REGIME CHANGE: Katie’s One-on-One with Maggie Haberman

He likes keeping these Trump 2028 hats in the White House.I mean, A, it is a way to remind J .D.Vance that J .D.Vance has a limited runway still, number one.

But number two, things that start out as trolling efforts with Trump can then become real, and they take on a life of their own.Whatever happens, again, we have no reason to believe he's actually trying to run again.Trump is not going to just disappear from the stage.He has this board of peace that he has set up as an intentional alternative to the U .N.It has been, as far as we understand it, seeded with U .

S.tax dollars.It has other countries involved.The bylaws are written so that Trump is the only one who can pick his successor on it.There is nothing that suggests Trump's going to go off and write books or do a podcast or just play golf.

Maggie Haberman, great to see you, Maggie.Katie, thanks for having me back.And congratulations for this book that you've co -written with Jonathan Swan.Very early in it, you make the case that if Donald Trump had won in the re -election in 2020, he would never have accumulated the power that he has amassed today.How did the years out of office shape Donald Trump's 2 .0 administration?

So Katie, I feel like it's almost undeniable, it's obviously hard to prove a counterfactual, but if you look at where the world was after the 2020 election, still in the middle of COVID, had Trump One, again, he would have been dealing with the next year of the virus.He would have been dealing with rising inflation around the globe.There is no reason to think that the U .S.would have been exempt from that.Maybe, maybe it would have, but it's hard to see how.

He would have had to deal with a withdrawal from the economy.Afghanistan at some point, because remember, he had been the one working out that deal for some kind of removal of troops for months, long before he actually lost the election.And he, like many other lame duck presidents with a consecutive term, could have been facing fairly low approval ratings, as he is right now.And those were generally global trends against anybody who was in power, against the establishment, against incumbents.Instead, he ended up At Mar -a -Lago, he ended up refusing to let go of this lie about the election in 2020.He continued to say it to anyone who would listen, which, as we write, were fairly few people.

And then he gets indicted four times.He is sued repeatedly in civil court.He has the potential threat of losing his business, essentially, based on the fine associated with one of those suits.He faces two assassination attempts, one of which was in the middle of an open air rally where he rises up and, you know, holds up a fist.And he was facing an unpopular incumbent in Joe Biden, who ultimately stayed on the ticket much longer than many in his party wished he would have.All of this turned him into this, you know, sort of martyr within his own party and a figure of mythic status for his own advisers.

And also gave him a lot of time to see and plot, right, Maggie?And I know when you and Jonathan sat down with him, he kind of confirmed the thesis of your book, and he agreed with you on this.

Did that surprise you?So it was a fascinating moment in the Oval Office, Katie.And just to set the scene, you know, Trump had all of these years to think about who he thought had wronged him.And while that was happening, a number of his advisorschief among whom, but not only among whom, was Stephen Miller, who had had a, Miller does have a plan for what he wants to see government do.He does have an agenda.

And he had spent a lot of time studying the levers of power on what could be done in a Trump 2 .0.And he pushed that agenda through very early on, with Trump's blessing, to be clear.We had asked for a sit -down with him for a while.We didn't want to do open mic night.We didn't want to just do two minutes of an interview by phone.And we didn't want to just say, what do you think about X?

We had fact -checking questions.We didn't think he was going to sit down with us.It took weeks to get him to agree.So on March 16th this year, we walk into the Oval Office, and we're 17 days into the Iran war.And instead of, we expected maybe maps on his desk, and instead what we found were maple tree pictures.And he says, you know, I'm good at picking trees.

He's picking trees for the White House grounds.And then he wants to talk about his ballroom design.And so that ate up about 15 minutes, I would say, 10, 15 minutes.Which must have been incredibly frustrating for you, too.It was interesting to get a sense of his mindset, but we did realize we were on the clock and we were going to have a limited amount of time.So we asked him pretty early on about his conception of presidential power, because he had said to Tucker Carlson a year earlier, or at some point the previous year, no president's ever been as powerful as I am.

And so we wanted to hear him talk about that.Instead of saying, no, that's not true, or whatever, he asked for an aid to get us these two printouts that he said were from a historian.The thesis of these printouts that he said were from a historian was that Donald Trump is the most powerful man to ever walk the planet.

But the people he compared himself to is the really scary part, Maggie.

