Gold, secrets, never-ending meetings: Inside the Trump White House
7/15/202646 min
Journalist Jonathan Swan’s book, ‘Regime Change,’ co-written with fellow ‘New York Times’ reporter Maggie Haberman, is a portrait of President Trump’s second term – which Swan calls "unrecognizable" from term one. The reporting duo interviewed over 1,000 sources for the book, including the president himself. Their work adds rich detail to developments that were generally known, and explores stories that had somehow slipped under the radar. Swan spoke with Fresh Air contributor and former politics reporter Dave Davies.
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsSpeaker 10:00
This season on Planet Money Summer School, we go to China, one of the world's biggest economy. And what we learned is Americans are crazy.
Jonathan Swan· Guest0:07
Chinese are crazy. These are two countries full of these crazy hustlers.
Speaker 10:11
The US and China are more alike than you might think. On Planet Money Summer School, a strange lesson about success, how to handle the downsides of progress. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Dave Davies· Host0:23
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. If you follow news about Donald Trump, you'll find there's plenty of it all the time, and you get used to impulsive decisions, surprising developments, and sudden changes of course. Tariffs rise and fall with dizzying speed. The Iranian leaders he was calling rational days ago, he now regards as scum. The pattern is so familiar that when I learned that New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan had written a new book about Trump's second term in office, I wondered, "Is there really anything new to report here?" It turns out there's plenty. Swan and Haberman conducted 1,000 interviews for the book, and the result is an account which adds rich and fascinating detail to developments that were generally known and explores stories that had somehow slipped under the radar. There are gripping accounts of top officials meeting to deal with the Epstein files and whether to follow Israel into war with Iran, and stories of rolling bull sessions in the Oval Office, one with a conservative influencer coming in to demand the firing of officials she regards