Lawfare Daily: Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan Discuss Their Bestseller, ‘Regime Change’

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you're building tomorrow's advantage. PWC's managed services, we run your operations with tech and talent, so you can run faster, scale smarter, lead stronger. The point is very clear, which is, this is a line the administration should not cross. That kind of a memo is not getting written, if this is just some kind of idle talk. And it was put back on the shelf, but like all ideas with Trump, you know, these are loaded weapons on the shelf.

It's the law fair podcast. I'm Roger Parloff, senior editor at Law Fair, and I'm with Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, White House correspondent for The New York Times. It was this very strange moment where Trump was essentially affirming our own thesis, and doing it in a way that was evident. Wouldn't have been my choice. You know, if I was president, I probably wouldn't have handed the journalist a document saying,

"Hey, look, you know, the top 10. I'm more powerful than Hitler."

Today, we're talking about their new best-selling book, regime change, inside the imperial presidency of Donald Trump. So, this is a book of extraordinary breadth. You know, at Law Fair, we have, you know, people who specialize in Ukraine, or follow Iran, or Venezuela, or AI, or litigation, and this covers everything. So, it's really a remarkable book. So, I'm going to start with a quote on the back of it, "Ask you about that. It's a quote from President Trump. It's then I have an article too,

where I have the right to do whatever I want as president, but I don't even talk about that."

“Where did he say this, and how did you choose that for the back of the book?”

Well, he said it during the first term, and the context was him contemplating firing Robert Mueller, the special counsel, who was investigating ties between his campaign in 2016 and Russia. I mean, the reason we chose the quote is it kind of says it all, doesn't it? This is how he views the presidency as an unconstrained vessel, which he can exert power.

He's never believed in checks and balances, the system of checks and balances.

He's always viewed Congress as an irritation at best. And the story of this book is really a story of a president exerting power, executive power, in ways that we haven't seen in our lifetime, in some respects, we've never seen it in the American presidency. So, we thought that the quote was kind of perfect. Right. Now, the book has four parts. I want to ask you about the structure, their entitled whirlwind, retribution, the enemy within and plunder. Tell me how you arrived at that structure.

Well, I have to give credit to I editor, Jonathan Jayo at Simon Shusta, who's basically a genius.

Not basically as a genius. He's really an amazing editor, and this was the least of his genius.

“But when you look at last year, we thought about the first section whirlwind, the experience of covering the first three months of last year, that's what I felt like to us.”

And that was by design. I mean, the Trump team, Steven Miller in particular, had prepared to flood their zone. They understand that when they do so many things at once so quickly that their opposition is overwhelmed. There are only so much ban with only so many resources, particularly in the centre-left's legal community, to resist what they're doing. So when you saw them pump out more executive orders in the first 100 days, then I think at any presidency, I'd have to go back and check back. I think it was more than FDR. I think it was that. Yeah, so I mean, that was designed to overwhelm the system, not just overwhelm the legal system, but overwhelm the media as well.

And so so much slips through the net. Some things are blocked, but a lot is slipped through the net.

“Remind me the sequencing of the intuition is second, the enemy within and plunder.”

Yeah, the second one speaks for itself, of course. It's been a huge threat of this administration.

But the enemy within really captures how Trump views his opponents. He believes his greatest adversaries are not China, Russia, Iran, but actually Americans, people who live inside America, who are leftists who hate Trump, who are in his view, trying to undermine him, and so so much of their energy is spent on thinking about how to suppress the left, how to investigate the left. Particularly after we have a chapter in our book about Charlie Kirk, and when he was murdered, that was a real pivot point when they started to turn their gaze onto

the infrastructure of the left in a sharper way. They've been looking at all these major sources of funding, left wing institutions in this country, and wondering how they can dismantle them through the justice department and through other means. They haven't had a lot of success yet from their perspective at doing that, but you're starting to see some of the early signs of that. And in the last one, in a couple of respects, one, we have a big chapter on the self-dealing

and the profiteering from the presidency. That is one of the most distinctive features of Trump's

second term. We've never seen anything like this in American history, full stop at this scale.