So this person who he identifies as a historian lays out a paradehistory's top conquerors and monsters.Mao, Stalin, Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Hitler, the Caesars, Tamerlane.Trump is reading these names, and he's not looking at this through a moral dimension at all.He's just reveling in the fact that in this comparison, he is more powerful because he has the U .S.

military and the might of the presidency of this country and the global reach of technology now, and that he is willing to use power.That's what he wanted us to take.

And this historian?

not a historian it turned out so we went down this rabbit hole Jonathan tracked the guy down and excuse me for the siren behind me that's Jonathan Jonathan tracked the guy down and once they sent us his name um he's Gary Player's business associate and former golf caddy, and Gary Player is a very famous golfer, who had introduced Trump to this guy, and this guy wrote down this thesis.So, not a historian.Noted historian.Right, right.David King.But also, it did confirm the premise of our book, which is that Trump is using power in a way that is just unrecognizable, certainly from his first term, and unlike any other president, certainly in our lifetimes, Katie, and I think any other, arguably any other U .

S.president.Speaking of that meeting, who the heck is this Natalie Harp person and what is going on there, Maggie?

So Natalie Harp, we first wrote about her in the campaign.several times, actually.She's known as the human printer because she would carry around this portable printer, battery -operated.She prints out articles he'll want to see, bits of good news.Sometimes, for instance, during theAlvin Bragg criminal trial in Manhattan, she was always with him, always part of the entourage.

And you would see him sitting at the defendant's table, flipping through papers, his papers.These were things she was printing out for him.She is a main source of inputs and contact, but she is also representative of essentially a certain type of bubble he lives in.She was writing him, and again Jonathan and I wrote about this in the New York Times a while ago, but we include this in the book, she was writing him these letters that were discovered in the various places in his quarters before he was president that were very emotional.And the line in one of them was, you are all that matters to me.And that is indeed how she has worked.

She is in almost every single meeting.She sits along the wall in the Oval Office near the exit to the Colonnade in the Rose Garden.And he has told aides that unlike everybody else who will go on and make money, she'll never leave me.

All righty then.Throughout the book, Maggie, there is a striking disconnect between Trump and the people around him that you kind of paint a picture of.His advisers worrying about polling, political backlash, public opinion, while Trump himself often seems indifferent to those concerns.Can you give me an example of that playing out?

Sure.So one really key one, and it's an important point, Katie, and I'm glad you brought that up, because they can see what the political realities are.Even as they really all believe in him, that is a big difference between Trump 1 and Trump 2.Yeah, we'll talk about the loyalty test in a moment.Sure.But they have internal polling, and we got our hands on some of those memos that were confidential internal team memos.

One of which was so striking, which was inDecember.I think it was December 11th was the date it was circulated.Trump's main pollster, Tony Fabrizio, writes about what they are seeing in polling about how voters feel about affordability, and the economy, and that this was a key promise that Trump had run on, that voters were so disappointed with Biden, and that Biden was just out of touch.He was telling voters that they should feel a certain way about their lives, and they didn't.But that Trump was falling—I don't think the memo said explicitly this part, but Trump was essentially falling into the same trap.

And there was a line in the memo that so stood out to us, which was that unless the the GOP and the President -slash -White House were honest, the word honest was in there, with the public about this affordability crisis and solutions, they were going to have a very hard time this fall.And so that would be an example where his aides had spent months Gingerly talking to him about the economy because he doesn't look to be fair.Many presidents don't like bad news, but he really does not.Right.To try to get him to a place where he would be different on this.

A reality check, if you will, Maggie.

But what does he do?

Does he just ignore these people?

He ignores them or he says that the real poll numbers are, you know, whatever he sees or or he agrees to do a speech and then talks about whatever he wants.So right before that polling memo, and it was reflected in this memo, he had done a speech in, I think it was Pennsylvania, and he was supposed to talk about affordability, and instead he started talking about affordability as a hoax, democratic hoax, meant to hurt him, made up, and the fact that that speech played that way was polled as well, and voters were not happy about it.

The people, as you mentioned, around Trump this time, this go -round, are market -based.different from his first term.There are no guardrails, no people to challenge him.And you write about a question they were asked before they joined this administration that would determine if they were, quote -unquote, my quotes, not yours, fit to serve.What was that question?

Well, it related to loyalty, and specifically there were questions about two prospective cabinet members.And to be clear, this was not – these were not questions put to Suzy Wiles or her deputies, James Blair, certainly not put to Stephen Miller, but to the vast majority of people outside of the White House.Where were you – what was your view of January 6th?What did you say after January 6th?Was the 2020 election stolen?These were loyalty tests and they were purity tests.

