Raging Moderates with Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov - What Trump Really Thinks About His Legacy (ft. Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman)

Episode Date: June 25, 2026

Got a question for Scott or Jessica? We're putting together a summer mailbag episode — send a short voice recording with your question to [e-mail]. We may feature yours on the show! Jessica Tarlov is joined by reporters Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, authors of the brand new explosive book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. They talk about what it is really like inside the Trump White House, the unprecedented ways in which Trump wields presidential power, and how their monumental yearslong investigative reporting effort led to this exposé full of shocking, never-before-reported stories. They begin with Jonathan and Maggie’s reporting on the start of the Iran war, and the unbelievable confrontation that took place in the White House Situation Room that immediately splintered Trump’s cabinet. They dive into the Epstein saga, and what the administration’s crisis management meetings were like behind the scenes — including the abandoned effort by the DOJ to release their own Epstein files database. That never made it out into the world, due to some of the contents being about Trump himself.Plus: Jonathan Maggie talk about how they determined who and what to believe when members of the administration started turning on each other. How loyal are his supposedly loyal aides? Will Trump really leave office in 2029, or is he building a fortified bunker underneath the new ballroom? And, given the changing role of print journalism in the age of TikTok and political influencers, what will the media landscape — and politics in America — even look like… post-Trump? Get your tickets now for our live show at 92NY: https://www.92ny.org/event/scott-galloway-and-jessica-tarlov For ad-free episodes, exclusive livestreams, and to connect with Scott, Jessica, and the Raging Moderates community, join us at ProfG+ on Substack: https://ragingmoderates.profgmedia.com/ Get The Monday Rage newsletter: https://profgmedia.com/s/monday-rage/ Follow Raging Moderates on IG, Tiktok, and Facebook: https://www.instagram.com/ragingmoderatespod/ https://www.tiktok.com/@ragingmoderates https://www.facebook.com/ragingmoderates Follow Jessica Tarlov on Instagram, Substack, and Bluesky: https://instagram.com/jessicatarlov https://substack.com/@jessietarlov https://bsky.app/profile/jessicatarlov.bsky.social Follow Scott on Instagram, Substack, and Bluesky: https://instagram.com/profgalloway https://substack.com/@profgalloway https://bsky.app/profile/profgalloway.com Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@RagingModerates Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for this show comes from Norwegian Cruise Line. A cruise with Norwegian is a vacation you'll never forget, with an onboard experience that makes it easy for the whole family to settle into their own version of vacation. Because on a cruise with Norwegian, choice comes naturally for the whole family, and destinations feel just as effortless. Wander beautiful cities and take in stunning natural scenery. Norwegian Cruise Line.

It's different out here. Visit NCL.com, call your travel advisor, or 1-888NCL Cruise. Norwegian Cruise Line, Chips Registry, the Bahamas and USA. Support for this show comes from Harvey AI. The future of law is agentic, not just tools that assist, but AI agents that navigate complex matters. That's why Harvey created agents that can do the work from end to end. They build a plan, pull from secure data sources, run subagents in parallel, and draft the work product ready for your review. So you delegate the work and on the judgment.

trusted by more than 60% of the AMLaw 100 and leading Fortune 500 legal teams, Harvey is the AI operating system designed specifically for legal work. Harvey, AI, tailored for law. Learn more at Harvey.AI. Imagine two brilliant team members. One builds your campaigns instantly. One handles customers 24-7. On brand and always on.

Meet Clavio's AI agents at K-L-A-V-I-O.com. We're chronicling a presidency like we've never seen before. And I think it's important for anyone who's curious about how their country is being run. This country is being run by a very small number of people. You know, five, six people really are running this country and Donald Trump. And they're actually very secretive. This is not like the first term at all. We've talked to people from previous administrations.

I don't think anything like this has ever happened in the White House Situation Room, full stop. Welcome to Raging Moderates. I'm Jessica Tarlew. Scott continues to gallivant along the quesette in Cannes, but I have a major upgrade today. I have Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman from the New York Times. They just wrote the book of the year so far, regime change inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. Great gold cover. Also, very smart marketing there. You guys have sold over 150,000 copies. They need a reprint already. The Internet is yearning. for more of regime change. Congratulations, and thank you for being here. Thank you for having us. Yeah. There is so much in this. And I just wanted to say up front, like,

obviously I'm a political junkie, so this was great for me, right? There were all of these stories that had kind of leaked out, but we didn't have the full picture of and you guys gave, I mean, more detail than I think anyone expected could exist. But this book is also wildly accessible

to people who I think are just peripherally interested, right, of the first 14 months of the administration. And I think that's probably why you're seeing so many people in a world where we're kind of tired or the marketist tired of Donald Trump books are so interested in it. So I just wanted to put it out there that it's for everybody. So kudos on that. So I want to start actually with the end of the book or the last big story, which is about the start of the war in Iran, this incredible situation room, meaning Bibi Netanyahu comes in. He makes his pitch. Everyone basically in Trump's inner circle is skeptical of the pitch.

