‘Regime Change’ Authors Talk Trump ‘Information Bubble’ and Situation Room Meetings on Epstein

President Trump has “a fundamentally different conception of the American presidency” than his predecessors, New York Times journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan explain in their new book, “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.”

Haberman and Swan sat down with “CBS Mornings” on Friday to talk about their book, which delves into the president’s second term and is the result of more than 1,000 interviews.

“This administration is so unrecognizable [compared] at Trump’s first,” Haberman told “CBS Mornings” co-host Gayle King.

She said that “it became very clear to us,” over months of reporting, “that we are not covering the transfer of power from a Democrat to a Republican or from a Democrat to a Democrat. This is a fundamentally different conception of the American presidency. »

Here are some of the key takeaways from their reports.

Trump uses executive power like never before

Swan said the second Trump administration and the book were “really focused on how he uses executive power.”

“We’ve never seen anything like this in our lifetime in terms of a unilateral expression of executive power,” Swan said, noting that it comes at a time when “it’s quite difficult to imagine a precedent for an American president having the command that Trump had over his own party in Congress.”

“There’s really no precedent. I mean, basically, he got them to do what he wanted, and Congress wasn’t even consulted when he went to war with Iran.”

Even former President George W. Bush, for all his criticism of the wars he fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, got authorization from Congress, Swan noted.

“Trump is just acting,” Swan said. “He acts out and the system tries to catch up with him. That’s really how it works.”

Trump fundamentally changes America’s approach to foreign policy

Through his unilateral actions, Mr. Trump is also changing the United States’ approach to foreign policy, from its acquisition of Venezuelan oil to its continuing aspirations to acquire Greenland.

“It’s changing the way countries around the world, leaders around the world, the way Americans view their president, and we’re not used to covering regime changes, as you say, here,” Haberman said. “But that’s what we were doing.”

Two things that matter to Trump: loyalty and looking good

The president’s decisions in selecting top officials for critical roles come down to two things, Haberman and Swan said: Is this person fiercely loyal to him and does he seem like the right fit?

“Loyalty was a primary characteristic that he looked for, and loyalty — and we write about this — has a bit of a fungible definition,” Haberman said. “What became the real litmus test was January 6. Where were you on January 6 and where were you on January 7? If on January 7, in Trump’s mind, you were separated from him in some way, he didn’t want you around.”

The authors also wrote about how the president selected his cabinet members. According to the book, before choosing John Ratcliffe as CIA director, the president said he thought he looked like actor Cary Grant, straight out of central casting.

“The ‘central casting’ aspect is important,” Haberman said. “Part of it was Pete Hegseth, how you have him now as Secretary of Defense and War. He liked that Hegseth was good on television. He liked that Hegseth stood up for, quote, warriors. When it came to someone like Tulsi Gabbard, who was the director of national intelligence, it was, ‘Let’s give it to her, what harm could she really do?’

Trump lives in an “information bubble” and is rarely told bad news

Much more than during his first term, the president operates in an “information bubble” where his advisors rarely tell him bad news, write Haberman and Swan. During his first term, the president had more advisors who occasionally showed resistance – but that is no longer the case.

Haberman noted that former President Joe Biden also hated receiving negative news, but she said, “Trump is in an information bubble that’s unlike anything I remember.”

“The input that comes to him is so minimal,” she said, adding that often “decisions are made by a group of about half a dozen people.”

For example, Haberman said, in the run-up to the Iran war: “The Secretary of Energy and the Secretary of the Treasury, the two people who should be managing the aftereffects and economic impacts of a global energy crisis caused by this war, did not attend these meetings initially because they were concerned about the leaks. »

The Situation Room was used for meetings on the Epstein files

In a series of close meetings, the Situation Room — normally the site of highest-level national security decisions — was used for discussions about how to handle the fallout from Jeffrey Epstein and the Epstein files, Haberman and Swan write in their book.

“It was a pretty extraordinary series of meetings that took place last summer and the setting itself was extraordinary,” Swan said.

“Over the summer of last year, they essentially turned the Situation Room into a response center for the Epstein crisis, and the highest officials in the U.S. government met in that room to essentially develop a public relations strategy to deal with the Epstein crisis,” he said.

“One of the problems they had was they built this website that they were going to release – a public Justice Department website. And they were looking for Trump there and they found a lot of stuff about Trump and some of it was, you know, embarrassing, so they had to make decisions about what to disclose and what not to disclose. But it was really a political crisis that had long-term effects far beyond what his team was dealing with. expected.”

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