Like, were those people who stormed the Capitol patriots or criminals, that kind of thing?

I don't remember if there was a specific question along those lines, so I don't wanna mischaracterize it, but it was definitely, the point was whether you thought that January 6th was a day to support Donald Trump's view of the election or whether it was not.

You describe many of them as having been almost radicalized by Trump's sheer survival skills.Do you think this has helped them rationalize or even ignore some of the more onerous aspects of his presidency, Maggie?

I think what happens is, well, A, I think that they – I think that the people around him don't see it that way.I think that they think that this is an agenda that they're putting through.That doesn't mean that there are things they don't agree with.We do write expansively in the book about the lead -up to Liberation Day, which was Trump's trade war essentially on the world, and how afraid so many of his advisers were.But again, he wasn't afraid.This was something he wanted to try.

They did try talking to him about different approaches or different formulas, but he just wanted people to just work it out and let him, no more exemptions, let him get to what he wanted to do.He was making up tariff rates for specific countries like China, put them in for 10 on the fly.These are people who, They were radicalized not just by his survival skills, Katie, but in many cases, not every single one, but in many cases, because they had been part of his world and got swept up in these investigations themselves, whether they received subpoenas.In some cases, like Walt Nowda, who now runs Oval Office Operations, he had been Trump's body guy and valet in Term 1.Walt was indicted in the documents case for Mar -a -Lago.They began to feel very hardened against the Biden DOJ, against the mainstream media, and they had a very us -versus -them mentality, and you do see that playing out now.

But did they also sort of feel some level of assurance, like, hey, he got through all that stuff, you know, he knows best, he's a survivor, and so we're going to stick with this guy, because no matter what he's confronted by, he seems to come through with flying colors.

There is no question that they believe that he was hearing things on a frequency that they just could not.And they had watched him survive so many things that would have harmed or failed any other politician, any one of the things we just talked about.But Trump absolutely refuses to be thrown out of any ring he is in, and he is shameless in terms of how he handles things.

One example I was gonna say, Maggie, of this sort of true believer statusthe people who surround him is his decision to go to war with Iran.You write in the book, with the exception of the Vice President, nobody on the senior team, not his Secretary of State, not his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, not his Chief of Staff, had made a real effort to talk him out of it.So obviously there are very few people in his orbit who are pushing back, which is especially alarming given the fact that Caroline Leavitt admitted relied on a good feeling that the Iranian regime was going to strike the U .S.assets and our personnel in the region.

It just seems like crazy land to me, Maggie.Well, it's interesting.So there, no one around him, to your point, no one around him thought that going to war in Iran was a good idea.The closest to that would have been Hegseth, who liked aspects of this.But there was nobody who thought that this was a good course forward.Dan Cain, his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, top military advisor, laid out what could happen.

Munitions will be depleted.That was a big concern of Dan Cain's.Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz.You know, there were concerns that Trump was going to be infuriating his political base because he had promised no more foreign wars.The only person who really was confrontational with Trump in our reporting was J .D.

Vance, the vice president.And it cost him with Trump, because Trump got really irritated with Vance about this.But at the end of the day, Trump is the president.This is his decision, and they supported it.I don't really know what somebody could do to get him not to.What is striking to us, Katie, is he took the country to war without ever consulting Congress.

And Congress raised almost no objections about it.You hear complaints here and there, but for the most part,the House Republicans and the senators in the Republican Party have really just capitulated to him.

But you did right.that none of these people had made a real effort to talk him out of it.there being much less information flow in this administration.And they're very good at keeping secrets.And yet you were able to reconstruct highly sensitive conversations, including those that took place in the Situation Room with only Trump's most trusted senior advisors present.That suggests someone extremely close to the president was talking.

Do you think this book might prove that these loyalists aren't as loyal as Trump perhaps hopes they are?

So we just won't talk about sourcing one way or the other, but I will note that, at least to my knowledge, nobody has challenged the accuracy of this reporting in any meaningful way from these scenes in the Situation Room.Three of the meetings, a number of the meetings actually, I was just thinking about the Epstein meetings specifically, but a number of these meetings, including the ones related to the Iran war were fairly well attended.There were a number of people in them.I would also just note that there is a reason this book took us a really long time to write.To be clear, we're 17 months into this administration, and we put this out, which was an extraordinarily quick amount of time in publishing world.Definitely.

