Trump aides privately noted health issues: Haberman & Swan reveal details

A dramatic reading.Quote, he, the president, was also having trouble hearing.Asking people to repeat questions they just asked.Joint press conferences with world leaders were more often held in the Oval Office than in the East Room, in part because the acoustics were better and he didn't have to stand for an hour.That excerpt is from Regime Change Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, released like less than 24 hours ago.But it's already sold out on Amazon.

With us now are the co -authors, our friends Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.First of all, congratulations to both of you.Thanks, John.I mean, sold out on Amazon's a pretty big deal.

Yeah, we were quite surprised, but also proud.quite thrilled that people are interested in reading it.But it is available in bookstores.If people actually want to go visit a bookstore, that would be wonderful.And it is going to be restocked.

It was not a problem we anticipated.

No.

Physical shortage of books.

It's been quite something.We've been hearing from people sending us our, this is not available until notes.

You're going to get mobbed when you walk out of here because you have two hard copies that people are stealing from you.But listen, I started with actually a very small passage from the book.There are huge big themes here, which I'll get to.But one of the things I loved about it is all the little tidbits and details of things I just didn't know, that I learned as I was reading it.I didn't know the president was having a hard time hearing or his hearing was fading.How else has his age manifested itself in this term?

So one of the things that we talk about in the book is how aides are aware that he is older.What exactly goes on with Donald Trump's health is one of the mysteries, right, of the last 10 years.And he is very secretive about his health.We also talk about how this is a White House, despite these displays of transparency.They're very good at keeping secrets, and they want to.This is always one of them.

But he is aware.Moving differently, he has the swelling in the ankles, which, you know, he was so irritated about the coverage of that he had the press secretary go out and talk about.And most people in the White House thought it was a little strange to be going out and talking about it.cankles, as we write, but he's very, very sensitive about his appearance.The hearing is an issue.They've all been aware of it for a while, and it's been happening for a while.

The fact that he just is older, at 80 it is harder to mask it, and they are all aware of it, what exactly that means.portends, they don't know, but he is not a young man.

Big picture here.One of the main themes here is just how different he is and is approaching this second term than the first term.And it's summed up by, you know, toward the end, toward the very end of the book, your interview with the president, where he yells at you guys as, not yells, but speaks loudly and firmly with you as you're leaving, telling you to remember, quote, essentially, I won every effing time.So, Jonathan, what does that mean, that idea that he is convinced that he is a winner here?How has that manifested itself in the second term in ways it didn't necessarily in the first?

Well, one other thing that happened when we went and saw the president in March was he handed us a document that he wanted us to read.And it was a two -page document that he said was written by a historian.And it opens with a statement, Donald Trump is the most powerful man who's ever existed on the planet by far.And then it goes on to compare him to Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Alexander the Great, the Caesars, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, you know, all the sort of liberal Democrats of, you know, history.And Trump wanted us to understand it was not a moral, there was no mention of a moral comparison.It was that he had power that no one has ever had before.

The US has the most powerful military in the world.economy, technology, but that he's willing to use it. AndAnd that was the thing he wanted to impress upon us.understood ourselves throughout our reporting, was in the first term, he was much more reactive to domestic politics.If there was a turn in the polls or the stock market, he could be diverted.This time around, he's trying to reshape the world.

He's trying to reshape this country.And he's willing to take much bigger risks because of that.And if you put it through that lens of sort of Donald Trump as a Napoleonic figure in his mind, the Alexander the Great, the presidency starts to make more sense, I think.

It's not so much that he's shattering the world order, he's behaving as if there is no world order, is basically what you write.

Well, when you talk to leaders in other countries, and most of them won't say this on the record, the post -World War II order essentially...It's over.It's really, I mean, who actually thinks that Donald Trump would go to defend a NATO country.I mean, he's openly saying that, you know, they're weak, they're paper tigers, they screwed us over, we need to pull troops out.NATO is really on its last legs.

