Few reporters understand as much about Donald Trump’s thinking, motives, and behavior as Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. Haberman has been covering the president closely for more than a decade at The New York Times; she started with his first campaign in 2015, and her record of scoops quickly brought her into the public eye. Swan was, for many years, her chief professional rival: He worked for Axios, where he landed a controversial 2018 one-on-one interview with Trump. In late 2022, the Times announced that it was hiring Swan, turning the rivals into colleagues.
This past June, they published Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. The book, an instant best seller, advances a new understanding of the first year of Trump’s second term, relaying in minute-by-minute detail how, since retaking office, he has pursued his personal goals with few limits on his power. The Atlantic staff writer Tim Alberta sat down with both authors at The Atlantic Festival, where he asked them about the 2028 election and the future of the presidency and the Republican Party.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Tim Alberta: Maggie, this country has been through a lot, and I’m wondering if you could help us understand how a “regime change” of this sort came to be.
Maggie Haberman: Essentially, we have had a series of national traumas since 9/11: two forever wars, a fiscal crisis, immense populist anger that started rising in 2010. To me, that was the year that set the tone. It was also the year that the proto-Trump, Carl Paladino, was the Republican nominee for governor in New York State. One of the issues that he ran on was the planned mosque to be built near the World Trade Center; it became known incorrectly as the “Ground Zero Mosque,” and it became a clear avatar of a change in this country after the era of George W. Bush. So you get to 2014, when immigration and particularly border crossings were on the rise under President Obama. Suddenly, this became a massive issue within the Republican Party. You had this mix of anger over the wars, anger over the massive accumulated debt under President Bush, then Obamacare, anger about immigration, and a shifting job market. The time was ripe for a candidate who presented himself as a fighter—and who was already known to most of the Republican electorate, not just as a celebrity on The Apprentice but as a cultural figure.
Alberta: 2016, Trump 1.0, is its own story. So much of what this book is about is how the end of that first term, and then his time in exile after losing in 2020, shapes this dramatic, radical, wholesale change to government and to executive power.
Jonathan Swan: When we were reporting for this book, we heard from a couple of people who were close to Trump at a pretty high level that, in their view, the best thing that happened to him was losing in 2020. Which is something they could never say publicly or in his presence, because, of course, he never lost the election and what have you. But it’s indisputably true. Let’s say Trump ekes out that victory in 2020: He comes back in; he is hobbled by COVID. He has the same inflation that every other country around the world has. He still has the rump of a team around him that he really doesn’t like very much, who are, in quite a few instances, pushing back on some of his more extreme desires. He really can’t get his arms around the presidency.
Instead, he loses. People like Stephen Miller spent those four years very productively. It wasn’t just drawing up the plans—you saw that blitz of executive orders at the start of 2025, which was all very well prepared. They also spent a lot of time thinking about Who are the lawyers that we want to fill the government with? And I’m not just talking about the White House counsel’s office; I’m talking about across the government. Agency lawyers, general counsels—they would constantly say, Well, no, what you’re proposing is illegal. But when you have lawyers who are saying, Well, actually, if we turn it this way and then turn it this way and then give it a little bit of a spin, then they can bless what you want. And that’s what’s happening.
I’ll give you the perfect example that describes the difference between term one and term two: In term one, Trump was saying almost yearningly, You know, they don’t have a drug problem in China, because Xi Jinping, he just kills the drug dealers. And they don’t have a drug problem in the Philippines, because Rodrigo Duterte just kills them. Trump was very fond of these extrajudicial killings. In term one, there wasn’t a huge amount of enthusiasm for this idea among the leadership of the Defense Department. Now you have Pete Hegseth, and you have lawyers inside the government that allow a policy where Donald Trump decided, in his mind, that people on fishing boats transporting cocaine in the Caribbean Sea are not drug traffickers who are to be interdicted by the Coast Guard and dealt with in a criminal-justice system. No: They’re enemy combatants in a war. We’re not going to interdict them. We’re not going to arrest them. We’re just going to kill them. And that’s something that has been blessed within the government. They haven’t even bothered to try to legally justify this in a public setting. They just do it, knowing that they have the right lawyers in place.
The other big element making this term unrecognizable from the first term is the immunity decision. Maggie and I talk about this all the time. Trump would say early on, I’m immune; I’m immune. He has said privately that he’s going to pardon anyone who came within 250 feet of the Oval Office.
The point is, he had the time to rebuild, and his team had time to prepare. That’s how you get this second term.
Alberta: Trump can’t stay in power forever. He will soon be a lame duck after these November midterms. I’m wondering how he’s handling that: whether he is going to allow a neat and tidy process to unfold for his successor, and whether or not J. D. Vance, who got a bit crosswise with him over Iran, is going to be tortured over the next several years as the president deliberates over whom he should hand all of this over to.
Swan: We have a scene in the book that I think illustrates what you’re describing. Rupert Murdoch comes to the White House for dinner. This is October of last year, and they’re in the Blue Room of the White House. And at the table are J. D. Vance and Marco Rubio.