It doesn't exist. The examples do not exist at this scale. There is no example of a present in his family monetizing the presidency the way that the Trump's are doing right now. You obviously had plenty of presidents, families making money off politics and what have you, but the scale of this is unheard of and the conflicts of interest are breathtaking. So there's that, but there's also the element of plunder that fits into Trump's worldview, which is that

he's got a very 19th century view of the world. He doesn't see the world as groupings of countries with longstanding alliances with America. He doesn't really put much stock in the history of these alliances. He really sees the world as a collection of countries that

“owe America something, owe America money or ripping America off. And I remember in the first term”

when Trump did his first series of foreign leader phone calls, the question he would ask briefers

before all these calls was, "What's the trade deficit?" And the answer to that question would shape his mood and his mindset in that phone call. So if in his view, the other country was taking advantage of America, didn't matter what else the other country was doing or whatever the history of the country with America, that was the defining feature. And what you'll see now in this term is Trump taking that mindset and using it to completely change America's place in the world.

NATO has been altered in a pretty fundamental way this term. I don't think you could have a private conversation with anyone serious at a senior level in Europe who would tell you that they have Trump has re-oriented America almost as a large regional power with focus on the Western Hemisphere. And when he talks about Venezuela as a 51st date, he's not trolling. That's literally how he views Venezuela. We have a story in the New York Times, colleagues of ours, which describes Marco Rubio

essentially as a vice-royer, Venezuela. And that's absolutely correct. I mean, they view DLC Rodriguez as a puppet, Trump views Venezuela as a giant oil field. And when he looks at the Western Hemisphere, he doesn't see sovereign nations that have their own rights and prerogatives. He sees subsidiaries of America and land and territory that should be part of America absorbed into America. So those are the two elements of that lost theme. On the whirlwind piece,

and this was really important to us, and we didn't quite, I don't want to say that we didn't

“remember because we obviously did, but I think that when we were looking over our reporting,”

it was really striking to us as we were writing the book and looking at what to include. And we

painful, but the book would have been 2000 pages long otherwise. It wasn't just Steven Miller's prep

“leading into the return to the White House, although obviously Steven Miller spent the most time”

thinking about what a Trump two-point-out would look like and how to make it happen, of course, various fronts. But the Elon Musk piece, it's like its memory hold. And he was a huge part of that whirlwind. And so you had Steven Miller doing Steven Miller's focus, which was immigration, which was putting in place all of these actions that were going to make the border essentially you know, unpassable, which was going to massively restrict legal immigration and asylum claims

and on and on and on. That was overshadowed by the daily shitcho of whatever doge was up to. And, you know, Elon Musk was belieffully taking a mallet to the government and just sort of indiscriminately getting rid of things. There are a few people in the government who still think they'll say, well, there were certain things that he found that we, you know, we had duplicate of processes for acquisitions and for purchasing. Okay, but they didn't come anywhere near close to

saving what they said they were going to and in the meantime, he just shuttered entirely, created agency in USAID. Marco Rubio was quite unhappy as we write to have to be dealing with the drugs of that and the rump of that agency that got absorbed into the state department. So into the larger state department. And then that just ended, you know, with this, this personal clash with Trump.

And so that was a big part of the whirlwind. Retribution came into focus as the second part because

by the spring, it was very clear that Trump was getting frustrated, that his Retribution agenda was not getting acted on. And that was where, and you can see this in the book, Bill Pulti emerges as a figure who is now the acting director of national intelligence. And if Jay Clayton does not get confirmed, which it does seem like he's going to in part because Republicans and others are afraid of Pulti. But that is how you see Pulti emerge as this loyalist just willing to do whatever

he thinks Trump will want in the reporting that we have. And in terms of the enemy within, what happened in August and September were two very important things to the agenda that Jonathan was talking about. One was that you saw the deployment of the National Guard in Washington, which is something that Trump had been talking about doing, by the way, not just since term one,

“but, you know, we have reporting about him talking about this admiringly in 1993, it was, I think,”

or 1992, as it was being discussed to try to deal with crime. When Mayor Pratt was running, Washington during the Clinton era. But in September as when Charlie Kirk was assassinated, and that was a really galvanizing moment for this effort on cracking down on the left and on political groups on the left. And you still see remnants of that that happened just this past week, with a terrorism conference that Marco Rubio led, the primarily focused on Cuba, but not exclusively,

that Stephen Miller spoke at. And so we were trying to show not just what this first 14

months was like, but how much of it is set the tone and the path for what has come in here, too. Yeah. Let me follow up on some of the things Jonathan said about plunder in July of 2024, this Supreme Court issued its immunity ruling, immunity for most official acts and it made clear that even unofficial acts would be very hard to criminally prosecute. To what extent do you all

“think that that shaped his conduct this term? I think you were very large extent. He has said”

privately, you know, I'm immune. Think of Trump as there's not a huge filter between what he thinks and what he says. I mean, there is sometimes when he wants to keep a secret. But in this case,

he's basically said it out loud. I mean, during the first time he felt like he was under siege.