And it captures the first 14 months.We really wanted to get the reporting out as quickly as possible.as possible.But it took a really long time and it was really, really hard.So.

Speaking of J .D.Vance, which you weren't speaking of just now, but you were earlier.We were.You described him as repeatedly pushing to release all the Epstein files, even unsubstantiated material about Trump, which will make him look quite different.good in the eyes of a lot of MAGA voters.

He also comes out very well, almost as if he or someone close to him was the source for a lot of this information.He's even suggested that perhaps someone was taping inside the Situation Room.Maggie, is this a case of me thinks he doth protest too much?

I'm not going to discuss sourcing in one way or another, but I would note that we have a very extensive sourcing note at the beginning of the book, and that we have spent an enormous amount of time, and we've talked about this in a number of interviews, making sure that we have multiple inputs and multiple accounts of how these things transpired.In terms of Vance, I just want to make one note, by the way, in terms of what you were saying about Epstein.There's no question that it's very popular with the MAGA base to say throw everything out there on Epstein.There are any number of people who would not consider put everything up there about Jeffrey Epstein, even the uncorroborated pieces of information, even the uncorroborated allegations, of which there are a number in these documents that the DOJ has and that the STNY has, there are many, many people who would not like that.Number one was the president.Number two is, you know, anybody who has ever experienced any interactions with the criminal justice system and why there are two things can be true.

once.This is a multi -administration failure in terms of Epstein, number one.But number two, there are women who would like justice, there are victims who have never been heard properly, but they also might not want their names and pictures up on the websites.And it's complicated.

Nothing is black and white.Right.But what do you think, if this would be upsetting to so many people, as you said, just all of it out there, why was J .D.Vance pushing for it?

Well, because J .D.Vance, and he wasn't the only one who was concerned about this, Kash Patel, the FBI director, and Dan Bongino, the deputy FBI director, had both spent years in the MAGA ecosystem basically building their reputations in part on, J .D.Vance a little less so because he was a senator, but building their reputations on the idea that there was a cabal of pedophiles and that once they were in power, They would put everything out.And J .

D.Vance, Katie, is extremely online.I mean, if you watch his Twitter feed, he is on Twitter a pretty shocking amount of time for a vice president.he was seeing, as were Kash Patel, as was Dan Bongino, how much blowback they were getting.And that is why.Again, you can argue it's great base politics, which obviously some people do.

You can also make a pretty compelling argument that it's not wise internal politics within that world and also creates other problems.

Is Stephen Miller, in your view, the most powerful person in the White House?And when he says insane things like James Tallarico is transgender, is he doing it on the orders of the president?Or is he just going rogue, saying these things on his own?In other words, who is pulling the strings on some of this public -facing rhetoric?Is it coming from Donald Trump or is it Stephen Miller?

It's an interesting question.I don't think it's black and white.But Stephen Miller, and we write about this, is absolutely one of the most powerful policy advisors in any administration in history.modern memory, maybe ever, but certainly in modern memory, because he's dual -headed.He's the Homeland Security Advisor, and he's the Deputy White House Chief of Staff for Policy, and even that doesn't fully capture the extent of his reach in this administration.And he's able to give Trump something that Trump really wants, or I shouldn't say he's able to give, he does give Trump something that Trump really wants, which is someone who will say, absolutely, I will get that done right now.

We will make this happen fast.Government generally doesn't work that way.But Stephen often presents Trump with what seem like quick options.In terms of the specific thing that you're asking about, which is this kind of trolling aspect of this administration, that is such a broad, across -the -board thing there.It doesn't require much compelling.Trump loves trolling people.

Stephen Miller loves trolling people.Stephen Chung, the communications director, loves trolling people.And we have a whole chapter about that in the book.

I mean, I would not even describe that as trolling, though, Maggie, I would say.

That's how they see it.

I would say it's lying about people.

Well, I think that there is a fair amount of things that get said on those social media posts that are not true, whether it is about James Tallarico as an insult about being a woman or a trans woman, or whether it is talking about, you know, Rene Good and Alex Preddy and with much more serious consequences.

I wanted to ask you about corruption, because by all accounts, this is the most corrupt president in our nation's history.And you quote him as saying, I prohibited my family from doing business in my first term, and I got absolutely no credit for it.I didn't have to do that.And it'sreally unfair to them.I found out that nobody cared, and I'm allowed to.