One of the ways this power manifests itself is through retribution.You guys write about this really in two separate parts of the book, but there's one episode that's relevant to New York.Big day here in New York, elections last night.One of the political losers, actually, the Attorney General Letitia James, some of the candidates she backed, didn't do so well.But the President had it out for her, Maggie, you write, in ways that I'm not sure people realize.

Yeah, so one of the ways we take people inside how this retribution campaign works in the White House is we describe how they can't even always remember exactly who they're going after, so just in one separate case that has nothing to do with Letitia James, butMiller and the president and Boris Epstein, who's not a White House employee, he's the president's legal advisor, are sitting around and they're talking, and they're talking about who was that guy involved in the elections, in the machines, and the security of the elections in 2020, and it was Chris Krebs.They couldn't even remember, they had to look up the name, and then soon there is this presidential memoranda about investigating Krebs.Tish james, who brought this civil fraud case against trump and the trump org, that could have essentially brought his company to its knees, she has been his top target, according to almost everybody that we have spoken to.And what was fascinating to us and really laid out in very clear detail how he is looking at this is, a, there's really no line between the white house and the doj, which I think has been apparent to people.But we make clear in the reporting how true that is.

He wanted the top DOJ officials to understand, as they were trying to obtain an indictment against Letitia James, and there was this question of whether a mortgage fraud charge could actually be brought, Todd Blanche, who was then the deputy attorney general, was not convinced this was going to work because it required intent and proving it and he was operating in our reporting from the perspective of if you're going to bring a case you need to be able to actually prove the case.Like a lawyer.Correct.And so I'm just going to read to you from the book, which is...have said it.

And he went on to call her a dirty cop and a very corrupt person, highly political, not smart.So we got a real look at exactly how this is working.And I'm sure there are many other drafts of history that will be written, but this was the one we were able to obtain.

The ballroom is cutting through.The fact that while we have an affordability you know, crisis in this country or many people living, you know, paycheck to paycheck, the visuals of Trump building this grand ballroom and all the gold, it's actually cutting through to voters in a way that I don't think many of his aides anticipated.

So much of this period you're writing about The president is unchecked or relatively unchecked, you know, operates with relative impunity.Any sense of what happens if the Democrats take control of a chamber of Congress next November?

It's very uncertain because, you know, there's a sort of conventional wisdom of, let's say they take the House.Well, now it's oversight seasons.Well, what happens if you have an administration that doesn't respond to subpoenas?What's the enforcement mechanism for that?The Trump DOJ?Oh yeah, OK.

Yeah, I know.They'll be really cracking down hard.So, you know, we don't know.It's a real black box for us as to what happens after November.And Trump has already said many times, we have this in our book, he has told people in Oval Office meetings, I'm going to pardon anyone who came within 250 feet of the Oval Office.Sometimes the distance changes.

Sometimes he says 200 feet, sometimes he says 25 feet, but some number of feet.So, He knows he has immunity conferred by the Supreme Court and everyone around him knows they're going to get pardons.So what's the accountability mechanism?It's very unclear.

Iran has been so important here.And you write and you've talked extensively about the fact that Donald Trump was more into this Iran operation.I think a lot of people realize based on that, Jonathan,any sense of where this goes next now that it's pretty clear?Look, I guess we don't know what's going to happen, but it's clear until now the main goals have not been met.

Right.And they're in a bit of a bind because they explicitly laid out these goals.Marco Rubio said we want to dismantle the ballistic missile program.And we've had reporting that Iran retains access to something like 70 percent of its missiles.So Look, Trump wants to get out of this.He wants a deal.

He's trying to sell the deal.And he's trying to desperately show that it's not the JCPOA.Some people on the right are worried it's going to be worse than the JCPOA on certain.

But they may underestimate his connection to his initial passion to going after Iran.Stronger, I think, than many people may have thought.

There's no question about that.I mean, there is this there is this belief that Netanyahu sort of puppeteered Trump into this.And certainly Netanyahu spent many months trying to compel Trump to join him.But Trump was a willing partner.And one of the striking things he said to us in that March interview we did, we asked about Netanyahu as a wartime partner, given the tensions they've had over time.And he spoke very approvingly of Netanyahu, saying he's not afraid of war.