfie of himself and Lauren Sanchez. Zuckerberg had texted him a letter from one of his kids about the golden age of America. You know, they're all in. Yeah. Maggie, why the humiliation part? Again, I enjoy it. I think they deserve it. But talk a little bit about why Trump relishes that, playing that J6 thing, he does on purpose, presumably. Well, that one I do think is about, you know, sort of forcing some version of a buy-in to his extremely fact-challenged view of the election and of 2020. In other cases, I don't think it's complicated that, you know, he loves nothing more than a convert, but he wants to see how far you're willing to go to make him happy.

And he has done some version of that to any number of people. But in this particular case, I mean, Trump prizes attention and he prizes fame and he prizes money. And he equates money with intelligence. And so in this case, if you're going to have the wealthiest people in the world coming and, you know, doing some version of this or talking about how, you know, successful you are and how amazing you're, election was and so forth, there's like nothing that is a pure form of joy for him. It is a thrill. And so I think that is all it is. I mean, there's the other component, which is it's not just the humiliation can't just be in private. That's part of the showing the texts off. It's making sure other people see it. So. Right, right. Absolutely. And putting them in the front

row was also, when I saw them in the front row, in front of elected officials, in front of bigger, you know, big long-time donors, I was like, oh, and the cabinet, I was like right next to the family. I was like, oh, my God, you know, I don't, in many ways it was grotesque, but I don't blame Trump for that. Well, of course he'd do that. That fact that they were there, especially Sundar Pichai was really, you know, who is not, it keeps his profile quite low, the head of alphabet. One of the more interesting things, people, Sergei Bryn was also there, but Sam Altman and Tim Cook were sort of toward the back. And I wondered why you wouldn't have put Sam or Tim in the front because Tim is a well-known person.

And I asked people at their companies, and one of the company people responded, it was the greatest feat of engineering in history. It was a good line. Within that panoply. That's a good line. Yeah, I thought so, too. Let's talk a little bit about AI, because a lot of this is about AI, and this is what the race is really about. You capture how Trump seemed to go from a skeptic to a booster after just one meeting with two top executives from Open AI during the campaign. You call it, quote, one of the more significant half hours in the history of AI.

Jonathan, talk a little bit about the meeting and how the ways it came to shape the White House mostly hands-off approach to AI regulation when Trump took office. I'd be remiss if not saying the people he picked like David Sachs are very tight in with these people. And to me, it's all, again, it's a rumble among Silicon Valley people was happening here. But talk about Trump himself, because I do understand the other characters like Emil Michael and the rest. So Trump is what you tech people might call a late adopter, Cara. He only started text messaging in 2022. Okay? At the end of 2020, it was late in that year.

More than 20 years after most of us. Anyway, so this is the summer of 2024 during the campaign, Trump really had no idea. idea what AI was. To the extent he was aware of it, he thought it was kind of scary, kind of disturbing. He had all these concerns about deepfake, someone doing a deep fake of himself declaring that a nuclear weapon was, you know, nuclear bomb was heading towards Russia or North Korea. What would happen? How would you verify it wasn't him, etc.? Anyway, open AI very smartly, uh, courted the Trump campaign. and set up this meeting in Las Vegas.

And it was Sam Altman was supposed to be there, but he had COVID. So it was two of his top executives. And this is the first time Trump had interacted with any type of AI tool in any meaningful way. And so they're in this crappy little hotel room in Vegas. And they set up chat GPT. Conference room. Conference room, not a hotel room. Conference room.

And they set up chat GPT on the screen. And so they, you know, they put in a few. And so it's Trump sitting there. It's, you know, some of his team. It's two of the top. Doug Bergam. Doug Bergam. Doug Bergam's there as well.

Anyway, so they set up the chat sheet, but they put in the prompt, you know, they put in a prompt about the AI executive order, one of them that Trump did in term one, and they ask it to turn it into a poem. And so, of course, it does it. And Trump's reading. He goes, the language is so beautiful. is incredible. He was completely bowled over by the poetry of the 2024 version of ChatGPT, and he turns to one of his aides, who's a speechwriter and says, you know, is this going to put

you out of a job? And so he'd started the meeting in this sort of like almost comatose state. He was yawning. He was tired. It was the end of a long day. And then he was just alert and totally locked in and kind of transfixed by this presentation. And so he starts asking them questions, Really basic questions. How does this stuff work? Who funds it? They explained him the concept of compute and how much energy it requires. And he went within the space of about 20 minutes from being like,

what the fuck is this thing? And it seems really bad and terrifying to how can I help you as president? Yes, he's quite intuitive. Open the floodgates. Get rid of all. And then, of course, it becomes known to him. He's brief that Biden had been... chaining these guys up and that he could be the one to liberate them. So he becomes a convert.

