Inside the Trump ‘Regime Change’ with Jonathan Swan

Summary

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Episode Overview

Title: Inside the Trump ‘Regime Change’ with Jonathan Swan
Podcast: 7am
Date: July 12, 2026
Host: Ruby Jones
Guest: Jonathan Swan (New York Times journalist, co-author of "Regime Change")
Theme:
A deep-dive with Jonathan Swan into his reporting on Donald Trump’s second presidency, as chronicled in his new book Regime Change (with Maggie Haberman). The episode dissects the radical shift in how Trump wields presidential power in his current term, his inner circle’s loyalty, unprecedented government overreach, motives, and global consequences.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Reporting on the Book: Chronicling Trump’s Second Term

Timestamps: 01:22–03:39

• Swan recounts that he and Maggie Haberman originally started reporting before Trump’s re-election, expecting to document the “final act” — which could’ve been defeat or a win.

• After Trump’s second inauguration (Jan 2025), they shifted focus:

  "We made, like, a very painful decision to basically throw out a whole year's work... what the project needed to be was documenting Donald Trump's return to the presidency. And we both believe he's the most consequential American president of our lifetimes."
  — Jonathan Swan (03:10)

• Their goal: forensic, real-time documentation of how this presidency tested and expanded executive power to new extremes.

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2. A New Level of Presidential Power and Government Overhaul

Timestamps: 03:42–07:23

• Swan argues Trump’s second term marks a historic expansion (and personalisation) of power, beyond any modern precedent:

  • Trump appoints Elon Musk as de facto “co-president”, granting vast, unchecked authority.
  • Musk, dismissing USAID as “hopeless”, oversees the dissolution and absorption of the major foreign aid agency within days:

    "Posting on X. We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper." (04:20)

  • Trade war launched (“Liberation Day”) without Congressional consultation, triggering global economic turmoil.

    Trump: "April 2, 2025, will forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn..." (05:09)

  • Directs Justice Department for retribution, launching investigations against political enemies—e.g., James Comey.
  • Wields federal power to pressure universities (e.g., Harvard over foreign student enrollments) and private law firms associated with adversaries (e.g., Perkins Coy).
  • Leverages regulatory bodies (e.g., FCC) to strong-arm media settlements favoring Trump family interests:

    "Using his leverage over deals to squeeze money out of media companies..." (06:33)

• Swan highlights “monetization of the office” and “family profiteering” at a scale “we haven’t seen from any US president” (07:13).

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3. Trump’s Inner Circle: Loyalty, Deference, and a Sense of Destiny

Timestamps: 07:23–10:24

• Swan describes the drastic shift from Trump’s first term, where top officials saw themselves as “guardrails” restraining him:

  "You would frequently hear from Trump's inner circle...that Trump was dangerous and that they saw themselves as protecting the United States and the world from Donald Trump." (07:49)

• Now, the circle is smaller, intensely loyal, convinced of Trump’s near-messianic status:

  • Some see divine protection, referencing his “miraculous” survival of an assassination attempt and repeated political resurrections.
  • Staffers are more deferential, "far less inclined to dismiss" outlandish ideas, even investing him with “supernatural capacities.”
  • The new attitude is: execute, not question.

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4. Most Shocking Developments: Trade Wars and the Iran Conflict

Timestamps: 10:24–13:26

• Swan reflects (candidly) that, despite his years covering Trump, the second term's escalation “unnerved even people around him”:

  • "Liberation Day" trade war caused “gyrations” in markets and almost broke the global bond market.

    "What happened after Liberation Day was the bond markets almost melted down and Trump pushed the global economy right to the brink." (11:07)

  • Treasury and Commerce secretaries “almost pleading” with Trump to pause damaging tariffs (12:10).

  • Willingness to start war with Iran, even as closest advisors and intelligence heads advised against:

    "He started that war despite his own CIA director... telling him Benjamin Netanyahu's presentation about regime change was farcical..." (12:48)

  • Swan: "He pushes things so much further this term... so much bigger risks."

