An insider's account of Trump's White House

**Justin Webb** (0:00)
Hello, it's Justin here, and hello to all the new listeners to Americast. There are quite a few of you at the moment. So if you do enjoy what you hear, please do consider subscribing to the podcast. That way, you will never miss an episode. Now, on with this one.

**Sumi Somaskanda** (0:14)
What really goes on inside Donald Trump's White House in this second term in office? It's a question many of you have asked us. We're speaking to a journalist today who gained unprecedented access into the Oval Office. We're speaking to Jonathan Swan on his book, Regime Change, Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. It's an extraordinary read with incredible anecdotes and insights into the inner workings of President Trump. And we get groundbreaking reporting on how President Trump decided to go to war with Iran. Welcome to Americast.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:49)
Americast from BBC News.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:51)
Whatever you want to talk about, Abdul, keep my wife's name the hell out of your mouth because she's way out of your league.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:57)
The tide is coming and this time we intend to win it all.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:04)
See, he doesn't want to do the job.
He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar. When I'm not around, you're going to be broke.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:17)
There's not going to be anybody to report on.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:20)
Nobody gives a damn about anybody else.

**Sumi Somaskanda** (1:27)
It's Sumi in the DC Bureau. As promised, I'm joined by Jonathan Swan, who's co-written this book with Maggie Haberman, White House Correspondent for the New York Times, who has reported on President Trump for many years, and they chart the first 14 months of President Trump's second term. Jonathan Swan is with us. Jonathan, thanks for joining.

**Jonathan Swan** (1:45)
Hi, Suni. Great to be here.

**Sumi Somaskanda** (1:46)
Maybe you can start out by telling us, how did this book come about?

**Jonathan Swan** (1:52)
Well, in 2023, Maggie and I were working together very closely with the New York Times, and we could both see that the Trump story, no matter what happened, was going to be headed for an epic conclusion. At that time, it could have been prison, he'd been indicted, very real prospect of criminal conviction, or it could end up in the White House. Either way, it was an extraordinary story, we were both very deeply sourced and widely sourced in his world, we've been covering him for a long time, and we felt that together we could do something that would reach the level, the ambition that we both had for what this should be.

**Sumi Somaskanda** (2:33)
Yeah, that's really interesting, Jonathan, because you say in your acknowledgments with Maggie that you called deaths, that you had been working on this book nearly three years. So that gives us a bit of a sense that, do I understand correctly, this would have been a book either way, it just would have been a very different book if he had ended up in prison?

**Jonathan Swan** (2:48)
Yeah, we discarded thousands of pages of reporting. We essentially discarded a year and a half of reporting, because we were doing intense daily reporting for the book, behind the scenes material throughout the campaign, throughout the late 2023 through 2024
And once we got to 2025, we realized that this was such a consequential administration that the bar that the material had to clear to make it into the book, for anything that happened before 2025, was that the material had to illuminate and help explain things that we were seeing and living through in 2025 So that's a pretty high bar. Most things don't clear that bar. So we went through the very painful process of discarding an enormous amount of immodestly very high quality reporting.

**Sumi Somaskanda** (3:39)
I know you can't tell us about kind of your sourcing, but can you give us some insight into how difficult it is or unprecedented, let's say, to have that kind of access?

**Jonathan Swan** (3:48)
It's very, very difficult and completely different from the first term. So the sort of fly on the wall reporting became unremarkable in the first term because there was so much leaking, so much factional warfare and what have you. So you actually saw spillage almost every day out of the Oval Office, even out of the White House Situation Room. I think one reason this book has had the impact it has is that you haven't seen that this term.
People were sort of, whoa, I didn't know that. I didn't know that that happened.
They could actually for the first time really see inside these rooms. And the truth is it's a much more cohesive team, much smaller tight-knit group. And so it was much, much more difficult to get these scenes. And again, it goes back to what I was saying earlier. If you saw the amount of material that we didn't put in the book because we just couldn't be certain it was true. We had a pretty high level of confidence that this scene had happened. It was a sensational scene or an extraordinary scene or maybe a funny scene or a revealing scene. And we just went through the process of trying to verify it. And at the end of the day, there might have been a 5% little bit of doubt in our minds. And so then very ruthless decision, no, doesn't go in the book. We could only put things in there that we were willing to put our names on. And I think it's been interesting that now the book has been out for, is it three months now? I don't know. It's a blur, two and a half months. There has not been one single substantive denial of any scene in this book, of any piece of dialogue in this book.