He becomes a total convert. And the first 12 months of the administration was essentially open season for these guys. They're changing course now, which is actually very interesting. But that's what it was. Maggie, how do you look at that shift? Because Trump of all, for a Luddite, he's astonishingly pressian about tech. You know, I always said he's the world's greatest internet troll. Like, he's good at it, actually. But he's not technical, obviously. But that hardly matters because he understands it, I think, understands at its heart, that it could be propaganda. He understands the attention economy. That's what he understands. But yeah. Right, right. We'll be back in a minute. Support for this show comes from Delete Me. The internet makes easy for scammers, stalkers, and hackers

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That's Framer.com slash Carra. for 30% off. Framer.com slash Kara rules and restrictions may apply. He also formed an alliance, obviously, the most famous alliances with Elon Musk and gave him huge latitude to operate across the government Doge, which is now apparently closed down, with nothing to show for it. In fact, probably a lot of costs.

Except, you know, just to minor detail, USAID doesn't exist anymore. Correct. And that's what I'm saying. There's a lot of costs, including deaths of people across the globe. You write that some of the administration appeared unhinged. which I told you this, Maggie, he would just wander to meetings with drunk whenever he wanted and pick fights with cabinet members.

Talk about the tenure, that first tenure that created so much destabilization, which the White House still hasn't recovered from or has it? First, Maggie, explain that sort of what happened there. Yeah, it's a good question about the recovery piece. So it's almost its memory hold at this point with so much that has happened for the most part. what those first couple of months of the administration were like.

But Trump basically let Elon Musk become not exactly a co-president, but basically a co-president. He was issuing directives. He was sending out these memos from the personnel management office, you know, the Five Things email. Senior advisors in the West Wing would learn when the rest of us did what Musk was up to. it created this, you know, sort of presidency within a presidency. And he was demanding cuts at cabinet agencies in ways that, you know, there were some people who were quite fawning over him, like Lee Zeldin at EPA. And then there were others who were very, very troubled by the demands that he was making. Marco Rubio at State Department, Sean Duffy at Transportation, Douglass.

Doug Collins at the VA, although, you know, it's a sliding scale of how animated everybody was, but he was just sort of doing these slashes of, you know, get rid of this one. He would make accusations. We write about this remarkable cabinet meeting in March of last year, which was only like six weeks into the administration at that point, where, you know, Elon Musk is insisting that Sean Duffy has, I think it was like, you have DEI hires still in the air traffic control towers. He was like, who? Like, names, please.

And that was one of the things that became the beginning of the end of Musk. On the one hand, Trump saw Musk as something of a heat shield at the time. He was the one absorbing a lot of bad press. But the reality is that Musk also essentially, as one person put it to us in the course that's reporting, hijacked this second administration for several months. And, you know, they've recovered in the sense that there were, you know, other things that they moved on to, like the 12-day Warren Iran, which was early last June. Then there was the summer of Jeffrey Epstein Piles, and I'm sure we'll talk about that at some point.

Yes, because it was mussel related. You know, there are people who, it's not like they are rowing in different directions in terms of what they want to see happen agenda-wise in this administration overall. They really aren't. This is not Steve Bannon versus Jared Kushner. But how you get there, they're not all on the same page, you know, whether it's Russ Vogue or Elon Musk or Stephen Miller as the top people I would put in that bucket. So you have this situation where Musk, yes, they closed a congressionally created agency in USAID, just got rid of it. It's just gone. And the rump that was left became Marker Rubio's problem. But beyond that, as you say, they did not do anything close to. the savings they said they were going to do. We had the sitting president do what was essentially an ad for Tesla by buying a Tesla and bringing it up to the White House, which, you know,

