\n<\/p>\n
T<\/span>hey cracked the White House Situation Room, unearthing secrets from the heart of a secretive administration. But the reporters behind Regime Change, a blockbuster new book on Donald Trump\u2019s second term, ran up against a wall when reporting on one issue surrounding the 80-year-old US president: his fitness for office.<\/p>\n \u201cHis health has always been a very specific lockbox for him, going back decades,\u201d Maggie Haberman, co-author with Jonathan Swan, said in an interview. \u201cIllness freaks him out; he perceives illness as weakness, usually, and he certainly perceives any sense that he is having an issue as a projection of weakness, and his advisers are very, very attuned to that.<\/p>\n \u201cSo the number of people who actually know what is happening with his health \u2026 they\u2019ve provided less and less information, except for saying things like, \u2018He saw 22 specialists,\u2019 but they won\u2019t say who the specialists are at Walter Reed [National Military Medical Center], and it has been on just a sliding scale since term one. Frankly, 2018, I think, was the last time we got real information. Remember, they were not honest at all about how sick he was during Covid in 2020, and so we\u2019ve never really known the extent of that, or any after-effects.<\/p>\n \u201cWill we know before the end of his term if there is something more significant? Doesn\u2019t seem likely on that trajectory. I don\u2019t want to make predictions.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>Donald Trump has sought to cover up a bruise on his right hand with make-up.<\/span> Photograph: Brian Snyder\/Reuters<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s health is an example of how this administration is \u201cvery good at keeping secrets\u201d, added Haberman. \u201cThat is one, and always has been.\u201d<\/p>\n As Trump slurs his words, shuffles down steps and sleeps in meetings while his hands are bruised and ankles are swollen, his every slowing move is scrutinized around the world. On the page, Haberman and Swan \u2013 who both report for the New York Times \u2013 describe sleep-ins after social media all-nighters; documents hoarded in chaotic, garbage-strewn quarters; and a mania for remodeling his surroundings that extends to the president being found in the Oval Office, trying to glue gold appliques over the fire.<\/p>\n But if aides don\u2019t dish on their boss, the boss can\u2019t help but dish on himself. In the set-piece interview that concludes Regime Change, Trump told the authors, \u201ca historian\u201d \u2013 it turned out to be golfer Gary Player\u2019s caddie \u2013 compared him to Alexander the Great, the Caesars, William the Conqueror, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Tamerlane, Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a reason that there hasn\u2019t been a ton of inside-the-room reporting since last year,\u201d Swan said of the administration. \u201cIt\u2019s because it\u2019s really fucking hard. This is a tiny group of people running the government, and there\u2019s this canard that Trump puts out that, \u2018I\u2019m the most transparent president ever.\u2019 It\u2019s complete nonsense. They\u2019re actually \u2026 incredibly good at keeping secrets.\u201d<\/p>\n Some can be prised loose. Regime Change describes Situation Room discussions about botched attempts to contain the scandal surrounding the late financier Jeffrey Epstein, his sexual abuse of underage girls, and his links to powerful figures \u2013 including Trump. After the Times published an excerpt, reporters swimming in Swan and Haberman\u2019s wake revealed White House\u2019s worries about how such material was obtained. Naturally, the pair are not about to reveal their sourcing. But they did describe how hard they had to work.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ll give you a recent example,\u201d Swan said, pointing to the Memorandum of Understanding with Iran, signed last week. \u201cOne of the most important documents you could possibly imagine, to end the war,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat were the terms? Almost no one inside the US government had seen that document until it was publicly announced.<\/p>\n <\/span>Trump\u2019s extraordinary use of presidential power was \u2018fairly effective\u2019 for a time, Haberman noted<\/span> Photograph: Alex Brandon\/AP<\/p>\n \u201cThe tiniest inner circle had seen it \u2026 very senior people in the White House hadn\u2019t seen it. Very senior people in the state department and the Pentagon hadn\u2019t seen it \u2026 there are parts of the intelligence community \u2026 almost monitoring these talks like it\u2019s a foreign government, you know. They have no idea what\u2019s being said in the room, how these things are coming together.\u201d<\/p>\n And yet, Regime Change reports on how Trump chose to take the US to war with Iran, both in bombing nuclear facilities last summer and in joining Israel in all-out air assault this year.<\/p>\n \u201cJust think about this for a second,\u201d Swan said. \u201cThe two people in the government that would have to handle the biggest energy shock in world history, Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, Chris Wright, the energy secretary, weren\u2019t in the room for the meetings that led up to this war. They found out about the war the day before \u2026 in the Situation Room.\u201d<\/p>\n Swan and Haberman are uncomfortable with comparisons to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post pair who took down Richard Nixon. Regime Change feels like a first draft of history under the second Trump administration.<\/p>\n \u201cWe really nearly killed ourselves during this book,\u201d Haberman said. \u201cWe are enormously proud of it. It does not mean, obviously, that it\u2019s perfect, and it does not mean that there is not going to be more to tell about this period of time, but what we were trying to do was capture something deeper and richer than can be done in the day-to-day swirl.\u201d<\/p>\n A lot of material didn\u2019t make the cut, for lack of confirmation. The focus, Haberman said, was a specific throughline: Trump\u2019s return, an \u201cunprecedented-in-our-lifetime\u201d use of presidential power, \u201cand how he and a small group of people prepared for it, the events that drove it\u201d.<\/p>\n All this was \u201cfairly effective\u201d for a time, she noted. \u201cNow you are seeing obviously less so.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump is deeply unpopular. Iran talks grind on. America is deeply fractured. The president\u2019s attempts to plaster his name across the capital, increasingly absurd, remain mired in scandal.<\/p>\n <\/span>Donald Trump visited the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for his presidential physical in May.<\/span> Photograph: Win McNamee\/Getty Images<\/p>\n Swan is a Washington DC reporter. Haberman is out of New York City. Her experience reporting on Trump in that city, the foundation of her book on his first term, Confidence Man, was invaluable in writing the second. Regarding the origins of Trump\u2019s mania for rebuilding \u2013 the ballroom, the arch, the reflecting pool fiasco \u2013 she makes a telling point.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s interesting watching him talking about the reflecting pool constantly, because \u2026 this is like the grander version of the Wollman Rink,\u201d she said, referring to the ice rink that Trump finished in Central Park in 1986, after taking over a stalled public project. \u201cHe has woven that into his origin story in New York. It was really a relatively small project, but 1782288418 he\u2019s planning to build this arch, he\u2019s still trying to build this ballroom, he put his name on the Kennedy Center \u2026 he never really got over the fact that [in the first term] his name was being torn off of buildings in New York.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" They cracked the White House Situation Room, unearthing secrets from the heart of a secretive administration. But the reporters behind Regime Change, a blockbuster new book on Donald Trump\u2019s second term, ran up against a wall when reporting on one issue surrounding the 80-year-old US president: his fitness for office. \u201cHis health has always been<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":50618,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[5013,1001,15108,964,671,632,9024,24842,5686,81,2168],"class_list":{"0":"post-50617","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-authors","9":"tag-books","10":"tag-detail","11":"tag-donald","12":"tag-house","13":"tag-killed","14":"tag-loose","15":"tag-pried","16":"tag-secrets","17":"tag-trump","18":"tag-white"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50617"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50617\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/50618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}