And, you know, he was being investigated. He had no experience in government and felt like he was in a defensive crouch. This time around, he's acting with impunity. It's not just Trump who feels emboldened. It's most of the people around him as well, particularly his family. He has given them essentially a green light to go and make as much money as they as their hearts, you know, desire. And we have some reporting in the book that Trump has said that he will pardon anyone who came

patterns. We expect base on our reporting that Trump has gone to do some of the most widespread

series of patterns in American history before the end of his term. And many of his top aids will eagerly accept those patterns. Let me change now to a question about habeas corpus. How close have

“we come to suspension of habeas corpus under this presidency? And why hasn't it happened?”

Well, we came very close. And that was a chapter in the book that was sort of a not sort of it was a white whale of ours, because as you know, and but I think a lot of people forget, Trump was amusing about this publicly. And the very end of a April, he did not specify habeas corpus. But in the middle of a cabinet meeting at the end of April, it was after he had been stymied by the Supreme Court to just have a free hand to similarly

send migrants overseas. And that specific case, it was to seek out to this this backlog, essentially, in El Salvador, which was essentially described as it was going to be used for the worst of the worst in terms of migrants in the country illegally. There's a lot of questions about how broad the sweeps are, but in that specific case, a judicial order not to be sent

“to El Salvador, because of threats on his life, potentially, was on one of the planes that went”

on the first flights there. So that became its own court fight and the president was very frustrated.

And he mused at the time in a cabinet meeting about, you know, there's this, there's one thing we have that, you know, three presidents have used very strongly or something to that effect. And CNN reported several days later that he was talking about suspending habeas corpus. And the episode passed pretty quickly, but we were really obsessed with it because there's, as you know, a discorpus is in trying to the constitution. It is older than the Magnecarta.

It is one of the most fundamental rights of due process. And the idea that president would think that this was something he could just end and Steven Miller was openly endorsing this. So we went down this rabbit hole to try to understand it and what we learned was the discussions were extremely serious. There was no, what one person described as administrative consensus on it, but Steven Miller had brought up the idea, according to our reporting prior to that episode,

he would bring it up again. The president was interested. Steven Miller tasked the DOJ with studying this, which was astonishing, that it would have went that far. And a reflection of how serious it was was, you know, we found out that there were these confidential memos that the staff secretary will sharp, who was a very conservative lawyer. You know, this is not, this is not the era of term one where, you know, there are people who would be identified as

squishes or holdovers or whatever. I mean, he was, he has endorsed almost all of Trump's most most radical and extreme agenda items. But he wrote this memo about how it was one of two that he wrote

the second was on Insurrection Act. In this one, it was that there's no precedent for this in

American history, you know, that the other times the Davias Corpus have been suspended. The first formally, I know there's Andrew Jackson did some form of it militarily, but the first by a president was civil war. And then every other act, the nation, a time it had happened, the nation had been under real threat of ambition or invasion. And so, and that even after 9/11, Bush was not given a free hand to just do sort of a form of military tribunals at Gitmo. And so, Sharf, the staff secretary

put all of this in a memo and he sent it to Susie Guiles, the Chief of Staff. And he doesn't explicitly say, in the memo, they're very dry, these memos, but the point is very clear, which is this is a line the administration should not cross. That kind of a memo is not getting written if this is just some kind of idle talk. And it was put back on the shelf, but like all ideas with Trump,

“you know, these are loaded weapons on the shelf. That one has not come up again. I think for a”

variety of reasons, but because it is clear that the uproar would be dramatic, especially before midterms, but it hasn't totally gone away. I go to say, I'm sort of surprised that there hasn't been more attention on these memos. I mean, when the history of this period is written, the fact that the most senior, one of the most senior lawyers in the Trump administration, someone who's in his in a circle who is, as Maggie said, no squish, no resistance figure.

Those people don't exist anymore. Like, like, it's hard for me to explain all to underscore enough

something this extreme in the first term. But, you know, every day in the first time you'd have a

headline, John Kelly or James Mattis was trying to stop this or that thing or what have you. And that was sort of the narrative of term one. Those people don't exist in this term. They don't. In the inner circle, in any position of any meaning in this administration, they don't exist. So the fact that the staff's actually felt compelled to write these confidential memos to the Chief of Staff, essentially saying in dry, loyally language, these are two lines that we should not cross.