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5. Trump’s Concept of Power and Legacy

Timestamps: 13:26–17:25

• Swan recounts a revealing one-on-one interview with Trump, March 2026, amid the Iran war:

  • Trump gives Swan a historian’s document ranking him as "the most powerful man who's ever existed," listing historical figures like Hitler, Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao, Napoleon, but stressing not a “moral comparison” — purely about power.

    "It starts by saying, you know, 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...Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Genghis Khan..."
    — Jonathan Swan (15:10)

    "It was interesting that Trump was completely untroubled by being in their company. And that power was this dominant, overriding value for him..." (15:39)

  • This explains Trump’s fixation not on domestic poll numbers, but on actions that will secure his image as a “great man of history”—from territorial expansion (Venezuela, Greenland) to breaking precedents.

    "I want to be the capital G, great man of history, of our time. I want to expand the American landmass, make Venezuela into a 51st state...take Greenland, you know, whatever." (16:32)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On changing the focus of their reporting:

  “We made, like, a very painful decision to basically throw out a whole year's work, but it focused us...what the project needed to be was documenting Donald Trump's return to the presidency.”
  — Jonathan Swan (03:10)

• On Trump’s governing style:

  “It was very clear that Donald Trump was governing, was using power in ways that we haven't seen from any president in my lifetime.”
  — Jonathan Swan (06:52)

• On the new inner circle:

  “It's a group that's much more deferential to him, who sees their role as executing what he wants, doing what he wants, and not putting up barriers or obstacles.”
  — Jonathan Swan (10:10)

• On Trump’s ambitions and sense of legacy:

  “When you understand it through the lens of I'm, you know, I want to be Napoleon...I want to be the capital G, great man of history, of our time.”
  — Jonathan Swan (16:32)

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Key Timestamps

• 01:22–03:39: Origin and focus of “Regime Change” reporting
• 03:42–07:23: Expansion of executive power, Musk’s government role, weaponizing institutions
• 07:23–10:24: Character of Trump’s inner circle, religious/destined motivations, shift from resistant to loyal staff
• 10:24–13:26: Swan’s most shocking revelations—trade war chaos, Iran conflict
• 13:26–17:25: Trump’s conception of power, legacy, comparison to history’s strongest figures

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Concluding Remarks

Jonathan Swan’s forensic account of Trump’s second presidency paints a portrait of a presidency transformed: stripped of constraints, more personal, more ideological, and bent on reshaping not only the American political landscape, but the global order. With a loyal inner core and a vision defined by audacious comparisons to history’s most powerful—and notorious—figures, the consequences, as Regime Change details, are profound and ongoing.

Transcript

[Ruby Jones]

New York Times journalist Jonathan Swan is famous for this interview with Donald Trump at the height of COVID I think it's under control.

[Donald Trump]

I'll tell you what.

[Jonathan Swan]

How 1000Americans are dying a day.

[Donald Trump]

They are dying. That's true. And you ha. It is what it is.

[Ruby Jones]

Now he's exposing the US President again with a forensic look at what he says was the most consequential year of an American presidency in our lifetime. Donald Trump's first presidency was defined by chaos, but also by the people around him trying to contain it. Swan says the second term is different. Trump has returned to the White House with a tighter circle of loyalists and far fewer people willing to say no. In a new book, Regime Change, co authored with Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan goes inside the first 14 months of Trump's return to power, documenting a presidency using the machinery of government to punish enemies, pressure institutions, and test what one president can get away with. I'm Ruby Jones, and you're listening to 78 today, Jonathan Swan on Trump's second term and how he's changed America forever. It's Monday, July 13th. Jonathan, welcome to the show.

[Jonathan Swan]

Thanks for having me.

[Ruby Jones]

So your new book, Regime Change. It chronicles the first sort of year, 14 months of Trump's second presidency. And people would know you and your co author, Maggie Haberman as New York Times journalist. But I thought, to begin with, would you mind telling me a bit about the reporting of the book, about how you approached it and what it was that you were trying to show?