in a series of pretty astonishing moments, that was one, but that was the beginning of the end. Right. So, John, how do you look at this period of time? Is it just that he gave Trump a lot of money and possibly was a critical element in it in the election of Trump winning? I believe that to be so, or something else what was happening here. And interesting enough, when the break happened, which I predicted would happen, Elon's tweet about Epstein set off the Epstein stuff, absolutely, to me. He was, when I saw that, I was like, oh, no, this is, this is where it's good, because I had spent a lot of time focused on Epstein stuff in Maga World, essentially. It had been a bearing wall for Maga World. And when I saw Elon's tweet, I was like, oh dear, he's really angry if he's putting this

talk a little bit about the course of that relation, because there was also the criticizing the big spending bill. John, talk a little bit about both those things. And Maggie, if you have any thoughts, but John, you go first. Well, so the Elon relationship is interesting for lots of reasons. But Trump had no relationship with Elon Musk before 2024, really. I mean, they'd met each other a couple of times. Elon had been quite critical of Trump. They'd sort of attacked each other publicly. There were a series of meetings throughout 2024, you know, breakfasts and things like that. And then Elon became a huge booster after the assassination attempt in Butler. And they just went all in, spent around $300 million to elect in, which is... That we know of.

That we know of, exactly. Correct. Which is just maybe the most ever spent on a presidential campaign by any donor. So I think it's that, but it's also, Trump was fascinated by Musk. You know, Maggie made the point earlier he equates wealth with intelligence. Well, by that score, Musk must have been the smartest man who ever lived. And Trump would talk about him almost like he was socializing him into the world. He would say, like, Elon's a recluse, but he's not a.

recluse anymore. I mean, Elon Musk moved in. He literally was living at Maralago in a cottage on the property called Banyan that Trump usually rents out for $2,000 a night. We don't know what Elon was paying for it. He was getting meals from the Maralago kitchen at odd hours. He became essentially a housemate and was suddenly involved in everything. Trump, I think, was intrigued by him, flattered that the world's richest man was essentially working for him. Trump would constantly, usually in previous iterations of Trump, you might think he'd be insecure, having someone who was so much richer than him around. But Trump at that point was such, he had been so inflated by his victory. He was now indisputably this figure of history. He would say to people, you know, he can't

be president. You know, he's South African. He can't be president. He would throw that in. So Elon was not a threat from that respect, and he sort of, I think, felt that he was larger than Elon, even though Elon was richer than him. It was paternalistic or older brotherish, you know. Yeah. At one point when he was living, I knew that he had a cottage there. Some, one of the Trump people were like, oh, it's great, he's there, he's there all the time. I go, that'll get tired in 14 seconds. And you'll call me in two weeks, three weeks, and tell me, he crazy. And the person called me and said, he crazy. Like, it was like, they didn't know what to do. It was like, Bob. I kept calling him.

Bob, the guy who wouldn't leave in the Richard Dribus movie. What do you make of the break, both of you, very briefly, of the break between them, and then the reconciliation, which seems to be afoot. Well, it was inevitable for the reason that you said. There was always going to be a moment when Elon Musk did, or several moments where Elon Musk did too much, went too far. And, you know, by the time that he did that Epstein tweet or ex-put, whatever the hell we call now, ex-post, I will tell you, though, that I don't share the view that Elon is

why that all suddenly came to bear. I think that that was a slow-moving disaster in Maga world. And with accelerating speed, he made it impossible for people to look away at that point. But that was a different issue. Trump is never going to be happy with somebody else getting spotlight, attention, credit. Elon did become a liability in Trump's mind.

He was privately telling people he was worried about conflicts of interest, which was a little late after the whole Tesla. display, but whatever. And the ultimate reality is, I mean, to Jonathan's point earlier about how Trump uses power and wields it over these tech officials, you know, Elon Musk is not so relevant politically without Donald Trump. And I think that he has seen that. And so Trump cut him off. Yes, Trump did have this remarkable line about how this is why he can't have friends. You know, they always leave him, which a lot of people have noted. us, whoever read the book, and we're struck by. But Musk is back because Musk likes influence

and power and because this government still has, you know, sway over some of his companies. And a lot of people around Trump still believe that Elon Musk can be of use to the party financially. I don't think it's more complicated, but Jonathan may have a... Does Trump think that? Does Trump think that? Trump's always happy to have somebody invest, is how I would put up. Yeah. Let's talk about some of the ways Trump has also used the president's to enrich himself and his family. It's a lot wrapped up in technology.