And a lot has changed since then. And I'm curious how you guys think Trump is thinking about the war today as it relates to his legacy and his principle of everything is just going to be okay, right? Which has kind of taken him through his life. I don't know. Do you guys like switching off? How do you like to do this? Start with Jonathan.

Well, Jonathan. Firstly, thank you for saying that about a book because it was really important. to Maggie and I that this is not like an insider book that's sort of a Beltway Washington book. You know, we take it pretty seriously that we're chronicling a presidency like we've never seen before. And I think it's important for anyone who's curious about how their country is being run. And this country is being run by a very small number of people, you know, five, six people really are running this country and Donald Trump. And they're actually very secretive despite common thoughts. This is not like the first term at all. Very different. And it's

very hard to get information out. So for us, it was really important that this could be something that anyone could pick up and help hopefully understand what's going on. On Iran, it's very clear that Donald Trump, even though he will never say this was a mistake, that those words will never leave his mouth. It's very clear that he realized this war was going nowhere good. He had been briefed privately on the disastrous, and really I'm not using hyperbole. The word is disastrous situation with American munitions. I mean, we have reported pretty extensively on that, but they are running incredibly low on long-range weapons that we would need for major conflicts, potentially, God forbid, with China

or other major competitors. And Iran's regime is still in charge. I mean, there was not the regime change that Netanyahu laid out for Donald Trump in his situation room presentation that we reported on. And the world saw that Iran is perfectly capable of controlling the Strait of Hormuz, you know, this incredibly important strategic waterway for the world's energy. So not a good outcome in general for the United States at this situation. Donald Trump has been reversing at very high speed, trying to get out of this conflict.

to the extent that he's now alienating people on the hawkish right who, you know, really hoped that he might execute finally on regime change in Iran. The last thing I'll say on this is several advisors have privately told us that there was a lot of magical thinking involved because it's just not true that Donald Trump was not briefed about the potential risks. Dan Cain laid out, you know, he wasn't forceful about it, but he absolutely, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, absolutely in the situation room and in the Oval Office laid out the potential risks of this war, including munitions, including the Strait of Hormuz. And Donald Trump just had a gut instinct that this would be a fast war, that this war would be over really quickly, that this was a paper tiger regime, and they would collapse quickly. And if you think about it, every other consequence was sort of ignored,

because if your assumption is this war is going to be over in, you know, like that, Like, you know, in a heartbeat, you're not thinking so much about munitions shortages and all these straight of all moves because if your premises, these guys are going to fold, you know, those risks get sort of pushed off to the side. So that's what really clearly emerged for us in our reporting. Yeah. I don't know, Maggie, if you want to dip in on that or... Yeah, no, I'm happy. And again, thank you so much for what you said about the book. Our dream was that people would find it accessible.

We also want it to be durable. Because there has been, it's been very hard. This is an administration that really is unrecognizable to the first one, Jessica, in many, many ways. You know, they make a great show of transparency. You know, Trump gets on the phone with lots of reporters. They're very good at keeping secrets when they want to and on a number of fronts. But so getting inside these rooms was really, really difficult. And it took an enormous amount of time.

And so we are very happy that people are interested in. reading it. But that was our goal. On Iran, part of the problem for the president is that he is, as it has been described to us by people around him, that he's been

a walking moral hazard his whole life. He makes decisions. Other people are left footing the bill. Whether it was casinos when he was in business banks, for those casinos when he was in business years ago, whether it is currently the situation in Iran

And, you know, he will not be president, even as the munitions stock issue continues to play out over several years. This is not an overnight fix. But it is representative of how different we found this term to be in our reporting. Because as Jonathan said, it is true. He was warned. There is this, again, he keeps saying, I didn't know this, or people suggest somebody misled him, or Netanyahu sort of marionette in him into this war. And it's not black and white.