Suspending habeas corpus for illegal immigrants, the most basic rise, the right to challenge your detention. If the government locks you up, you have the right to challenge your detention. And then to invoke the insurrection act for events that don't even come close to what the insurrection act has been invoked in the past. The other thing that we show in the reporting is that these definitely remain loaded weapons on the shelf, particularly the insurrection act.

We have a scene in the book a few days after Alex Pressey is killed in Minnesota. So you have the killing of Renee Good. You have the killing of Alex Pretty. There are huge protests. Trump himself is feeling discombobulated. He's seeing the coverage. He's not liking it. He's considering pulling back. And we have this extraordinary scene in the book where Susie Wilde, the Chief of Staff, convenes her senior staff meeting in her office in the morning. And the vice president comes in

“and sits down. And he says, I think we need to invoke the insurrection act. This is a few days”

after Pretty is killed. And he says, basically paraphrasing, we need to stop these protestors,

these left-wing protestors. Hey, the agitators. He called them paid agitators. There is no evidence of any court or good word. Well, paid. But basically his view as expressed in that meeting was we're going to endure some short-term political pain, but it's worth it in the long term. And they have this conversation where, you know, Wilde's staff's secretary's pushing backs, Steven Miller saying, well, we haven't really explored whether, you know, the law will stretch to accommodate

this. And they end the meeting in this sort of no man's land. They basically decide to put it aside.

But it wasn't sort of this definitive decision we will never do this. It's something that Trump

himself has expressed a desire to do many, many times. Steven Miller is clearly has expressed an eagerness to do it. So it's just waiting there. It's waiting there for the moment. And that's

“one thing we, I think, try to make clear in the book is this is not like all they floated with these”

things and, you know, now, you know, it's the furthest thing from their mind, not the case. Yeah. A couple points I want to follow up on there. One is that Wilde's sharp does play a sort of important role in the book. And I don't think he's really a household name. And this staff secretary is an important position that, like Brett Kavanaugh was staff secretary under Bush. And my correct he's he was in John Sauer's firm in Missouri is that I don't think, I don't know that he was in his

firm. He may have been. They certainly work together on the immunity. Okay. Okay. On the on the post J6 case. Yeah. And and Sharf was, you know, Sharf ran for office himself. He's clearly an ambitious guy in Missouri. I see. I see. He was one of Trump's most vocal defenders on television during the Manhattan

“DA's case in 2024. But you're correct. I mean, if you if you didn't see him on Fox News or I think”

occasionally on CNN, he's not somebody people would know existed. And he's by all of our reporting from everyone in the West Wing, like a tremendous stickler for process, which is not an easy way to live in this particular way. You know, the first one was difficult, too, for people, but this one in particular. Yeah. The other thing is you have an insight there that I had not appreciated, which is that the we've spent law fair, we spent a lot of time on the mandatory

immigration detention policy that comes in around July. Yeah. The change that was put into us from 29 years of prior interpretation, which allows you to keep people detained during their

everyone was, everyone was treated as now as if they had just arrived at the border. Exactly. Yeah. And this, as you portray it, this is sort of suspension of habeas corpus light. This is off, which I hadn't appreciated. They sort of go down the habeas corpus suspension route. They decide no, it's too far. And then they come up with this. Is that fair? Yeah, that's our understanding. I mean, I think, you know, we're both quite aware of the fact that there is more to

learn about this entire both of these episodes, both in terms of the habeas corpus piece. We wrote

the the best and most detailed first draft of what was happening there that we could. And as I

said, it took us absolute months. But yeah, I mean, that the our understanding is that the the the ice change in policy came as a result of trying to figure out ways to fundamentally alter process. And if they couldn't legally have a free hand to just

“merely eject people, no matter what, then you could take, you know, if he's the the INA, which I think was 1996, right?”

And that's that was one of the first put into place. And you could just you could just re-imagine it because it was an interpretation. It was not a strict or definition. Now, as you would know better than we do, their interpretation has been challenged over and over and over by judges. I know they have more recently had some favorable rulings. And I think they are primarily from Trump appointed judges. But those are the minority to put them out. But yes, those our understanding is that these things are

related that they found a way to gum up the works regardless. Do your current managed services really help run your operations? Or are they just running in circles? Running isn't enough anymore. With PWC's managed services, your operations don't just run. They evolve continuously, powered by AI embedded directly into your workflows. So instead of maintaining yesterday's model, you're building tomorrow's advantage. PWC's managed

services, we run your operations with tech and talent so you can run faster, scale smarter, lead stronger. Let's turn to retribution. Next week, James Komi's team is going to probably

file their motion to dismiss in the C-shell's case, the second case against him.