[Jonathan Swan]

So Maggie and I have covered Donald Trump for a long time. This is my 11th consecutive year. Maggie's covered him for more than 25 years. I mean, she had her first byline about Donald Trump in 1998. So Maggie and I were approached by publishers because we were working together at the New York Times. At that point, we basically both concluded that whatever was coming next with Trump was going to be an epic story. We were going to write a book about the final act of Donald Trump, whatever that was. And at that time, it could have been a story that ended with Donald Trump going to prison, or it could have ended up with him going to the White House. So we did the book deal and we basically just started reporting. We'd sort of done about a year of hardcore reporting. By the time he's sworn into office, January 20th last year, we could already see that all of the reporting that we'd done from the campaign, the vast, vast, vast majority of it, we were going to throw out the office of

[Former Trump Administration Official]

President of the United States.

[Donald Trump]

The Office of President of the United States.

[Former Trump Administration Official]

And will, to the best of my ability.

[Donald Trump]

And will, to the best of my

[Former Trump Administration Official]

ability, preserve, protect and defend.

[Donald Trump]

Preserve, protect and defend.

[Former Trump Administration Official]

Constitution of the United States.

[Donald Trump]

The Constitution of the United States.

[Former Trump Administration Official]

So help me God.

[Donald Trump]

So help me God.

[Former Trump Administration Official]

Congratulations, Mr. Kevin.

[Jonathan Swan]

So we made, like, a very painful decision to basically throw out a whole year's work, but it focused us and we realized that what the project needed to be was documenting Donald Trump's return to the presidency. And we both believe he's the most consequential American president of our lifetimes, and that last year was the most consequential year of an American presidency in our lifetime. So we just, we just report the

[Former Trump Administration Official]

hell out of it.

[Jonathan Swan]

And that's kind of how the book came together.

[Ruby Jones]

And so what was it that really made you realize that you needed to make that pivot, that this second Trump presidency had the power to, to change US Politics and global politics for good.

[Jonathan Swan]

So we've seen in the United States over the last few decades an expansion of presidential power. Presidents have been exercising unilateral power to a greater and greater extent. So it's not like Donald Trump came from nowhere. He didn't. There's a lineage before that, but it was very obvious early on when Donald Trump appoints the world's richest man, Elon Musk, as essentially a co president and allows him to run roughshod over the whole government, the whole federal government. When they shut down an entire agency over a weekend. USAID helping an estimated 32 million children suffering malnutrition, and bringing food, water, shelter and health care to victims of natural disasters. But Musk, the world's richest man, says the agency is hopeless. Posting on X. We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper, major foreign aid agency gutted and then absorbed into the State Department. Within a couple of months, he starts a trade war with the whole world.

[Donald Trump]

Liberation Day, my fellow Americans, this is Liberation Day. Waiting for a long time.

[Jonathan Swan]

He didn't talk to Congress before he did it. He just did it.

[Donald Trump]

April 2, 2025, will forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn, the day America's destiny was reclaimed.

[Jonathan Swan]

And then you start to see him use the Justice Department as an engine for retribution to actually direct his Attorney General to prosecute individuals and investigate individuals. And you start to see investigations being opened up into Donald Trump's enemies.

[News Reporter]

We've got some breaking news coming into us just in the past hour here. The former FBI director James Comey has now been subpoenaed apparently in connection with the so called grand conspiracy. However, Comey has been repeatedly singled out as this perceived political enemy of the President's.

[Jonathan Swan]

Then you see him use government powers to coerce universities. President Trump again setting his sights on Harvard University over the weekend, chastising the school for failing to hand over documents on its international students and saying it doesn't enroll enough Americans.

[Donald Trump]

Not gonna have a problem with foreign students, but it shouldn't be 31%. It's too much because we have Americans that want to go there and law

[Jonathan Swan]

firms that employ, employ or represent people he doesn't like.

[News Reporter]

Perkins Coy llp, for example, represents former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and billionaire Democratic donor George Soros in Trump's executive orders. He demands that security clearances be suspended for all three of these firms and that their federal contracts be suspended.

[Jonathan Swan]

Using his leverage over deals to squeeze money out of media companies, The FCC

[Former Trump Administration Official]

approved Skydance Media's $8 billion bid to

[Jonathan Swan]

acquire CBS News parent company Paramount.

[Former Trump Administration Official]

The green light from Trump's FCC comes after Paramount agreed to a $16 million settlement over a lawsuit brought by the President.