It's much more nuanced than that. But Trump is much more hawkish on Iran than most of his team. And certainly more than his team wanted to acknowledge. So this wasn't something that he was, you know, compelled into. He went very willingly. But what he does do in these rooms, this is not term one where you had, you know, Gary Cohn snatching a piece of paper off of the resolute desk. Or you had John Kelly and Jim Mattis who thought that Trump's world.

was dangerous and his behavior was dangerous. And there were really these very aggressive fights, you know, that he was aware of to try to keep him from doing things that the staff either didn't agree with or that, you know, more precisely, in many cases they thought were legally problematic. The staff believes in him. They want to see him succeed. This is generally a very small group of people who have been with him for a while. And he does in these rooms intimidate people. So, one of the only people in our reporting who really aggressively pushed on the Iran war and was against it, you know, far more than Dan Cain, who did lay out concerns he had but was less vocal about it with Trump directly was J.D. Vance, the vice president. And it hurt him with Trump. Trump

got very irritated with it. But at the end of the day, you know, Vance, along with everybody else, believes that Trump is the president and it's up to him. And that's true. But he also, Trump does not want to own this decision. And that's why you, you're hearing him say what he's saying now. Yeah, I mean, it seems like they're all in a bit of a quagmire. I feel like that's everyone's, you know, word of choice for this. And what you guys both just said touches on something that you cover in the book, which is that the people in his close circle think that there's almost something like mystical about him, right?

That he is hearing frequencies that we can't. And that's even separate from, you know, how the evangelical community treats him where they're, you know, praying around him and you have the memes of him Jesus and things like that. But there's no question that the administration is aware of the tough road that they have ahead, right, coming up from the midterms. We would, I don't think we would have seen this about face on the war if they weren't aware of it, right? And saying we can't go in with $4.50 gas, et cetera. Do you think there has been any breakage in the mystical sheen around him or are they so in it? I don't want to call it.

a cult. But, I mean, are they so under his spell that they think that these are external factors that he hasn't set into motion, like, that he's perfect and it's just, you know, misadvised, or, you know, everyone's entitled to a little bit of a mistake every once in a while? It's a little more nuanced. Look, you know, we, would we use the word mystical? It's more that the core people around him just couldn't be more different from term one. In term one, we would have conversations with his advisors, and many of them just simply had contempt for him. They thought that he was foolish, ill-informed, in some cases dangerous, and some of them, like James Mattis and Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State in the first time, saw their job essentially as protecting

America and the world from Donald Trump. This team, some of them anyway, went through the 21 through 24 period with Donald Trump. And that experience was radicalizing. They saw him after January 6th as this pariah. They saw him build his way back. And no one thought he could win the election in 2021. No one thought he would be back as president in early 2021. None of his own, you know, advisors did.

Many people kept their distance from him. And to see him come back through four indictments, everything else that was thrown at him, two assassination attempts, and then he wins this election and comes back to power. Even people around him who may think that some of his ideas are outlandish, there's this second thought or asterisk attached to that, which is, well, maybe he's picking up on something we're not picking up on, because we didn't see this, and he sort of insisted that he could come back and he did.

So there's much more deference to his instincts. And remember, a lot of these people themselves received subpoenas. We report this in the book. Again, they were in the trenches with him, and they saw the stakes of the election in very personal terms. It's, you know, we win and, you know, he stays out of prison and maybe we don't have legal problems, or we lose and our future looks very, very perilous. So that's the context for all of that.

I will say the Iran war and just how poorly it's gone has popped that bubble a little bit. And it probably is exacerbated by the fact that there was basically no one on his senior team who thought it was a good idea to begin with. The closest would be Pete Hakeseth, but basically all of them were very skeptical about this war. The problem was, with the exception of J.D. Vance, none of them actually made a case against the war to Donald Trump. They all just kind of kept their mouths shut and sat there and let him follow his gut instinct. So I do think it's changed a little bit, but I wouldn't want to overstate that because you still basically have a group of true believers around Donald Trump. Yeah, I mean, I think that connects nicely to another one of your incredible looks inside these private rooms surrounding the Epstein scandal, which has been plaguing the administration basically since day one. I'm, you know, it's very interesting for me, you know, someone who follows this closely to actually hear who thinks it's a serious thing, who is dismissive of it.

And it broke down a little bit along generational lines, which I think makes a lot of sense for the hyper online folks versus, you know, the old school. You write that ultimately Trump couldn't make Epstein disappear, even with all of the power that he has. So Maggie, what role do you think the Epstein story still has for the next two and a half years of the Trump term? And how much are they thinking about it right now still? Support for the show comes from Seoul. Soul is a wellness brand that makes delicious hemp-derived CBD and THC products designed to make feeling good simple. Soul's new mood gummies have precise dosing, clean ingredients, and formulations designed for predictable effects. So you can choose how you want to feel while staying.

and control. Whatever the moment calls for, there's a soul-mood gummy to match. If you're looking for a bright, social, and energizing buzz, go with the uplift gummies. Three milligrams of Sativa, THC, and CBG, perfect for daytime plans or beating the afternoon slum. When it's time to wind down, the mellow gummies deliver three milligrams of Indica, THC, and CBN, ideal for cozy nights and fully unplugging. And if you're looking for that just right anytime vibe, Sol's balanced gummies blend three milligrams of hybrid THC and CBD for an easy, versatile feel. Perfect for when you're listening to your favorite podcasts, which is us. Make today a good day and get yourself some soul gummies.

