AMY GOODMAN: I mean, there is so much here. For example, talk about the use of the war room, as you describe it, both in a piece in the Times Magazine but also in your book, “Inside the White House Freakout Over the Epstein Files.”

MAGGIE HABERMAN: Yeah, the Times Magazine headline was, I think, pretty precise. So, we describe in this book a handful of what were many meetings in the White House Situation Room, which is a meeting where — a room where presidents have — and it’s a series of conference rooms, but there’s this large conference room that people have seen pictures of presidents sitting in. The complex itself is where President Obama monitored the raid to kill Osama bin Laden. It is where presidents have talked about wars.

It is also what became essentially a crisis comms hub for the Trump team — not the president, he was not in these meetings, but his team — trying to deal with the general issue of the Epstein files, which Trump wanted nothing to do with. Trump obviously was very close with Jeffrey Epstein in the 1990s. He often talks about a falling out, that we still don’t totally understand, in the 2000s. But his name was in these files. And some of that was public already. But he just didn’t want to hear about it at all. And he had several people in his government who had repeatedly talked about transparency in these files once they got in office. The problem is, the president did not want anything to do with this.

So, they then were in these meetings trying to figure out what they could put out to the public, how to handle Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime associate and girlfriend. And it ends up in these remarkable moments where they are discussing, among other things, you know, an uncorroborated secondhand allegation made to a reporter a decade earlier about Trump, you know, sleeping with a woman who — in Jeffrey Epstein’s house, and that the woman — that Trump had had a nipple fetish and that he had clearly abused her body, according to this secondhand account, which had already been public. But this was the kind of thing they found themselves talking about in the Situation Room. It was not really, in those meetings that we focused on, about justice for these victims. Now, there were other discussions on that front, but that was not what this was.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about who was there.

MAGGIE HABERMAN: It was the top levels of the White House and the DOJ. It was the chief of staff; the vice president; Pam Bondi, then the attorney general, who they mostly all blamed for comments that she had made publicly and how she handled it; Todd Blanche, now the attorney general, then the deputy attorney general; Kash Patel, the FBI director; Dave Warrington, then the White House counsel. The list goes on, and that’s a partial list. I mean, there were more than a dozen people.

AMY GOODMAN: And it’s so significant, Todd Blanche, given that he is the attorney general now.

MAGGIE HABERMAN: Correct.

AMY GOODMAN: The questions he was just asked by Kristen Welker on NBC about whether he would be independent, and he took great affront. He’s the one who handled the Epstein files.

MAGGIE HABERMAN: He was the person who was overseeing the majority of how this was dealt with. Pam Bondi talked about that in House testimony. And while she was certainly present in a bunch of these meetings and aware of what was happening, it is true that Blanche is who the White House tasked with this. And he was tasked with this because they believed that he would be, you know, clear with them about what was there and be clear with them about how they would move forward. There is a total eradication of the norm of DOJ independence that has existed since Watergate. What this White House will say is it is an agency of the executive branch, there is no actual independence. In this case, the middleman just doesn’t exist.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the briefing, Maggie Haberman, in the war room that Benjamin Netanyahu gave —

MAGGIE HABERMAN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — leading up to the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, how unusual this is.

MAGGIE HABERMAN: Right. This is an unusual meeting in the Situation Room, that large conference room, from the other end of the spectrum. This is actually about matters of governance. There are few things as important as how a president takes the country to war. And that is what this meeting was about. But this was a foreign leader sitting in the Situation Room. Trump normally sits at the head of that big conference table. And in this instance, in our reporting — and again, we get into this in detail in the book; this was really the last reporting we did for this book — Trump moved his seat so they were sitting across from each other, which said something about Netanyahu and the level of respect that Trump was conferring on him. But we could not find any other example of a foreign head of state being present with the president of the United States in person for this kind of a meeting.

And in this meeting, Netanyahu made the case for a regime change scenario, trying to pull the U.S. in. Various steps would happen. Various things were unlikely to, you know, be constricting, according to Netanyahu. He portrayed the Iranian regime as fairly easy to topple. And he played this video for the president in the conference room, which was of, you know, possible leaders who could take over, which most of the U.S. government did not take very seriously.

Trump, however, liked the sound of this. Trump, at the end of this presentation, said something to the effect of “Sounds good to me.” And while there were more conversations with his own government, it was clear to his own advisers how appealing this was to Trump. Trump was acting on instinct. This was after the Maduro raid in Venezuela earlier in the year. He believed the Iranian regime was a paper tiger, based on how it had responded the previous year during the 12-day war. And the president basically ignored many of his own advisers and just went ahead.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think Epstein also drove some of this? I mean, you had Epstein dominating the headlines in December. So, then he attacks Venezuela, gets Maduro and his wife, wipes the headlines off, very successful for President Trump. Then they’re creeping back in again in February. The whole operation was called Operation Epic Fury, which many dubbed “Epstein Fury.”

MAGGIE HABERMAN: Absolutely.

AMY GOODMAN: What drives Trump? What drove him into — the man who fought endless wars?

MAGGIE HABERMAN: We don’t have reporting suggesting this was an active diversion or an active distraction, although, obviously, Trump likes distractions. And we talk about that in the book, as well. We have a scene early on where they were looking at ways to wipe the controversy over an OMB memo that had gone out, you know, off the front pages. And one of the things they were talking about was, you know, “Let’s talk about sending migrants to Gitmo.” That was one possibility. So, obviously, he likes distractions. But we don’t have reporting suggesting that this was the active method behind it. It almost doesn’t matter, though. He was expanding his own power. That is the main focus for him now.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you have Netanyahu in the Situation Room. And now you have Trump on this secret flight. And it turns out, I think it was The Washington Post exposé saying, that the CIA didn’t hold much stock in Israeli intelligence that Trump was being targeted on this plane.