[Jonathan Swan]

It was very clear that Donald Trump was governing, was using power in ways that we haven't seen from any president in my lifetime. And in some respects, like his monetization of the office and the family profiteering office, we've never seen at this scale from a United States president, the personalization of the office, the office of the presidency, as an extension of Donald Trump's own personal interests. We haven't seen anything at this scale from a United States president.

[Ruby Jones]

And while all of this was happening, power was becoming more and more concentrated within the White House. Right. I mean, you've spoken about the sort of five or six people who form the inner circle who are making a lot of the decisions that affect the entire country and the world. Can you tell me a little bit more about that close circle and how they see Trump?

[Jonathan Swan]

Well, this is another area where this second term of Trump is unrecognizable from the first term. During the first term, as a reporter, if you were covering the first term of Trump and you were having background conversations with very senior officials, they could be very senior officials in the White House, at the State Department, at the Pentagon, you would frequently hear from Trump's inner circle, not universal, but frequently, that Trump was dangerous and that they saw themselves as protecting the United States and the world from Donald Trump.

[Former Trump Administration Official]

The last year of the Trump administration. And to tell the story about things we prevented, really bad things, dangerous things that could have taken the country in a dark direction.

[News Reporter]

What kind of terrible things did you prevent?

[Former Trump Administration Official]

At various times during the, certainly the last year of the administration, you have folks in the White House are proposing to take military action against Venezuela, to strike Iran. At one point, somebody proposed we blockade Cuba. These ideas would happen. It seemed every few weeks something like this would come up and we'd have to swat them down.

[Jonathan Swan]

Now you have a group of people that likes him, believes in him, is loyal to him. It's a smaller group, it's more of a tight knit group. Some of them went through the whole campaign with him and see him as a figure of destiny. Some believe that there is a spiritual dimension, that God has protected him, how he miraculously avoided being killed with that assassination attempt when the bullet grazed his ear, that this was a divine intervention, and that also Donald Trump's own miraculous ability to come back from January 6th and the indictments and all the tribulations to become president. When he says something in a meeting these days which might be outlandish or even crazy to some people's ears, the staff this time are far less inclined to dismiss the idea, even if instinctively. They're like, oh, that's a bit crazy. They're much more inclined to think, well, maybe he's picking up on something we're not picking up on, or maybe he's seeing something we're not seeing, that they almost invest him with these supernatural, almost capacities. So it's a group that's much more deferential to him who sees their role as executing what he wants, doing what he wants, and not putting up barriers or obstacles.

[Ruby Jones]

Still to come, Donald Trump's pride in being compared to Hitler, Stalin and Genghis Khan. Jonathan after all of this time covering Trump, you must be more desensitized than some to the, to the more outlandish, the more kind of crazy ideas that have come out of the White House. But did anything that you heard from, I think the more than a thousand insiders that you spoke to, did any of it shock you?

[Jonathan Swan]

I don't know that it shocked me, because I know how his world works and I'm so immersed in it and I cover it every day, but certain events unnerved even the people around him. So I'll give you an example. We get into the book the astonishing sequence of events that leads to Liberation Day last year, when Trump starts a trade war with the whole world. His aides were frightened, some of his advisors were genuinely frightened after that moment, because what they started to see in the data was yes, the stock market dropped, there were gyrations in the Dow and whatever. But actually what happened after Liberation Day was the bond markets almost melted down and Trump pushed the global economy right to the brink.

[News Reporter]

The announcement of US President Trump's far reaching tariffs last week have sent shockwaves through the global economy. Nearly $150 billion was wiped off the ASX in less than an hour this morning amid growing fears of a global recession.

[Jonathan Swan]

Take a look here. Okay, the loss to GDP in 2025 trumps tariffs. Look at this. We're talking about $180 billion. $180 billion

[Donald Trump]

with a B.

[Jonathan Swan]

That is eye popping, but it's not. And it took, as we document in the book, almost pleading from his Treasury Secretary and Commerce Secretary to get him to step back from the brink and to put a pause on those tariffs. So shocking. Maybe not. But he pushes things so much further this term than he did in the first term. He's willing to take so much bigger risks. The Iran war is an obvious example of that.