Right now, Soul is offering our audience 30% off your entire order. Go to getsole.com and use the code moderates. That's getsole.com promo code moderates for 30% off. Support for the show comes from Hems. Losing weight can be a real ego boost and a great way to have more energy during the day, but it could also be hard to maintain. That's why weight loss by Hymns now offers access to the FDA-approved Wagovi pill and the FDA-approved Wagovi Pen.

Wagovi is designed to help you lose weight and keep it off so you can stay on track with your goals. With Wagovi at Hymns, you can lose up to 20% or more of your body weight when combined with diet and exercise. It can help you regulate your appetite and eat less, so success is within reach. Plus, Wagovi is the first ever GLP1 pill for weight loss, so there are no needles needed. Hymns says everything online. You'll connect with a licensed provider who will determine if treatment is right for you. Are you ready to reach your goals? Visit hymns.com slash moderates to get a personalized affordable plan that gets you.

That's h-ims.com slash moderates. Hymns.com slash moderates. Weight loss by Hymns is not available in all 50 states. Wagovi is the registered trademark of Novo Nordisk AS. To get started and learn more, including important safety information, Wagovi clinical study information and restrictions, visit Hymns.com. Support for the show comes from Decagon. Growth is part of every successful business, but when you grow, your customer support also gets harder to keep up with.

More customers means more questions, more complicated requests, and more pressure to respond quickly. Decagon makes it easy. Decagon helps companies create personalized, concierge-style customer experiences with AI agents across chat, email, voice, and SMS. They're available 24-7, feel natural to talk to, and can resolve customer requests on their own so businesses can keep up with requests without losing their personal touch. Decagon plugs directly into your existing systems so agents can get live quickly. And because workflows can be updated using natural language, teams can make changes themselves without long engineering cycles. That means less time spent managing workflows, more time focused on customers and ROI in weeks. Ready to transform

your customer support? Go to Decagon.a.a.a.i slash moderates to get a personalized demo and see what Decagon can do for your team. Check Decagon out at Decagon.a.ai slash moderates. That's Decagon. dot a.I. slash moderates. What role do you think the Epstein story still has for the next two and a half years of the Trump term? And how much are they thinking about it right now still? So one of the things that we found in our reporting and that's in the book is we got our hands on some secret polling memos that were generated inside the Trump team to a, you know, a dozen or so advisors. And one, which we, we write about, was from March. And there were focus groups conducted by Trump's main pollster Tony Fabrizio. And what he wrote in this, in this memo, was that voters

kept proactively bringing up Epstein. They kept talking about it. It was breaking through. These weren't, you know, these were, these were, these, were voters across stripes, political stripes, and it was ranking higher in their list of concerns than some pretty striking core issues like crime and safety, like data centers from AI

that are potentially costing jobs. And it has really stayed with the Trump team that the Epstein situation, I shouldn't say situation, the Epstein, whatever you want to call it, debacle of how it overtook the administration last year, has broken through in a remarkable way to voters, and now is just something that they can't contain. So it's certainly not going to go away.

Democrats have become much more vocal about this issue on the hill than they ever were before for a variety of reasons. But there's nothing they can do about it at this point. I would also note, Jessica, and we do talk about this some in the book, but, you know, they slow-walked responding to a House subpoena. So then eventually there was this massive Epstein Transparency Act bill. And again, something else that we talk about in the book, but DOJ files are not meant to be, and you know this, they're not meant to be treated like WikiLeaks. They're not meant to be just sort of splashed online where you can see everything indiscriminately because a lot of it is unverified material. A lot of it is, you know, raw notes from FBI interviews with witnesses who may or may not be recounting things correctly. and victims whose accounts, you know, some often need to be verified. That is what this act ended up calling for. And it was a huge volume of material, half of which, roughly, still has not been released. And what the administration has said is it's duplicates. That's why it hasn't been made public. But that's a real take, our word for it, answer. So because they dragged their feet on this House subpoena and were not really complying with it the way they were supposed to, that then created.

a stronger impetus for a bipartisan coalition to start being more vocal and to buck Donald Trump from his own party and say, we need this law. That law then called for a massive amount of material that I'm not sure that Congress anticipated, but there it is now. And so there's just no world where this stops

being a problem for Trump. Jessica, we were pretty shocked, honestly, when we sort of unfolded this report. You know, once we started to understand that the most senior people in the U.S. government was sitting in the Situation Room, the National Security Command Center of the U.S. government, not to talk about, you know, wars or national security crisis, but to talk about Jeffrey Epstein and how to spin their way, essentially from a public relations standpoint, out of this crisis. I mean, we've talked to people from previous administrations.

