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Tom Swarbrick is joined by New York Times White House correspondents Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan to discuss what they have witness during Trump's tenure. Listen to the full show on the all-new LBC App: https://app.af.lbc.co.uk/btnc/thenewlbcapp #tomswarbrick #whitehouse #uspolitics #donaldtrump #trump #zelensky #zelenskyy #netanyahu #LBC LBC is the home of live debate around news and current affairs in the UK. Join in the conversation and listen at https://www.lbc.co.uk/ Sign up to LBC’s weekly newsletter here: https://l-bc.co/signup
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As America turns 250 tomorrow, we get an extraordinary insight into the mind and the times of Trump's second presidency
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New York Times writers Maggie Huberman and Jonathan Swan have spent years talking to sources deeply embedded in the Trump administration
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Their book is called Regime Change Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump
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I spoke to Maggie and Jonathan for some time about what's in their book. Frankly, it is jaw-dropping
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It is absolutely breathtaking, the kind of things they've been hearing about going on in the rooms around the Oval Office
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But this is, what you'll hear from them here, is an account of what was going on in the run-up to, and the aftermath of
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Trump's massive blow-up in the Oval Office with President Zelensky. Can I start with perhaps one of the key moments that jumps out immediately when one thinks of Trump's second term
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And that, to my mind at least, is the Zelensky moment in the Oval Office, in the White House, where it kicked off in front of the world big time
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Take us into the room, take us into the anti-rooms of the White House after that meeting and about perhaps what the president said after it happened
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Trump's meeting with Zelensky in the Oval Office was shocking to watch, both for anybody who had support of Ukraine during the Russian incursion into Ukraine and its attacks
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Trump does not like Zelensky. That's known. This was not an ambush. And we write about this pretty clearly
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This was not some planned theatrics, but it also wasn't really surprising to Trump's advisors that it went this way
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Most of them actually were just fine with it because most of them share Trump's antipathy to Zelensky
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But there had been this back and forth about whether there would be some kind of a minerals deal with Ukraine and the U.S
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We get deep inside these meetings in the lead up to these discussions between Scott Besson, the Treasury Secretary, and Zelensky in the lead up to this Oval Office meeting
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But the Oval Office meeting was, I think, as you say, it was essentially the clearest sign that you could have of how radically different this term was going to be from last term
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We had seen Trump blow up at domestic leaders before. We had seen Trump fight with foreign leaders before in one way or another or heard about phone calls that were unpleasant
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This was in the Oval Office with the leader of an ally nation
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And it underscored the degree to which Trump was changing the post-World War II order, showing that it basically just wasn't going to continue the way it had been, couldn't functionally continue the way it had been going forward
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I think the other thing that sort of we discovered in our reporting for the book is the antipathy to Zelensky was much deeper than people realized I mean we have reporting in the book that the Treasury Secretary Scott Besant actually advised Trump not to let Zelensky
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into the White House until he'd signed the Mineral Steel. He described to colleagues and associates
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Zelensky as a tricky little f***, as a special needs child for the Europeans
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as Mr Bean on crack. We have an extraordinary scene in the Oval Office
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where the senior Trump team is discussing their Russia-Ukraine strategy. This is in the first week of the administration
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And Trump's Russia-Ukraine envoy, Keith Kellogg, comes in prepared. He'd spent all this time doing this very detailed presentation
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about what the plan should be to get a deal with Russia-Ukraine
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And Trump just keeps interrupting him, basically saying Zelensky's ruined his country, he's terrible
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the only good thing about Ukraine is their women, direct quote. They keep winning the Miss Universe contest. And we also have reporting in the book of phone calls between Trump and Vladimir Putin and then Trump and Zelensky back to back calls. And it's very instructive because the tone could not have been more different
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with Putin Trump is dealing with him as a peer as someone he respects um there's certainly no
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moral judgment whatsoever zero and in fact he sees I think as came through in that conversation
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Ukraine almost as an obstacle as an irritant that's in the way of his desire of doing business
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deals with Russia getting American companies back into Russia immediately after that call
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he gets on the phone with Zelensky and his opening line is this sarcastic but actually very cruel
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line he says you know i just got off the phone with your best friend vladimir putin as if it's
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sort of this you know mean girls kind of thing whereas no actually putin has been you know
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ravaging invading his country um for for this period of time and he he essentially said to
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Zelensky you don't have any cards this is what he ended up saying publicly but you need to get to
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a deal. So it's just we're not used to seeing an American president behave like this or think like
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this. It's just unrecognizable from what we're used to with an American president
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There is obviously going to be in any negotiation of war and peace kind of behind the scenes
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give and take some of it possibly even quite fraught between the leaders
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What has been utterly remarkable about Trump presidency one, but certainly Trump presidency
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Two, is the extent to which those behind the scenes difficulties, antipathies, misunderstandings have been just placed front and centre for people to see, Maggie
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Yes, everything is playing out front and centre in part because Donald Trump likes operating that way
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But as I said before it one of the ways in which this presidency this term is just unrecognisable to term one In term one Trump would have as Jonathan said these kind of mean girl conversations He would call the leader of one European nation and say you should hear what you know Angela Merkel is saying about you and back and forth like that It did not play out publicly