Trump has made at least $2 billion after returning to the White House. Again, I think that's undercounting it. About half of that comes from the family's cryptocurrency business. One of the ways is getting fees. Even as people lose money, they get a big every time. Other ways is like the UAE buying into their companies and getting something else somewhere else. They purchase 49% of World Liberty Financial

and it's a crypto firms they share with the family of Steve Whitkoff, Trump's Middle East envoy. Talk about this and what do you make of what's happened here. It's not a surprise, but compared to Hunter Biden, Hunter Biden wasn't imaginative enough, apparently in terms of taking advantage of this. To compare them is almost absurd at this point. I mean, Hunter Biden, was it $80,000 a month that he was getting from Burisma? And some paintings, basically. Yeah. Obviously, Hunter Biden was influenced peddling in when Biden was vice president. I mean, he's not on the board of Burisma because he's an energy expert, obviously. But this is something of a scale that we've never seen before in the American

presidency. And it's actually not even close. The Trump family has made clear to everyone in this second term that you actually don't need to go through intermediaries anymore. You can put money directly into their pockets. You can put the children on boards of companies that are competing for government contracts and in some cases getting major government contracts, if you're a foreign government or a fund attached to a foreign government, you can go into business directly with the Trump family and the Whitkoff family. And you said, you know, that we don't know the half of, I don't know, we might not know 5% of what the family is making. I mean, like, any time you go down a rabbit hole, like we went down in the book, a rabbit hole on the,

the Library, the Presidential Library, which I think is a really underreported exercise. Of course, it's not a library. It's a skyscraper. And the plot of land was given to the Trump's free. Very valuable plot of land in Miami was given to them for free. Eric Trump is out soliciting Gulf Arab sovereign funds. This is at the same time as his father is conducting foreign policy with those countries and those countries are seeking favors. But it's also if you want to stay in with Trump, you can give money to him. So Howard Lutnik, his commerce secretary, Trump was, some of our reporting in the book was Trump was very irritated at reading stories about Lutnik's sons being involved in business that had overlaps with his government.

Lutnik gave $25 million to the Trump presidential library and Trump would remark in front of people, the only reason I put, this is in front of Lutnik as well, but others in the Oval. The only reason I put up with Howard's bullshit is because he gave me 25 million. million dollars. Other times he'd say, you know, how great is Howard? I asked for 25. He just gave it to me straight away. So it's all out there. They've made it very clear that they're open for business. And, you know, understandably, many businesses, many rich people, many people who are seeking pardons, understand that this is the Trump economy in Washington and you've got to get into it. I've called it a coin-operated presidency.

You put money in and you get more out, typically. Musk is a good example. He puts $200 million in, and he's gotten billions out in contracts. And he may have deserved those contracts, but some of them he might not have, right? But talk about how that's allowed. Is it because of the Supreme Court's presidential immunity ruling or the fact that Trump is going to pardon or going to try to pardon everything? Because it's not just that. There's luxury resorts in Albania linked to Jared Kushner.

Everywhere, it seems everywhere that Trump's sons are. doing licensing deals around the real estate businesses that are somehow linked to. So it's essentially the monetization of the White House. Maggie, how is this going to be, how is this going to turn out this blurring of foreign policy with private interests? Well, there's no question. And sorry, Jonathan, I didn't mean to cut you off. I wanted to make sure that you made the Lutnik point because that's an example that I don't think I could have imagined before, honestly, as a cabinet official, making sure to stay in a good place that way.

In terms of how is it going to turn out, I mean, it's inevitably raising questions about the overlap between foreign policy and, you know, personal finances. There is a bit in the book where, you know, Jared Kushner and Steve Whitkoff went to go try to hammer out this ceasefire deal with Gaza, get the hostages back. It was a huge deal. It was a big deal. It was a legitimate accomplishment. And their view was, you know, what you guys would call, I'm paraphrasing, but what you would all, the collective view, would call a conflict of interest, you know, these are negotiating assets for us. However, there is so much overlap that it is really, really hard to determine what ends where and what begins where. In terms of how is it, I think you said, how is it allowed? So there's a couple of factors. One, people keep saying to me, you know, wait until the house.

House flips, if the House flips. I don't think Trump's going to have a big problem. I mean, there might be subpoenas that he doesn't want to deal with, among other things, because most processes move much slower than Trump does, number one. Number two, Trump is operating with an immunity decision, which he will often say, you know, I'm immune and I'm immune. Trump runs the Justice Department, and they've made very clear there is no, and we lay this out in our book very clearly.