“And then in September, I think we'll have oral argument on his first case, the government's appeal”

of the dismissal of his first case and of the Tisha James's case. You have some, I think you advance the ball sum in the reporting on those first indictments. You say that on September 24, Trump was actually considering firing both Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche. Can you talk a little about that? Yeah, so, you know, this was after Trump had been very frustrated as we mentioned that this all started coming into deeper clarity in the spring of last year that Bill Pulti was becoming

his, it was at the time running, and I guess still is, which is its own oddity. And obscure housing agency, and he was making repeated accusations of mortgage fraud.

First online, and then he would do criminal referrals. Is he, is he carrying favor? Why is he

getting involved? Do we know? Yes, he's, he's, he's trying to please Trump. I mean, you know, Pulti has no government experience prior to this that we know of. He was squired around Marlaga during the transition by Roger Stone, who is Trump's, you know, longest serving on and off political advisor. He wanted to be the HUD secretary that job did not go to him. There was some other job that they were talking about for him and steady answer running FHFA.

And mortgage fraud becomes this hobby horse. Now, with James, I should note, and we didn't go into this in depth in the book, because they're, I really had all in the book, because it's just,

“sort of, you have to make choices about length of a book, frankly, but this issue of mortgages”

has come up with James before in her local races in New York. But it took on a much broader tint here. And we should note that Roger Stone actually was, I think, the first one promoting this idea in February last year online. But Pulti, you know, runs with it. He sees an opportunity. This is going to make Trump happy. He starts showing up at the White House or Trump's golf course with these foam boards where he's got, you know, pictures of the US attorneys and even Trump's

voted for the prosecutor to be confirmed. So, therefore, he's suspect. But the reality is that the

prosecutor in Eastern Virginia, in the Eastern District of Virginia, was more than fine in our reporting, trying to come up with a case against both Latisha James and James Komi, but couldn't make either stick. And in the case of Latisha James, it was the mortgage fraud requires intent, which is something Todd Blanch tried explaining to White House officials at the time, again, according to our reporting. And in the case of James Komi, it was about a possible

“perjury charge related to his congressional house, I think, a Senate testimony from 2020,”

which was online. And even that was very hard to discern. They just didn't, the prosecutors just didn't feel they could make the case. And at the time, what Blanch was telling White House officials was

basically in line Roger with what you would expect a career prosecutor would say, which is,

I'm fine bringing in case it has to be able to be taken to a conclusion, where we're going to get in conviction. And in our reporting, and I'm still surprised this has not gotten more attention along with the memos, but Trump, who had viewed Latisha James as his top target before he came into office for retribution, because she had focused on his money among other things, because she brought this near civil case against his company and had this eye popping judgment issued by the judge in the case.

He told an advisor that Blanch needed to understand that he didn't care if she was convicted, he wanted to make her miserable. And that was the goal of the indictments. The process was the punishment,

“and in the world of Trump advisors, I'm not endorsing this view. I'm just saying that's how”

they view things. They believe that that was what was done to that. And that was done to him in the indirect and period. So that was all the prelude, and Pulti kept repeatedly suggesting to Trump in our reporting that Blanch was not, and this also hasn't gotten much attention, Pulti told the president, according to what the president was telling other people, that Blanch wasn't going after the mortgage fraud piece, because Blanch had his own problems on this front, which Blanch was pretty

irritated about to have to explain, wasn't the case. But all of his leads up to September 24th, where it's right before the statute of limitations expires on James Komi and this purgeary charge that did not stick. And Trump was furious and wanted to get rid of the top, both, the number one number two, at the Justice Department. And the White House Chief of Staff in our reporting told people she was mindful that there was only so much tumult that could be tolerated. Susie Wildes.

Susie Wildes. And so there was this Susie Wildes who was a long relationship with Pam Bondi

who was not Trump's first pick for the H.J. job. It was Matt Gates who we don't need to go down

that rabbit hole. And Todd Blanch had been one of Trump's personal lawyers. And this sets in motion this just enormous anxiety about what might come next. But what ends up coming is indictments that don't stand up. And apparently Blanch, according to the book, anticipated that the had an appointment wasn't going to stand up. Correct. It was the Lindsey Helligan then gets picked by Trump to become the acting U.S. attorney to replace Eric Seabert who Trump ordered fired.