I don't think anything like this has ever happened in the White House Situation Room, full stop. But there was one meeting where it got really uncomfortable for some of his senior aides. They had planned as part of their efforts to try to convince the public that they were being transparent. They had built this sort of beta version of a public-facing website that the Justice Department was going to. put out. There was going to be sort of this almost all things Epstein library. You know, here's every document you could possibly imagine, not just documents that were in DOJ possession, but also civil cases and various other things. So they're in the situation room. They're talking about this website. And one of the aides at the table had been searching through the website,

you know, well, if we're going to put this thing out, I'd better do a bit of, you know, searching. And one of the first things that came up when they put in Trump's name was this secondhand accusation about Trump allegedly abusing a young woman's nipples. And this was a conversation that they had in a situation room. Do we put this out? Don't we put this out? You know, should we have these nipple abuse allegations about the president of the United States on a public-facing DOJ website? Now, this was unsealed in a unrelated civil case in 2024. It was already public because it was online, publicly available. Most people had no idea this existed. And it was secondhand, right? It was a secondhand uncorroborated

allegation. But they had to have this conversation about, well, the president's not in the room, because they don't want to have these conversations around the president. So, you know, you've got like the chief of staff, the vice president, the most senior people in the justice Department, sitting around the table, having this theoretical conversation, you know, would the president be okay with that? Vice President Vance says, you know, we should just put it all out. You know, he's been accused of worse. And Susie Wiles, the chief of staff says, no, I don't think the president would be okay with that. And that was sort of the end of the end of that conversation. But it just gives you a, it just gives you an insight. It's almost, you know,

if we didn't establish this from multiple sources, you just almost wouldn't believe this happened. This could happen in the White House situation room. But that's exactly. what happened last summer. And by the way, no one has disputed that. We've had this out there now for weeks. No one has disputed our reporting about these meetings in the situation room. I mean, you guys generally are on a pretty hot streak in terms of no one disputing your reporting. I know that you, you know, right in the introduction that, you know, there were a few pushbacks as, you know, you gave them time to respond, obviously to all of it. And this has gone through a hugely rigorous fact-checking process and you've had the full muscle of the New York Times behind you

to make sure, you know, that you're not caught out there. Like you said last night at your beautiful book party, Jonathan, with your, you know, bare-assed in a hospital gown, for really speaking. You need to give context to that. You can't just throw that shit out. You can't just say that in the middle of it. Like, what? It's a serious podcast.

You're doing public exposing myself or something. All right. You need to explain. Or you do. One of you needs to, yes. Okay. Or I can. I'm happy to.

Let me do it. I'll do it. I'll do it. With that setup, Jonathan gave actually a very lovely speech last night at a book party that the New York Times hosted for us that Jessica was at. And it was a wonderful party. But he was talking about, while lots, it's a rough time for media all around in this country right now and frankly globally, that lots of people have decided that they want to go. their own way. They go out on substack. They host independent websites and we hope that they succeed. But legacy media, which gets described, you know, as a slur by a lot of people, actually has

an enormous protective value. It is skill. It is learned craft. And there is a raft of editors and talent and experienced people who help us get it right. And Jonathan was referring to an expression that because he's introduced me to so much about Australian media that I had never known before. And I appreciate that despite the fact that I worked at the Near Post for 10 years, which is that there is a saying, I might mangle this, but the best editors, you're like a patient in a hospital and you're wearing a hospital gown that's open in the back. And the best editors follow behind you to make sure your ass isn't hanging out. And Jonathan was thanking the wide breadth of editors who make sure that our asses aren't hanging out,

because there's a high potential for that at any given moment in any newspaper, but especially the one we're in. So no, Jonathan wasn't mooning. No one was moaning. It was a lovely evening. That was beautifully said, Maggie. It was really inspiring to you to say that. Thank you.

Good. You know what? We should write it down and make it a speech. Thank you. I appreciate that. I think it's very marketable also. You know, everyone understands that. Like your book is accessible.

That is an accessible, you know, representation of what you need to get a book like this out and it leads me to, I mean, I want to talk about the state of media, but before I do that, I want to ask about how you guys decided who you could trust and how far that level of trust could go because, I mean, I'm not going to ask you if there are tapes. I'm not going to ask you who leaked to you because 50 people before me have done it. You're not going to tell me. But obviously for a tight-knit group and, you know, different from the first Trump administration, which was, you know, leaky like a sieve, right? This is very different.

