Trump Fatigue Meets Its Match

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**Jonathan Swan** (0:47)
You need to love what you're doing so much that you dream about it. Maggie and I are like 100% demented. Our lack of sanity is our secret source, I would say.

**Dylan Byers** (1:01)
Hello, friends, and welcome back to The Grill Room. It is Tuesday, July 7th.
My guests today are Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, the dynamic duo behind Regime Change, latest tome about the Trump presidency, and without question the most authoritative and compelling as well. Regime Change, you may have read some of the excerpts in The New York Times. Regime Change has the receipts. It delivers down to the most minute detail conversations that took place in the Situation Room in the Oval Office and provides, I think very crucially, some terra firma on which to stand in a very disorienting political era. There's a lot of spin that comes out of this administration. There are a lot of dueling narratives about what's happening in America right now. And the reporting obviously is there to ground you. And when you get it all in one place, telling a story about what happened over the course of many months about this administration, it's an instant classic. So I wanted to have Maggie and Jonathan on to talk yes, about their reporting process, about why they feel like this book has resonated so much, despite the broader Trump fatigue that we see in the media. And to talk about where their reporting partnership goes from here. So incredibly enjoyable conversation. Love both of these guys. And without further ado, let's get started.
Maggie and Jonathan, welcome to The Grill Room.

**Maggie Haberman** (2:52)
Thanks for having us, Dylan.

**Jonathan Swan** (2:53)
Thanks for having us.

**Dylan Byers** (2:54)
Congratulate, we had 300,000 in the first week, 300,000 copies sold. I know that it sold out on Amazon.
I don't know what the latest data is, but what is happening here? What do you attribute the success of this book to?

**Jonathan Swan** (3:12)
It's a very good question. I don't think we can actually answer it, because it's sort of entering kind of 50 shades of gray territory, and there are no sex scenes in the book. So I can't, I actually don't know. People seem to be reading it, which is great.
We couldn't have worked harder on it. So it's very relieving, gratifying, surprising that it's such a response.

**Dylan Byers** (3:42)
You knew what you had, because obviously you had the goods, you had the receipts, you had the conversations and the details and all of the backroom drama.
But before we get into that, did you anticipate this level of response? And I ask because there's been a narrative out there that for some reason in Trump 2.0, the hunger for Trump stories and Trump revelations was not as big as it was during his first term. And that is amid a sort of broader discussion in the publishing industry about a waning interest in non-fiction books generally. And then here, like lo and behold, here this book comes out and blows everything out of the water. Did you anticipate this level of response, just given knowing what you had in terms of the revelations in the book?

**Jonathan Swan** (4:36)
No. We sort of had this, it was like a dual track thing because we both felt that it's the best work we've ever done in our lives by orders of magnitude, like by far the best reporting we've ever done and we killed ourselves on it. But that's a separate question from commercial expectations and sales expectations. And I mean, I was super bearish just based on what you were saying. I mean, we were reading all the same headlines. You know, the Wall Street Journal declared serious nonfiction dead basically in this article.