And Lindsey Helligan did not go through any normal process. She has no prosecutorial experience. She was working action under Will Sharf in the Staff Secretary's office at the time. She was another personal lawyer for Trump during the indirect. And there were serious questions about how the grand jury process went. In the James County indictment, when Helligan brought it, a Pam Bondi ended up signing it, signing off on it. But that was all used by Comi's lawyers. And according

to our reporting, Blanch had worn multiple people that this was going to be an issue that Helligan's appointment was going to be seen as a legitimate. And it was going to render the indictment illegitimate. That was exactly what happened. You also make an interesting point, which I hadn't really focused on, which is sort of the dog that didn't bark here. There hasn't been much attempt to prosecute Alvin Brake. Why is that? Well, there's there's two lanes here.

So one is this weaponization working group. The Todd Lanch had put in place last year. But that was separate. That's about the office among other things. It is about how prosecutions work and as I understand it, as we understand it, it was trying to figure out whether there was this conspiracy that Trump's folks have been alleging that Biden directed everything from the White

“House. We have no reporting to suggest that that's the case. In fact, I think it's pretty well-known.”

The Biden White House was pretty frustrated that Merrick Garland was not doing more. So I don't know why anybody would have taken a circuitous route to Alvin Brake. In a case that has been pretty criticized for various reasons. But the president would not talk about Brake and our understanding

people, that Brake was being puppeteered by Biden. And Trump is very dismissive of both Alvin Brake and Latisha James, both of them are Black. Equal opportunity hires is what he could even

know, both are elected officials. You know, they could never get, I'm paraphrasing here, but they

could never get jobs outside of, you know, this agents, at whatever, you get the point. And so, but his personal animus about Brake was just far less significant. Now, that's ticked up a little bit ever since Michael Cohen has suddenly decided to say that he felt coerced by the prosecutors. But yeah, it's been, it was very notable to a lot of people. It's interesting. And I just want to add that the, that conspiracy theory that Biden was behind the Brake prosecution was one of the

craziest, thinnest, emptyest theories, but anyway, there was something I wanted to ask you, how should I think about Pam Bondi? Because like, when she was nominated, she seemed like team normal compared to Matt Gates, at least to me. And then she got into it and it seemed,

“she was all in. And then she leaves and things get even worse. So, how should I think about Pam Bondi?”

I don't think it's a particularly complicated psychological portrait there. She's someone who, you know, has her own background in Florida, is a absolute died in the wool Trump ally, loyalist, represented him during impeachment, you know, someone who will not do everything that he

wants or anything that he wants. And I think that that was fatal for her, ultimately,

when Maggie and I went and saw President Trump in March and interviewed him, we had report, this is before she was removed. We had reporting that Trump had been complaining about her, and that he was very frustrated that she wasn't, you know, moving fast enough to prosecute his enemies. Surprise, surprise, Trump had tweeted, accidentally, that was supposed to be a private message, but he tweeted a version of that. So, everyone knows that was the case. And Trump didn't really

deny it. He sort of, you know, he sort of, oh, you know, when did you hear that? And, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then he basically sort of said, oh, she's good at PR, which I mean,

talk about a little knife in the ribs. And then he just sort of pivoted quick. He didn't

“criticize her. All he said, you know, I'd like her to move, I think, and Maggie, you have to remember”

that quite a bit of something that she, there's, it was like, things, I want her to go to move fast with respect to things, things, things, things, things, you know, who can say, really, and say what it was also notable, just, and I don't, I don't want to interrupt you, don't do it just very quickly, and then you should finish. We also asked him about criticizing Tom Blanche, because it was about the reporting that's in the book from September. And he drew

a clear line. He was like, Todd, when was this? No, no, Tom's grossed the greatest. Yeah, it's wonderful. He pivoted to just, you know, falsely praising Tom Blanche. So look, without being able to get inside Trump's head, it seems fairly clear from what he's told devices, what he said publicly, that he believes that Todd Blanche is going to move more quickly, more competently toward prosecuting the people that Donald Trump wants to see prosecuted.

And I, and both of us have seen indications from our reporting that lead us to think that if those objectives are not mass, you know, reasonably timely fashion, who knows, maybe maybe Donald Trump will want to have someone else, believe the Justice Department. But certainly when we sat down with him, he praised Todd Blanche, falsely, the greatest, you know, imaginable. I also want to just, I just want to add one point

to, I was thinking about what the question Roger, which was the team normal line, which I know,

“I think was initially put into the into the lexicon by Bill Steppian during the J6 hearings.”