" Is that how the President of the United States rationalizes enriching himself, his friends, and his family to the tune of more than $4 billion?And that's, at this point, a conservative estimate.

So we've just never seen a scale of monetizing the presidency like what we are seeing right now in real time while the presidency is happening.The quote you read is something Trump said to our – mine and Jonathan's White House team colleagues in an interview in January, and it was a really, really important quote because the part you noted, which is, one, I did it – first of all, he didn't – he never actually put his company in a blind trust.He did try to scale back what his – the business deals his sons were doing overseas.But it was, I didn't get credit for it.And I'm allowed to do it.So he didn't like that he still got bad media coverage.

And also, there is no ethics prohibition against a president.That's true.And part of the difference in this term from last term is he has a presidential immunity ruling now, where he'll say it.Thanks to the Supreme Court.Correct.And he'll say, I'm immune.

I'm immune.So the scale of this is staggering.One of the examples that I've seen And the lack of congressional interest or action on it is staggering, especially considering all of the focus on the Biden family.One moment here in the money factor that was really striking to us, and just to be clear, I think that everything, and there's been a lot of really good investigative work by The Wall Street Journal, The Times, many, many news outlets, The New Yorker, many, many news outlets on this.And it's still, we just don't know what we don't know.So we've done as much as we can.

But Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, sitting commerce secretary,very wealthy man, his sons were getting negative attention in the president's mind for business interactions where they were appeared to be benefiting from decisions the administration was making, meaning their father's administration and so forth, meaning Howard Lutnick's administration.Trump got very angry about that.At some point after that, Howard Lutnick gave a $25 million donation to Trump's planned presidential library.Trump openly will talk about that, and he talked—we have this refer to him saying in a big meeting in the Oval Office, you know, the reason that he puts up with, excuse my language, Howard's bullshit is he gave me $25 million.And at another telling, it's, I just asked him for this money and he gave it to me.

Can you believe it?I can't remember a time where there was a cabinet secretary making a library donation, you know, to, to, in the president's own words, continue putting up with that person.We don't know what we don't know, but there is just an enormous amount of money floating around.

How is Donald Trump preparing for what might be a very different reality after the midterms?Are we going to see an even more unhinged version?Obviously, Maggie, this is probably an unfair question.You don't have a crystal ball.But what do you predict will be unleashed if, in fact, Democrats win the House and even potentially the Senate?

So, it's true, I don't have a crystal ball, but what I will say is most times at this point in a presidential cycle, Katie, and you have watched several presidential cycles, as have I, in a lame duck term, which usually comes in the second consecutive term, you can see the arc.Trump is very, very unpopular among, you know,general population voters.He's still pretty popular with Republicans and very impactful with Republicans.Normally I can see where it's going to go, which is the House will likely flip, maybe the Senate will flip, there will be a lot of oversight hearings, subpoenas, so forth and so on.I look past November and it's a black hole.

I can't see what's happening or what's coming because We have had presidents in the past who have, including Trump one, but also under Obama and very discreet circumstances and others, I think, prior to that, where agencies didn't respond to subpoenas or specific subpoenas were not complied with, congressional subpoenas.What if the entire government just doesn't respond at all?What is the recourse?What's the mechanism for oversight and accountability that Congress has in that case?They don't have, you know, they don't have a, there's no jail in Congress.They have to refer contempt of Congress potential charges to the DOJ, and I somehow don't think that the Trump DOJ would take those up.

Trump has also, and we have this in the book, repeatedly said that he's going to pardon everyone who came within, comes within a 250 foot or a 200 foot or 25 foot, the radius changes, but distance of the Oval Office.We have no reason to believe that that's, you know, a joke.And we've had several people tell us they are counting on their preemptive pardons.So I don't know what this looks like.

You wrote recently in the New York Times about his claims that the California governor's race was rigged.Of course, we heard him talking about that.Do you think that's a foreshadowing of discrediting or even tampering with the election results?I mean, is this preemptive rhetoric and this way he'll be able to say this was not a free and fair election and ergo it doesn't count?

So he's been, I can't speak to the tampering piece, although certainly he has been trying to get some kind of either visibility to or control over voter rolls in various states for a while now.And his executive order on that just - Maybe tampering's too strong a word, but interference I think is fair, right?Or certainly involvement in some way, right?I mean, state voter rolls are their thing.This is part of, Trump has just this week, you know, cut the legs out from under a planned vote on a bipartisan housing bill that would help voters on a key affordability issue if he doesn't get his way and have the Senate pass a bill that has virtually no chance of passing, which is the Save America Act, or the Secure, whatever it's called, Secure America Act.But it's a voting bill.