And there leaks for specific reasons, right? Not just because people have an obsession with, you know, texting people are feeling powerful. So how did you decide who to trust in this? And were you ever nervous that you were getting leaks for a specific reason, right? Like that this is what they wanted and for you to, you know, run to the pages of the Grey Lady to do this. So Maggie and I have a philosophy, and we've had this for a long time covering, Trump world, which is assume false until proven otherwise. Like our bar for including material in this book was extremely high.

And we put on the cutting room floor a legitimately painful amount of reporting that was phenomenal reporting that would have been very, you know, I wish it was in the book. But we had this 2%, 5%, 10% doubt. Maybe it's not quite right. And so, or there were differing accounts from people. in the room and we just couldn't square the circle and we just said, you know what, we can't trust this information enough to put our names on it. So that's number one. Number two is the thing about this book, which I think is quite distinctive, is almost everything in the book is anchored

in a scene. You know, we're not just saying like wispy Donald Trump was thinking this thing or saying this thing. No, no. On this day, at this time, in this room with these people around the table, this was said, okay? And to establish that, you can't just take one person's word for it. And in many cases, you can't take two people's word for it or maybe sometimes three people's words. So again, it's like, it's hard to convey to people who, you know, I understand, you know, reporting is sort of this weird thing that we do. And it's not something that the general public really has to think about a lot, the sort of the process of doing it. But it's so hard. It's so hard and it takes so much work. And this book basically

killed us. By the end of it, I was like, I don't know if I'll ever write another book ever. I mean, and we were just exhausted by it. But the reason we're exhausted by it is because every scene like that, the amount of just sheer reporting effort that goes into verifying and making sure that it's accurate is immense. So again, we don't trust, there's no trust. Trust is completely irrelevant. It's squaring accounts. It's, again, we don't, we have in the book, a big source note at the start where we say, you know, when we use dialogue that's in direct quotes, it's either, you know, from the person who said it or basically people who are participants in the conversation. And again, we're never just going to take one person's word for anything,

or tapes, transcripts, contemporaneous notes of meeting. So we take that very, very seriously because we are reporting a first draft of history, and it has to be right. It has to be right. And for us, our names are on us, and if we get one of these really high-stakes scenes wrong, it's a catastrophe for us, like, for our credibility and for our reporting. And it's just not acceptable for us to have scenes in the book that are wrong.

Picture it. Summer, you and your girls are your favorite patio bar, The sun's out. The breeze is perfect, and you're looking stunning in that new sun dress. And what are we drinking? A Kampari Spritz. It's just Kempari, Prisko, and Soda Water. Bold, iconic, and perfectly bitter, just like you. Check out official cocktail recipes at Kampari.com. Kampari Sprits, stay bitter. Kampari liqueur, 24% alcohol by volume 48 proof. 2026 Kampari America, New York, please enjoy responsibly. Anyone managing cash flow knows growth is expensive and flexibility matters.

The American Express corporate program helps businesses manage spending and payment timing to support healthier working capital. Chat with a member of the American Express team to find the card program that's best for your needs. Learn more at Americanexpress.com slash corporate. Terms apply. Support for the show comes from SOFi. If you're a parent helping your child to navigate college, you know just how fast the costs can pile up. Between tuition, housing, textbooks, and everyday living expenses, funding higher education is a major financial commitment. That's where today's sponsor, SOFI,

comes in. SoFi offers private student loans that can cover up to 100% of school certified costs, not just undergrad and graduate tuition, but SOFI can help cover housing, books, food, and other education-related expenses. SoFi's private student loans are all about flexibility. They offer competitive, fixed, or variable rates, multiple term options, and monthly payments, so you can build around your budget. The application process is completely online, and you can check your rate in minutes.

And for families exploring their options together, adding a qualified co-signer may help improve chances of securing a lower interest rate. And there are zero fees required. That means no origination fees or late fees, no surprises. What you see is what you pay back. Head to sophy.com slash box student to check your options and get your education funded the smarter way.

That's sophide.com slash Fox student. Originated by SoFi Bank and a member FDIC. Terms and conditions apply. Please borrow responsibly. You know, you've both spent a lot of time thinking about Donald Trump all the time, right? And not in the TDS way that I do necessarily, right? Like in a genuine way that you are. In a reportorial way.