I'm not endorsing the idea of, you know, normal versus not, but, but what I will say is that that is that is a a construct that applies to term one. It does not apply here. And so what I think people mean when they same team normal is, you know, somebody who is going to argue that, you know, you can't do x, y, z, you can't do this. You know, there are people who are doing that. You know, we just talked about Will Scharf as an example, for instance. But the debates are not,

she's a former attorney general herself, but she also aggressively defended Trump during impeachment one. She has been one of his most aggressive defenders on television for a long period of time or was before she had that job. That doesn't mean there are not lines that she would not cross. And I think that we will probably learn more of them as we go on. She wasn't being accused of

paying for sex, which was what Matt Gates had been accused of as a house member. And he always denied

the idea of anything inappropriate. But if that's the bar, you know, then probably must, much of Trump's government would be what is being described as to, it's just, I think that she is, look,

“she still wasn't doing enough of what Trump wanted, right? That's why she's gone to Jonathan's point.”

But she, I think, was quite eager not to be attacked by Trump and didn't want to be fired, which, all of these folks are mindful of the term one fireings. And they don't want to be fired by true social posts. I want to try to touch on something quickly. We might be running down on time, but, you know, the word surreal is maybe overused, but I don't know what other word to use. You have this vignette scene about Laura Loomer coming to the White House, the Oval Office,

and emerging with basically causing the fireings of six people in national security council.

Can you just go over that a little bit? It's one of the most remarkable for me scenes in the book. I mean, it's just what I imagine it was like when Brent's quote, let's go across used to

“come and sit down with George H.W. Bush and have a conversation about, you know, the NSC started.”

Yes. So Laura Loomer, I don't know if the law fair, I'm sure your audience is at least somewhat familiar with Laura Loomer, but certainly Google, Google her and you're very quickly gaining understanding. Yes. So, a lot of just to give you one highlight of her career, she has called for creating a new form of Uber or Lyft that is for non-Muslim drivers. So, a non-islamic form of Uber, anyway, you get the idea. So, she's a very, very influential, I guess you would call her

an influencer online, causes her for journalists as well, but really what she has made a specialty of is investigating people who work for doll Trump and proving this is from her perspective that their disloyal, or that there's something in their background that would give reason to think that they would be disloyal. Maybe their wife worked for Joe Biden, you know, even if they're a career prosecutor or something, maybe this person, you know, often the link's a quite, you know,

several degrees of separation, but she has been very successful is term at raising suspicions about people on Donald Trump's staff and getting them fired. And we have this extraordinary scene in the book. It was last April. It was actually liberation day that the very day that Trump announced

“a trade war against the whole world. So, she buys a new, I think it was a red pant suit,”

got her nails done, got her hair done, everything, and got professionally appropriately printed her dossiers, if it she had on Trump's staff, so that she could present them to Trump and everyone in the room. And she goes into the Oval Office and gives Trump this document, and essentially begins to describe, you know, the horrors and the sins and the disloyalties of very senior members of his administration in the national security apparatus, including top members of

the National Security Council. And Trump is just, you know, furious. He's listening, he's "How do these, how do these happen? How do these people on staff?" He's not verifying or saying, "Okay, well, let's take this and get someone to check it." He just says, "We need to fire then we need to get rid of them." And with in a very short period of time, many of the people on her list were just summarily fired, removed from their positions. Extraordinary. I don't think anything

like this has ever happened in the Oval Office. It's very troubling. And in fact, the way I toward the end, Michael Waltz walks in or arrives. I don't know if he summoned or walks in. No, he just walked in. He was supposed to be, yeah, he didn't know about the meeting.

Okay, and he begins to debunk totally, be debunk, right? Like one of the most important examples,

although I will say one of the particular people that he defended didn't end up getting fired at that moment. But yes, generally speaking, he was overruled and essentially the staffing

“to see some of the most important staffing decisions in the National Security apparatus”

webbing made by Laura Luma. Yeah. That's just the fact. One other piece too, just to note for you, Roger, before we move on on this one, and very quickly, but Luma is another person who had been a Roger Stone Prodiget. Yeah. She and Bill Polty, who are among the two most aggressive in terms of telling Trump that other people are failing them and that they are laying out the reality. We're both brought into that world by stone. Interesting. Let's go to the epilogue.