And a constraining voting bill.The Save Act, thank you.He or Save America, I think is what he changed it to.But regardless, in terms of just casting doubts on elections, We forget, because this has been going on for so long, Trump cast doubts on the election he himself won in 2016.Remember, he was insisting that there were millions of voters who were shipped in to various states, even though he was certified as the president, that the reason that he didn't win the popular vote was because it was rigged.And so he has a very long history of doing this.

I don't expect him to change that MO at all, but it does have a a seeping effect on how people feel.

You describe in this book this awkward moment, and I would love to have been a fly on the wall, Maggie, where Trump asks Rupert Murdoch, in the presence of J .D.Vance and Marco Rubio, to essentially rate them, and Murdoch says that Vance has the potential to be great and thatRubio is brilliant.But the bigger question to me, Maggie, is does Trump actually want an heir, or is there a part of him that relishes this idea that no one can ever replace him?

It's the it is the question Katie I mean we get asked a lot about who's he gonna pick Vance or Rubio and does he really like Vance and that's it's almost beside the point to some extent because He wants to be singular.He wants to be a singular force for the Republican Party.He doesn't really want a successor.He doesn't really want an heir.Vance was often described by a lot of people who like Vance in Trump's world as the obvious heir to the MAGA movement.And that might be the case, actually, because he is close.

I would still say that he is the prohibitive front runner for the Republican nomination.But there's such a difference between the MAGA movement and Trump.at this point.There is not always total overlap, and that's becoming clearer on a couple of key issues, particularly Iran.Trump said something last year that was so revealing, which was that he was proud that the Republicans did poorly when he wasn't on the ballot.I don't think that most of his party feels great about that.

But that does speak to the mindset you're asking about.And also, he likes pitting people against each other.And I don't think he's going to make life easy for J .D.Vance.Let's put it that way.

Last question, you believe that Trump, I know, will not go gently into this good night after the end of his term.So do you get the sense, Maggie, Alice, Steve Bannon, that he is really going, toying with the idea of running again?And what do you see for Donald J. Trump starting in January of 2029?

So with the caveat that Jonathan and I haven't covered nothing in our reporting that suggeststhere's an active plan for Trump to run again, which we should note that he has prohibited.constitutionally from doing.

Right, but they've talked about changing the country's constitution, right?

Yes, although so far that would be very, very hard to do.But he likes keeping these Trump 2028 hats in the White House.I mean, A, it is a way to remind J .D.Vance that J .D.

Vance has a limited runway still, number one.But number two, things that start out as trolling efforts with Trump can then become real, and they take on a life of their own.Whatever happens, again, we have no reason to believe he's actually trying to run again.Trump is not going to just disappear from the stage.He has this Board of Peace that he has set up as an intentional alternative to the UN.It has been, as far as we understand it, seeded with U .

S.tax dollars.It has other countries involved.The bylaws are written so that Trump is the only one who can pick his successor on it.There is nothing that suggests Trump's going to go off and write books or do a podcast or, you know, just play golf.

Or imagine his presidential library.

Right.I mean, well, that one I think they are going to work on, but I don't think that's going to be the only fight.Right.Yeah.Because that one is also intended to be a huge tower that is expected to turn into a hotel.But I do.

And for which the Florida gifted them an enormous parcel of land.I are enormously valuable, I should say.I do think that He is going to remain a presence for as long as he is on this earth.I don't quite know what that looks like.But there is this belief for Democrats and certainly some Republicans that it's like what it was in 2021, Katie, at the very beginning of that year.You know, he's gone.

His whole point right now is seeing him leaving hisimprint on the world so that it will be very hard to undo that when he leaves.

Well, Maggie Haberman, your book, along with Jonathan Swan, is called Regime Change, the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.Congratulations, Maggie.We are in awe of you.We don't know how you are the White House correspondent and your side hustle is writing this book.All I have to say is after promoting it, which I know you still have some things to do, I hope you can take a well -deserved summer vacation, Maggie, and get to know your family again.

Yes, I'm told they're wonderful people, and I'm excited to see them.Thank you, Katie, for having me.

It was great.Thanks, Maggie, for making the time for us.

See you soon.

Bye.Bye.