[Donald Trump]

We are going to destroy their missiles and raise their missile industry to the ground. It will be totally again, obliterated.

[Jonathan Swan]

He started that war despite his own CIA director, as we reveal in the book. His own CIA director telling him that Benjamin Netanyahu's presentation about regime change was farcical and his own Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying it was bullshit. But Trump at a gut level felt that Iran was going to collapse, that they would fold very quickly, that it'll be a quick war and all of the scenarios that he'd been warned about were not going to come to bear. This stuff did not happen in the first term. He wasn't willing to roll the dice like that. So, yeah, I'd say there have been things that have, that have shocked me

[Ruby Jones]

and share with me, I suppose, where you think Trump is now in terms of his thoughts on power and his own legacy. Because I know there was this one big sit down interview you had with him as part of the book, which I think was quite revealing. What's your sense of how he is thinking about how he's changing the world?

[Jonathan Swan]

So when we went and met with the President at the end of our reporting process, just a side note, you know, obviously we wanted an interview with Trump. He's the subject of our book. His staff was not eager to facilitate that interview, to say the least. So we ended up just going directly to the President. We called him a couple of times, texted him, whatever, and eventually he told his staff to set up the interview. So we sit down with him. It's March 16th. It's like the 17th day of the war with Iran, really fraught period. Americans had died. It was already clear it was not going to be the quick war that he imagined. And there was this amazing moment in the interview where we had some reporting that Trump had been telling people that, that he was the most powerful American president there had ever been, that there had never been a president as powerful as he was. So we ask him a question about his own power, and instead of answering it directly, he asks one of his aides, this young woman, Natalie Harp, to go and get the document, he said, from the historian. So she runs off and she races back and hands us this two page document, each of us. And Trump's sitting there across from us, you know, the Resolute desk, and he's got a copy. And he's watching us like, what? Like, he's like reading this document. He's clearly kind of relishing it, wants us to take it in. And it starts by saying, you know, 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 what Trump told us were the top 10. Hitler, Stalin, Ma, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hunter, William the Conqueror, Alexander the Great, Tamerlane. You know, you get the idea, but not, not a moral comparison of any sort. It was all about power and that the point was they were powerful, but their power was localized, regional. Trump's is, is global. He can project power with the force of the US Military, with America's economic and technological power. So it was a revealing moment for two reasons. One, it was interesting that Trump was completely untroubled by being in their company. And that power was this dominant, overriding value for him in the company of some of the great monsters of history. He was sort of absorbing. He's like Napoleon. Very interesting, you know, da, da, da, da. But secondly, it helped explain something that we were puzzling over in our reporting, which was, we've both noticed, Maggie and I, that this term, Trump is far less responsive to domestic politics than he was in the first term. Like, if he, if there are bad poll numbers or some domestic political concern or people worried about the midterm elections, it's not that he's not at all concerned about it, but he is so far less concerned about it than he was in term one. And when you understand it through the lens of I'm, you know, I want to be Napoleon, I'm being slightly glib saying that, but not really. I want to be the capital G, great man of history, of our time. I want to expand the American landmass, make Venezuela into a 51st state with a pliant leader who's more like a governor. Take their oil, reshape Iran, take Greenland, you know, whatever. You start to understand why he's willing to roll the dice in the way that he's rolling the dice this term, which he certainly wasn't willing to do in the first term.

[Ruby Jones]

Jonathan, thank you so much for your time.

[Jonathan Swan]

Pleasure.

[Ruby Jones]

Also in the news, Iran has declared the Strait of Hormuz closed until further notice after firing warning shots at a container ship it claimed was travelling on an unapproved route. The US military has retaliated, striking Iranian targets. The interim deal to end the war is now on shaky ground, with Trump declaring the ceasefire over. Iran's new supreme leader, in his first statement since his father's funeral, has vowed to avenge his death and One nation. MP Barnaby Joyce has refused to guarantee his party will cost all of its policies before the next federal election. After Angus Taylor claimed their current platform would cost more than a trillion dollars over a decade, Joyce questioned whether they'll have the resources to cost their policies. That's despite the Budget Office being available to all MPs to provide independent analysis of their proposals. I'm Ruby Jones, this is 7:00am thanks for listening, Sam.