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the same way, as caustic as it seemed at the time. And it was. But yes, Trump was very candid
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for instance, in that meeting with Zelensky, where at the end of it, where it was incredibly fiery
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for, you know, many, many minutes. They're talking over each other. And then at the end
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Trump says something, you know, about how this will make for great television. You know
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he describes it at another point as it'll be better than The Apprentice. There is a degree
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to which Trump is making a big show of transparency, much more so than term one. In fact, and we make
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this clear in the book, they're very good at keeping secrets when they want to, particularly
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when it involves matters of foreign policy and national security. But that's a different matter
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Well, let me ask about another matter of foreign policy, certainly one that has affected every continent on Earth, pretty much, is the war with Iran. And the extent to which
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Trump's relationship actually with Netanyahu, which was, I think, pretty fraught by the end of
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first term, you describe being quite fraught and Trump's mind not really being secure about whether
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or not to follow Israel into a war with Iran, despite Netanyahu's best efforts
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Yeah, it was much more complicated, I think, than a lot of the very reductive public commentary
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about it. Bibi Netanyahu absolutely, you know, from the minute Trump won the election
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had a very focused, aggressive plan to bring Trump into a regime change war with Iran
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There's no question about that. But it's also true that Trump is far more hawkish about Iran specifically than many of his more isolationist, anti-interventionist advisers would like to think he is or at some time sort of pretend he is
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he managed to sort of be all things to all people during you know his political campaign saying you
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know i'm the president of peace no new wars george w bush did the worst thing ever bringing americans
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to the middle east but if you actually looked at his actions while in office in the first term
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they were very clearly comfortable with the projection of u.s force not to the extent we've
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seen in this term but you know he he authorized the the killing of qasem soleimani the top iranian
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general he pulled the united states out of the iran nuclear deal that obama had struck against
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the advice of some of his advisors and then in the interregnum period the issue of iran became much
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more personal for trump um he was briefed by the fbi that they were trying to kill him that there
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were plots to try to assassinate him so again much more complicated but the story of trump going into
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war in iran it's one of the most illustrative stories of how foreign policy is conducted in
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this administration because he actually was briefed about the risks. We we we established that unequivocally in our reporting the chairman of the joint chiefs Dan Kane absolutely laid out the risks of the Strait of Hormuz closing of munitions supplies Trump felt in his gut
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this was not a decision driven by the CIA or the US intelligence assessments. It was Trump's own
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gut feeling that this Iranian regime was a paper tiger, that it would collapse quickly
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and that Trump could be the first US president in 47 years to finally deal with this regime
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So that's how it played out. I'm going to have to let you go
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Unfortunately, I could spend all day talking to you about this. And as someone actually who has been on, I used to work for a prime minister 10 years ago
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during Trump's first term and have been on calls between Trump and the prime minister
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And a lot of what has been reported about his kind of attitudes to those calls certainly rings true from what I heard
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And then there was this this wonderful detail that you talk about in the book, Maggie, about his obsession with gold leafing the White House
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Caroline Leavitt, the press secretary in the White House, told colleagues to find him pretty remarkable moments that she walked into the Oval Office one morning early on in the term in 2025 to find Trump with a tube of super glue
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uh gluing gold appliques onto the the mantelpiece of the the fireplace uh the fireplace is marble
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uh he has covered every single inch basically of the oval office with gold we hadn't been in there
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in quite some time until we went in to see him for an interview for the book on march 16th of
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this year and it's pretty overwhelming how much gold there is and it takes a minute to to take it
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all in, but it's arresting. He is so fixated on decorations and on leaving his mark all over
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Washington in a way that can't be erased. But the amount of time he would prefer spending on
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decorations or on building projects compared to the rest of governance, like if you look at
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Jonathan often says, the pie chart of his brain, that would be the majority if you could look in
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there. But yes, his interest in decorations and his interest in both the residents, which we got
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very deep inside reporting on, and the Oval Office and parts of the rest of the White House
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was among some of our most detailed reporting of how he's thinking right now. And it is
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illustrative of this term. Absolutely jaw-dropping quotes there about what was reportedly said
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in and around the president after that meeting with Zelensky. Now, we've approached the US
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treasury department for comment and we haven't heard anything yet donald trump says of this book
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quotes it is mostly made up fake news largely fiction as have been most of the things she
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maggie human has written about me for so many years she's a third rate writer and intellect
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who has made a first rate income because of your favorite president capital letters me end quotes
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