Haberman: And, like, 10 other people.
Swan: Halfway through the conversation, Trump says, I really like J.D. I really like Marco. Rupert, what do you think of J.D.? And he starts this beauty pageant, essentially, in front of both of them, with the most powerful proprietor of conservative media—knowing full well that Rupert Murdoch is no fan of J. D. Vance and, in fact, tried to stop him from becoming the vice president. There’s this pause, and Rupert Murdoch says, J.D. has the potential to be great—just withering. Vance says, Oh, gee, thanks, Rupert. It’s a very awkward moment. Trump says, What do you think of Marco? And Rupert doesn’t miss a beat: He says, Marco’s brilliant. This savage moment just foretells what the next two years are going to be like. How is he grappling with being a lame duck? The way he’s grappling with it is by refusing to be a lame duck.
Vance is in a really difficult position because, as you noted, there were several meetings leading up to the Iran war, in the Situation Room and the Oval Office, where Vance was the only one in the room arguing against it. That did not go down well with Trump. And so the notion that this is going to be some smooth glide path to the 2028 nomination is contradicted by every piece of evidence we have about who Donald Trump is and how he behaves.
Alberta: Maggie, that point that Jonathan makes about Trump’s refusal to be a lame duck over the next two years—what does that look like?
Haberman: I don’t want to limit anyone’s imagination here on what it would look like. The question that we get a lot is, Will he try for a third term? I truly don’t believe he will, but I’m absolutely willing to be wrong. I don’t actually think he wants that, and he doesn’t need it. He will be the dominant figure in this party until he is no longer on this Earth, whether he’s in office or not. He has made more money than he ever made in his life during this presidency—at least just liquid, that we know of, assets.
Swan: By orders of magnitude.
Haberman: The crypto money is, I think, $2.2 billion in the first year-ish of the presidency. His children have continued to make money. There were very valid questions about Hunter Biden, but it is so dwarfed by everything that we are seeing now, everything that Hunter Biden was doing.
What the next two years I expect will look like will be the projects Trump really cares about, which are these monuments to himself in Washington—the ballroom. I’m very curious to see what happens with the Kennedy Center; that’s a big open question. This is not going to look like any kind of congressional flip that we’ve seen before in a lame-duck presidency, because to Jonathan’s point, Trump knows that he is immune from federal prosecution. He has talked about pardons very openly. We spoke with a number of people who are counting on their pardons. We’ve never seen a government just not respond to subpoenas in Congress. The only recourse that Congress has if they don’t get cooperation is a contempt-of-Congress vote and a referral to the Department of Justice, where I’m confident Attorney General Todd Blanche is not going to do a lot. This is a government that has done so little in terms of legislating. Everything, for the most part, was by executive action.
Alberta: Your reporting describes a government that is not recognizable at a fundamental level. How do we come back from that?
Haberman: That’s the reason for the title.
Swan: It’s such an interesting question, because on the one hand, there will be a desire by many to restore what was before. On the other hand, Trump has also shown what you can do unilaterally. He’s demonstrated, particularly in the second term, that a lot of the constraints that we take for granted around the presidency are not legal constraints. They’re self-restraint or norms. Just take the ballroom, for example. Yes, in the end, it was green-lighted, right? The court system is not stopping him from building this ballroom. But by the time the court system got up to that point, there was a giant hole in the ground. There were cranes in the sky; there were shovels going through the earth.
The tariffs are another great example: Yes, ultimately, the Supreme Court checked him on his tariffs—months after he started a global trade war, which had all kinds of rippling consequences. This is a legal system that is not built to deal with a president like Donald Trump; he has shown that you can just get away with acting and forcing others to react. That was a deliberate strategy—overwhelm the opposition; overwhelm the legal groups.
So you have two models: One is a figure who comes back and says, Actually, we need to restore checks and balances and the constitutional system. Or you have either a right-wing populist or a left-wing populist saying, You know what? Donald Trump has actually shown us what nirvana could look like if we do it on behalf of our chosen priorities. That’s how you can get potentially even more of an expansion of executive power and the imperial presidency.
Haberman: The one addendum I would make is that I think that for the most part, President Biden did try going back. He really did. He did fairly little by executive action; he had big legislation; he left the Justice Department alone. What I hear from Democrats I speak with is that they want someone who is going to fight in the manner that they have seen Republicans fight. I agree with Jonathan that I don’t think there is another Donald Trump walking around; I think he is sui generis for a lot of reasons. But that doesn’t mean there are not aspects that would be appealing. And certainly, I believe that whoever the next Republican nominee is, they’re going to be in the mold of Donald Trump. I mean, this is Donald Trump’s party until there is another Republican president, not just nominee, or for as long as he is alive. Whatever you see the Democrats form will be a reaction to that.
The only other asterisk is that if ever there was an election cycle that was ripe for a Ross Perot type, it will be 2028. There is so much anger at the system. Part of why Trump is struggling right now in polls is that he broke several campaign promises, and voters can feel that. They can feel $4.50 gas. People want to feel like somebody is actually helping them.
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