Yes, that is true. Yes. Much fancier than talking about TDS. So what comes next for political journalism? Because, well, it's a two-part question. One, a little conspiracy theory-ish, but is there any part of you having such intimate understanding of Trump and the people around him that thinks that he is not going to leave office in 20, you know, at the beginning of 2029 when there is a new president coming in,

you know, people think he's building a bunker right under this 90,000 square foot ballroom, that he has side plans. You have Steve Bannon and out there regularly talking about that there are ways to change the Constitution or we'll just do it. And now he doesn't have a Mike Pence, right? He has J.D. Vance. It's very different than that. So one, do you think it's possible that they are scheming in any way to stay? And then two, can you speak to how political journalism goes on without Trump? Because he's obvious, I mean, he's, done a lot to change the relationship to the press. And then there have been a lot of people also that have fed off of those changes to make a very different type of political journalism career

than they would have had if we had had Hillary Clinton for a couple terms and then Marco Rubio. Let me work backwards on those two questions, if that's okay. In terms of the political media question, there obviously are a lot of people who have built very specific careers around this moment. There are people who clip his videos when he speaks. And as somebody who follows all of those accounts, I mean, we all find them useful. It's helpful just in terms of, you know, aggregation, just to at least know what's out there. There are people who have, as we said before, they have launched substacks. Some of them are reportorial. Others are opinion. Clearly, yes, there is a greater engagement level in this moment with Trump than I think there would have been with

a president, Hillary Clinton. than there was with President Biden, although I will say there became a fair amount of interest in political media in the final year of the Biden term for a variety of reasons. And we can talk about that another time. What that looks like in the long term, I think it's impossible to say because I disagree a little bit, or I think it's a little bit more nuanced than that it's just about Trump, because political journalism was already changing before Trump. And he absolutely threw accelerant on it. But trends that were moving somewhat slower suddenly sped up with him, whether that was media, whether that was political. But, I mean, one thing that I talk about,

Jessica, it's a bit of a cul-de-sac, so just bear with me for a second. But, and I did write about this in Confidence, man, but one of the races that I covered that I found really informative in terms of where the country was heading and what voters wanted in terms of a change was certainly on the right, but obviously it's not just on the right. Look at what just happened in New York in terms of elections here, which is where I am right now, was the Carl Paladino versus Andrew Cuomo gubernatorial race in 2010 in New York. Now, Paladino, who was also being, you know, informally advised by Roger Stone, and who had sent racist emails about Michelle Obama and who had had a child out of wedlock, and all of these became stories. He lobbed,

you know, previously unfathomable from a candidate accusations about Andrew Cromo and Andrew Cromo's on past marriage. He said things we had just never heard a candidate say before. He won the primary against an establishment candidate two to one. He was not expected to win. He was a proto-Trump in a lot of ways, but that was 2010. Trump really started putting himself out there much more in 2011. And this energy was already beginning. This, this, this, post-financial crisis, post-Iraq war, a lot of unresolved turmoil within the Republican base over the Iraq war. And he picked up on that and ran with it in a sui-generous way because he was a celebrity, because he was so known to so many people. And that has had, I think, an impact

in terms of how he gets certainly seen by a lot of his supporters as well. So I don't know what that means going forward, but I don't think it's just about him. There will also be other changes that we can't foresee because of AI in the media. That is one of the greatest threats the media is seeing right now. And I don't know what that looks like. I'm not smart enough to know what that looks like going forward. The other piece I would just add about in terms of people like Jonathan and me, this goes back to the legacy piece. We're, I mean, Jonathan is the, the, conducted the single best television interview that anyone has done with Donald Trump and ever will. So just put that out there right now. But Jonathan is also a newspaper reporter. That was his,

that was his start, and that's in his blood and in my blood. And we both had careers before Donald Trump started running for president. And so they were not as familiar to people, but we had been doing this for a while. And so I think, you know, there is a world where there is just a media landscape that just exists without Donald Trump because people have done it before. It might just look different. In terms of him leaving, I mean, look, I, I, I think that Jonathan and I can safely say, and we've talked about this a lot, that, you know, we're not going to make any predictions, A, because we shouldn't, but B, that's not our jobs, but B, because after January 6th, 2021, and the lead up to that, and I should be clear that two weeks later, Trump did leave. But January 6th was a calamitous day, to put it mildly. And it was a shocking day for many of the people around Trump in particular who couldn't quite believe what they were watching. from inside the White House.

So I'm not going to say that I have any idea what is coming. What I will say, and we have talked about this a lot too, is most times in a presidential cycle in the midterms, with a lame duck president in particular, I can see, we all can kind of see what the arc is looking like, especially when somebody has such low approval ratings. And his approval ratings are about, Jessica, where they were, give or take a few points in the margin of error after January 6th. right now.