There is no separation between the DOJ and the West Wing, as there was as a supposed to Watergate norm for a very long time. And Trump has told people that he'll pardon, you know, everyone who's come within a certain radius, the number changes, but of the Oval Office. And we spoke to a number of people in the course of our reporting who were counting on those pardons. They were explicit about it, you know. He's going to give out pardons. I'm counting on my pardon. I hope he does, et cetera. So that sets up its own incentive structure. And then when you have a group of House Republicans who behave as if they are an extension of the executive branch, that's another way.

So I don't know what this all ends up looking like, but I, you know, what it's not going to look like in my humble opinion. And again, I could be wrong. There is no use to some extent in prognosticating, she says before she does it, a version of it. But this isn't going to look like 2019. You know, this is going to be a very, very difficult world for Democrats in the House to get subpoenas complied with.

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Kara at Grooons. That's code Kara, K-A-R-U-N-S-C-O. Is Kamala Harris running for president again? Listen, I might. I might. I'm thinking about it. But does anybody want that? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I do. There will never be a woman president in the United States. Now, why, wait, you can't just walk away on that. Tell us why. I know it's still early to talk about 2028, but as we build to our post-Trump future, it seems to be a big question about the Democratic Party.

Kamala Harris leads all of the presidential polling. So does this mean that the person who led the ticket in 2024 is going to lead the party again in 28? The campaign needs to be called bye-bye. by it's just a tainted brand. Do you think from a donor community largely that there's any appetite for a Harris return? I don't. I'm a Sted Herndon, and this is America Actually. Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast.

Let's finish by looking forward at the upcoming midterms in the presidential elections. You write in the book that only does Trump seem uninterested in the midterms, but he seems to take satisfaction the idea of Republicans losing when he's not on the ballot. which seems on brand. He also expects to be impeached again if Republicans lose control of Congress. Can you explain that indifference, Jonathan? Well, firstly, it's not completely black and white.

It's not that he doesn't care at all about the midterms. It's just that he cares about them far less, A, than he did in the first term, B, than his advisors, what would hope? They would hope that he would be more exercised about domestic political concerns, and he's just not. Things could change, but I think in Donald Trump's mind, the way he's behaving right now, he's not ever going to run for office again. He's constantly talking about, you know, should it be JD, should it be Marco, you know, what have you. And he's in what he would talk about as describe, I think, as legacy mode, but a very specific type of legacy, you know, putting his stamp on Washington, he spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about architecture and building monument.

to himself renaming institutions, essentially branding himself indelibly on Washington. And also on reshaping parts of the world, I think one of the great appeals of the Iran situation was that he could be the first president in 47 years to finally deal with this problem. It's what can get me in the history books. So I think that's part of it as well. Maggie, you've also said you're not sure Trump wants a successor. And just a few weeks ago, he again floated the idea of running for a third term. Is he serious about that?

Or is he just trying to drive everyone, including Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance, crazy. Because there's a scene in the book where Trump asked Rupert Murdoch about both of them and they're in the room. Talk about that moment. Sure. Let me work backwards. So from that, we have this scene in the book, and it was a pretty remarkable moment. Yes, Trump likes trolling people. we have no reason to believe in our reporting that Marco Rubio is running for president.

You know, maybe that will change. You can scale up fairly fast. But J.D. Vance, in all of our reporting, is the frontrunner at the moment. But Trump's not going to make it easy for him. And to that point, you know, Trump has Murdoch to the White House for dinner in October of last year. While Trump is suing Murdoch over some of the Epstein coverage and then Wall Street Journal at the time, very big group in the blue room at the White House, and J.D. Vance and Nusha Vance are there. Marco Rubio is there, along with a bunch of other people. And Trump starts engaging Murdoch.

You know, what do you think of J.D.? And Murdoch says, well, J.D. has the potential to be great. And or good. I don't remember the exact way. John, if there's a good or great? Great, I think. Yeah. Whatever, I think it was good.