You guys go to see, is it, is it, is it March? You go, this March? You go March 16th. Yeah. Okay, you go to the White House, and you want to run past him some of the things in person that you're saying. Tell me about, and then he brings up sort of unsolicited conversation with Gary

“Polty. So we go into the Oval Office, and we were expecting, you know, at least somewhat the”

war to be on his mind, the Iran war was the 17th day of the war Americans had already been killed. And instead, he greets us. He's very relaxed, which itself was striking, given that a few days earlier, he had threatened to add us to us a lawsuit and had gone after Maggie in very personal terms, but he was smiling, relaxed, wanted to show us photographs of maple trees that he was buying for the White House. And the moment that you're describing in the epilogue happened when we asked him a

question about his power. We had reporting that he had told Tucker Carson that no American president

had ever been as powerful as he was. So we asked him about that. And instead of answering it directly,

he told us this story about the Gulf of Gary Player, who's a friend of his. And he said that,

“you know, he was playing golf with Gary Player, and Gary Player had this friend who was a historian.”

And he said the historian had risen something about him, and then he says, you know, Natalie, who's his aide, Natalie Harp, who sits by the wall in the Oval Office, and almost every meeting, almost every meeting. Go get them the document. So she rushes off and within a flash comes back with these printouts and hands them out. And it took us a moment to sort of absorb what they were. He wants us to read them. And he's sitting there with his own version. And he's

so excited by that he starts reading parts of it. And the document basically starts by saying,

Donald Trump is the most powerful man on the planet who's ever lived, you know, by far.

And then it goes on to compare him to what Trump describes to us as the top 10. And it's Adolf Hitler, Stalin, Mao, William the Conqueror, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Attila the Han, Tamaline, the Seasers, Napoleon, and he's reading, it's like Napoleon, very interesting. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, he goes, you know, and he's reading from the Seas. These people used fear. Who would do a thing like that, you know, et cetera, you know,

being sarcastic. And look, it wasn't a moral comparison in any sense. It was really just an argument that Donald Trump, as the commander and chief of the U.S. military, the most powerful military that's ever existed. As the leader of the most powerful economy that's ever existed with the most powerful technology that's ever existed. And someone who is willing to use American power in ways that previous presidents have not been willing to use it. Those factors make him the

most powerful person, not just American president, but person who's ever existed. And the document was unusual to say the least. And we certainly in our book hadn't compared Donald Trump to any of these people. But the thesis was actually not so different from the thesis of our book, which is

the Donald Trump has expanded presidential power and is using presidential power in ways that we've never

seen before. So it was this very strange moment where Trump was essentially affirming our own thesis and doing it in a way that was, I mean, I wouldn't have been my choice. You know, if I was

you know, the top 10. I'm more powerful than Hitler." But that's what he did. And what was very

interesting was, the moral dimension was very secondary. For Trump, what he wanted us to understand was these people had power, but their power was local. They could only project power in a you know, regional sense or in even just within their own country. He, his power was completely global. And he wanted us to understand that. And he wanted us to understand too that he's willing

to use it. That was the other really, really important piece of it. Yeah. Although it comes from a

caddy, the point is is real. I mean, he really does have unprecedented power. I mean, it's hard to think of somebody. The Supreme Court has handed him power. Congress has handed him power. And your whole book, you know, there are a lot of points in the book that are funny. If you divorce yourself from the fact that this is reality, that this is not a Joseph Heller novel or a Jersey-Kazinski novel. And that part sort of brought at home, he, this is no joke. This guy

“who does have more power than him in history. And I think it's a remarkable”

close to the book. It's very, it's very troubling. Anyway, we'll have to leave it there. But thank you so much for coming. It's a real honor to have you both. The book is remarkable as I said. And I recommend it without reservation. Thanks so much. We appreciate it. And very much. We're very gratified by the response. We just, we wanted to make sure that we got our best reporting out while he's still president so that people could understand how their

country's been run, which even as, with someone who is as covered as Donald Trump is covered, as saturated as, you know, the conversation is about Donald Trump. We did think that we could add

“something original and, and hopefully unique to that. I think you did. I think you did. I think you did.”

Thanks so much. And be sure to check out our other shows, including rational security, allies, the aftermath, and escalation. Our latest law fair presents podcast series about the war in Ukraine. You can also find all our written work at lawfairmedia.org. The podcast is edited by Jen Patcha with audio engineering by Kara Shillin of goat rodeo. Our theme song is from alibi

music, as always thanks for listening.

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