Usually I can see where it goes. Congress flips. There will be lots of subpoenas and oversight questions. I don't know what it will look like when the House flips, if it does, and maybe the Senate flips, and a bunch of subpoenas are issued. And what if the Trump administration just broadly says we're not complying with these? Congress doesn't have a special jail. They will have to be making referrals to the DOJ, and I somehow don't think that the Trump Justice Department is going to move on those. So I don't know what this looks like. You know, one of the things that we write about in the book is that Trump has spent, you know, months telling people that he's going to pardon everybody who came within a certain radius of the Oval Office. Sometimes it's 25 feet, sometimes it's 200, sometimes it's 250, but lots of people told us, as we were reporting this book, that they're counting on their pardon. And I think it's going to make the Biden pre-pardons look small. So I don't know.

what this looks like. Okay. We're almost out of time. I wanted to ask you, you know, you talk about how much you reported or you had, and then you couldn't either verify it, but then there's also stuff that doesn't make a book because you don't have enough space, and it's already, you know, 410 pages or, you know, longer, but all the notes. And it's a long book. It's a long book. It's totally worth it. So is there anything that you are planning to do with the pieces that were on the cutting room floor that you just couldn't fit into this or really feel like a different kind of story and, you know, I'll shoot my shot. Is there anything that you do have verified that you could talk about that, you know, is regime change part two or just, you know, Maggie and

Jonathan X raging moderates fodder? Both of our, both of our spouses just screamed into pillows suggesting regime change too. I do want you guys to say happily married, so forget that. Is this like the sealed section in the, you know, magazine, you know, whatever? Yeah, that's special. I don't know. Look, we have so, we have thousands of pages of reporting of mostly from the campaign. Because remember, we started reporting this book in 2023 when we had no idea how this would all turn out. So a lot of it was from the campaign period. There's also stuff from the administration that we didn't think just either met the bar for

being important enough to put in the book. So at some point, we'll probably have a good look through all our, stuff and maybe there'll be times where something happens in the news that we think we can help illuminate through reporting that we had. But there's nothing that like immediately comes to mind for the raging moderate listeners. I'm sorry to disappoint you. No, I knew it was coming. Yeah. I know you guys aren't on this massive tour. So I appreciate that raging moderates was a stop for you. Again, I can't speak highly enough. about this book and how accessible, again, it is for any person who's interested in what's going on

in our country. Because it's not just about Trump, right? It's about a revolution, essentially, that's gone on in our politics. And congratulations. This is just incredible work. Thank you. If I could say one thing, which sounds kind of promotional, but it's not, it's more logistical. We did not anticipate to have Amazon running out of stock, which they have. They are doing a big reprint to refill it. But you, You can buy it, obviously, instantly with e-book and an audio book on Amazon, and there's still copies around in independent bookstores and Barnes & Noble and stuff. So that situation is being remedied very quickly, and hopefully next week we'll have a big

influx of books coming through on Amazon. Great. And also, if you are trying to buy it on Amazon, don't, like, walk away. Exactly. You know, place the order. That's kind of what I'm saying. You said it better. No, no, thank you for that, Jessica.

But yes, it is actually being, the stock is being refilled, and pretty quickly, because I have been looking to see what is there. But we did not expect this level of interest. And so Simon & Schuster, the publisher, is rushing to try to fill the demand. And people should keep checking on Amazon, but also your order, if you order it, I think we'll come fairly quickly. It will just take a few days. And I assume Simon and Schuster is also quickly refreshing your contracts and saying, I would like your next three books for whatever comes next. Spouses. Thank you, Jessica. Right. Marriage, whatever. Yeah. Give me more inside the situation room. Maggie and Jonathan, it was fantastic to have you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks for how to us. We appreciate it. Yeah, we do.

This show is supported by Atio, the AICRM. Atio is the AICRM that turns every customer signal into context you can act on. Connect your email, calendar, and product data, and Atio instantly builds your CRM with enriched, data and a complete picture of every deal. Then you can ask Atio anything. Spot a deal at risk, draft outreach, uncover new prospects, so you can spend less time in your CRM and more time-building relationships. Ask more from your CRM. Ask Atio. You can go to atio.com slash Vox and you'll get 15% off your first year. That's A-T-T-I-O.com slash Vox.

When you finally find your thing, you want the whole. whole world to know about that thing. So you use a thing called Canva to make it an even bigger and better thing. Whether you want to create flyers for that thing, make presentations for that thing, or design merch for that thing, you can do

anything. So people can see your thing, feel your thing, love your thing. The next thing you know, it's a thing. Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing. We all have to drink water. and staying hydrated is one of the simplest ways to feel your best.

But come on. How is your relationship with water really? Are you getting enough from it? Is it satisfying you? Or is drinking it becoming a chore? Here's a tip to spice things up. Hint water. With delectable flavors like watermelon, Georgia peach, even lemon zest freeze,

hint is water that will make you desire water, no sugar, no sweeteners, no calories. It just goes to show. Sometimes the right hydration partner changes everything. Try Hint. Available at drinkhind.com and in stores nationwide.