Anyway. And then J.D. Vance, who knows that Murdoch did everything he could to stop Trump, you know, and we didn't succeed from making Vance the VP in 2024 as nominee. Oh, thanks. Thanks a lot, Rupert. And then Trump says, you know, well, what about Marco? And Murdoch just isolated says, coolly, you know, Marco is brilliant. And it was uncomfortable. And it was a pretty incredible scene just to do this in front of them, in front of this group of people. You know, and there have been other moments like that where Trump has made a sides,

or we write in the book about how Trump was talking about his gilding of the Oval Office, and someone asked him what happens when the next person who succeeds him takes it all down, and Trump says, Cubans love gold. J.D. Vance is not Cuban. So. That was a funny lie. So Trump, you know, this was misinterpreted when I said it somewhere that, you know, he doesn't, what he wants is to be the last big sort of, leader among Republicans and among the MAGA movement, doesn't mean that he doesn't actually want

another president to take over the country. But with the 2028 stuff, he just doesn't like other, he doesn't like seating the stage. And so the second that he anoints someone, that person is going to start the hourglass on Trump, number one, depending on how he does it and what it looks like. fine. Number one, number two, these things often start out as trolls with Trump, and then they take on a life of their own, like the 2028 thing. Now, it is really hard to see a world where he could run again. But that said, there's no world where he is leaving the stage, even if he leaves the White House. And so I think that becomes its own complication in various ways going forward. I mean, there's this, this was like, it just, I keep thinking about the people who keep talking about this.

I keep wondering if they lived through the same 2021 that I did, where Joe Biden kept saying the former guy, as if that was going to make Trump never appear again. He is the most consequential president, certainly of my lifetime, certainly of Jonathan's lifetime. You know, depends on how long we live. Maybe it'll remain that way. But he's not just going away. No, that is very true. So he doesn't really want. And it's interesting.

John, it's Vance, who's been, including in your book, voicing skepticism about Trump's impulses, that he's the one that seems most not on the same page. How do you look at what he'll do? J.D. Vance is actually, when it comes to most of Trump's agenda, completely on board, if not more aggressive on some issues like immigration. I mean, we have a scene in the book where only a few days after the killing of Alex Pretti in Minnesota, Jady Vance walks into the Chief of Staffs Office in the meeting and is agitating for them to invoke the Insurrection Act to suppress the left-wing protests in Minnesota.

So it's not like Vance is, you know, against a bunch of Trump's agenda. Where he was really vocal were two issues. Epstein and Iran. And the interesting thing about Iran was, which I think was quite revealing, was no one in Trump's inner circle thought this was a good idea. The closest maybe Pete Hakeset, but basically everyone else was very skeptical about going into Iran. But no one made a case to Trump against it, vocally, except for Vance. And it cost him. It cost him with Trump. It irritated Trump. He didn't want to hear it. And it strained their relationship. So I thought that was kind of interesting because if you're

JD, I always looked at Vance through the prism of his one, politically is to stay in Trump's good graces and to get, you know, if Trump says you're my guy, that's it. It's over in terms of the primary. So it was just interesting that he was willing to risk that at that moment. And it showed me that ideologically, it does run deeper for him on certain issues than it does for Trump. Yeah, absolutely. I think he can't stand it. It just has history. I think eventually he won't be able to stand it. Trump is also 80. years old and showing signs of aging as Biden did. But Maggie, you've said that Trump's health is, quote, one of the black box secrets of the administration. Why? I mean, obviously, they can't

figure out what's going with Mitch McConnell. He's in a hospital. One would assume you could find out. But why is this, this ability to suppress the information about any president's health? So to your point, it's not just this. All presidents have some version of being secretive about their health not to the same degree by any stretch of imagination, all of them, but he's not alone in that. Trump has always just been very, very, very secretive about his health going back decades to when he was running the Trump organization. Why, I don't know. It doesn't mean that there is some dark secret. It just, it's an area that really he doesn't want people going to, in part because he sees illness as weak. He is constantly worried about getting sick. You know, there was an amazing moment

in term one where George Stephanopoulos was doing some hours-long project with Trump of just a news recording project, and Mick Mulvaney was in the background. Then the White House chiefs and Mulvaney starts coughing. And Trump was like, get out of here. If you're sick, get out of here. And it was all on camera. That's a pretty pervasive attitude. But yes, he is 80. He obviously looks older than he used to. He sounds older than he used to. His voice is slower. His language is less crisp.

You know, I can watch the same video as everybody else does from 10 years ago. But we don't know what we don't know. And, you know, he has gone to Walter Reed more often with less information being released. I think presidents in general have, you know, a desire not to be seen as weak in terms of illness. I am astonished that we don't have this information. for any president, including this one who's clearly aged. Yeah, I mean, I think this is true for all public officials. I personally am of the opinion, either party,

independent. Presidency, Congress members, anybody. You know, if you have a condition that is impairing your ability to serve that is not in the public's interest, that doesn't mean I think he does, by the way, Trump's. I'm just saying that this is not something that any president really is particularly forthcoming with. Last question. One of the big arguments you make in the book is that it was Democrats' successes in driving Trump from office in 2020 in their support of efforts to hold him accountable that made him, quote, the most consequential and feared president of our lifetimes. In other words, it egged him on to get, one of the things you say stay out of prison. The other is to make money. The third is to have a do-over here. For Democrats, what are the risks that come with aggressively going after Trump again, should they retake power? Well, I don't think it's really a disputable premise. The point was that if Trump had have served a consecutive second term, it just would be nothing like this term. He was hobbling

along at the end of 2020. And if he eeked out a narrow victory in that election, he would have had to deal with all the same stuff Biden did, COVID, inflation, you know, the notion that he would have avoided the global inflation. I mean, okay, fine. You can claim that, but it's not really plausible. He would have had to withdraw from Afghanistan, which he was trying to do on a precipitous timeline. So that was the argument. Instead, he leaves power, the public sours on Biden, and Trump gets built up as this almost mythological figure through four indictments, you know, the assassination attempt, holding up the fists, the blood coming down the face. He became a larger figure. He was enlarged by all of this and had time during the Interregnum for his team to really prepare for what they

want to do people like Stephen Miller. So I don't think that's disputable. That's just like anyone with any common sense can see that. As for the future, look, I don't think, I never want to make confident declarations, but I don't think Donald Trump is running for a third term. I don't see any evidence that he is. So I think then the political risk is simply just energizing the Republican base, right? And impeachment effort obviously energizes the Republican base. We've seen that with Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party. We've seen that in the first term with Donald Trump. So, you know, it's pretty obvious. And I've spoken to people who are, you know, advisors to Trump and people who are supporters of J.D. Vance, who've said to me,

the best possible thing for us in 28 is if Democrats impeach. It would just be something that we could rally behind. I mean, remember, the Republican Party is very divided right now. There's all kinds of fractures. And an impeachment effort would just be a glue. So, I mean, that's the political analysis. I would agree. Maggie, why don't you finish up?

I'm sort of the opinion. A, like, I agree with everything Jonathan said, just about sort of the unifying factor that it would be, I don't really see how Democrats have been running on Trump as one of the most dangerous threats in the world and talking about accountability and then not pursue accountability, despite the fact that what Democrats have run into every single time,

among other problems in their party and with their own messaging and their own actions, is it's an asymmetrical fight, because Trump will, we write this in the book, his shamelessness is his superpower. And so, you know, Graham Platner, for instance, did eventually drop out of the race. You really are never going to see Trump take a similar,

I mean, he's obviously not going to be in that position again, but you're not going to see a commenced reduction. But what I will also say, just my personal guess, And again, you know, this is useless and all the caveats. If it is an impeachment, there's going to be something else that Republicans unite behind as to why they're galvanized against Democrats. And it will be the same for Democrats against the Republicans because this is the world of political polarization that exists. So it's just it's all tribal and neither side wants to see the other get ahead. So no more books, right?

No, no. You're never doing a book. Don't say the word book to us. Terrible question. Yeah, but so much good stuff. That's why. Just enjoy this one. Okay. Well, no, but there's more.

I can't speak for Maggie. You ain't getting another one from me. I know how that feels. Enjoy this one. This was a unicorn. All right. Well, it's an excellent book, and congratulations on the success.

And good luck covering the rest of the administration. Yeah. You're going to stay until the end, right? Maggie. Bitter end? Sure. So is Jonathan. You too.

All right. Well, we'll look forward to more of your reporting in the Times. Thank you, much. Thanks for us. Bye. Thanks for having us. Today's show was produced by Michelle Alloy, Catherine Millsop, Madeline LaPlante Duby, Megan Bernie, and Kalyn Lynch. Nishot Kerwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Rosemary Ho,

Dave Shaw, Lisa Soap, and Julia Sharp Levine. Our engineers are Fernando Aruta and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trachidemics. If you're already following this show, you are writing another Beck's selling book. If not, you're falling a slug. leap on camera. Go wherever you listen to a podcast search for On with Caro Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Caro Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more.