MAGGIE HABERMAN: So, we actually have different reporting on that And again, this is all still emerging. But our understanding is that this is actually a separate threat stream from what the Israeli government had been discussing. In real time, the CIA, according to our reporting on what was motivating them to get the president out, did not have a confidence assessment one way or the other in real time. Now, they later, I think, looked at it and were less confident. But that was not — I think things are getting conflated here. But again, we are all still trying to figure out what happened.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Maggie Haberman, co-author of Regime Change. Let’s talk about the inner circle. Talk about people like Stephen Miller, how he rose to power, how important he is to Trump, what this immigrant crackdown is all about. Talk about the Rubio-Vance competition to succeed President Trump. I thought it was interesting that Rubio was on the plane that possibly was targeted. He was left on the plane. And it then turned out that Trump is telling people behind the scenes that he’s for Vance now?

MAGGIE HABERMAN: Trump is quite capable of saying different things to different audiences, as you and I both know, and I think that that will continue. I think that Vance is likely, you know, to be the nominee, which at the moment he seems like he will be. Trump will get with him. I don’t think Trump is going to make it easy for Vance or anyone who is the Republican nominee, because Trump does not like attention shifting elsewhere. And Trump’s legacy is less about policy, in his mind; it’s about Trump. So, that’s one piece of it.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think he’ll allow the elections to continue?

MAGGIE HABERMAN: I do, and on reporting suggesting otherwise. But there’s a difference between, you know — A, there are limits to what he can actively do, as you know, to take over elections in states. That doesn’t mean that there won’t be, you know, efforts to try to get involved somehow. We’ve already seen that in Minnesota in the middle of these killings of Alex Pretti and, a few weeks before that, Renee Good earlier this year. The DOJ, then run by Pam Bondi, was saying, “Well, you know, we can — we’ll pull back the agents, the federal migrant forces, immigration forces. Just give us your voter rolls, and so that we can take a look at them and see what’s there.” So, I expect we will see more of that.

In terms of Stephen Miller, he is the most powerful White House adviser arguably over, you know, the last few decades, probably in modern history. He is dual-hatted: He is the deputy White House chief of staff for policy; he is also the homeland security adviser. Even those two titles do not really explain the level of his power. We got into his background, who he is, how he grew up. We were trying to make clear who these people are and what drives them, in this book. Miller is fundamentally important to understand for Trump in general.

But he came up in California in a very liberal enclave in Santa Monica, and he has been listening to — he was listening to Rush Limbaugh. He has been talking about undocumented immigrants for decades. And his vision is a restrictionist immigration policy. He is more hawkish than Trump on this matter, but — on this topic, but Trump just doesn’t stop him most of the time, unless it gets negative attention in the press, and then he will pull him back, like after Minnesota. But that was extreme. This immigration crackdown is what it looks like. It is about restricting who comes into the country and who can keep living here. And there is so much happening on this front that, you know, everybody across the media, I think, at the mainstream outlets, and not just mainstream outlets, are doing a lot of coverage, and there is still so much happening on so many fronts that we’re not really fully seeing the full picture.

AMY GOODMAN: Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. Talk about the title.

MAGGIE HABERMAN: So, one of the things that occurred to Jonathan and me very early on — and this relates to actually what we were just describing about Stephen Miller — Stephen Miller is one of the people who had spent the most time thinking about what a Trump 2.0 would look like, including how to put in lawyers who would help Trump get to a yes — not just help, but be willing to say yes and then figure out how to work the policy and the justifications later on. It was clear within the first three months that what we were covering was not, you know, Democrat-to-Republican transition, or even Trump to Biden, where Trump left Biden a handwritten note after January 6th, you know, and there were still some efforts to try to have some kind of a transition between the governments. This is a form of regime change in our own country. This is a reimagining of the U.S. presidency, an expansion of executive power on a level we have not seen before in modern history, in some ways ever. And we had come up with this title months before the Maduro operation. This was not about Venezuela. It was not about Iran. It happens to be true of those efforts, too, but this is about the U.S.

AMY GOODMAN: And the other people who surround him, who are most important, that we should be looking at?

MAGGIE HABERMAN: This is a government run by, as you said, about a half-dozen people, give or take: Susie Wiles; Pete Hegseth; Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; John Ratcliffe, director of the CIA; Steve Witkoff, Trump’s all-purpose envoy; Jared Kushner does not have an official government role, but he is quite involved now; Scott Bessent sometimes; Howard Lutnick sometimes. That’s about it.

AMY GOODMAN: Jared Kushner just declared a billionaire.

MAGGIE HABERMAN: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: He’s the billionaire builder, Trump envoy. And in fact, is it a benefit to Kushner not to have a portfolio exactly or be a paid employee?

MAGGIE HABERMAN: Correct.

AMY GOODMAN: Because it means he just goes around the world, like Steve Witkoff. Some people — Trump is saying he’s going to make peace; other people are saying he’s going to make money.

MAGGIE HABERMAN: Right, well, and two things can be true at once. I mean, certainly in the case of Witkoff, who actually does formally work for the government, whereas Kushner does not at all. Witkoff and Trump and their children are partners in this crypto business. The self-enrichment of this administration is at an astonishing scale. And I think people were loath to really believe, in Trump’s world and among Republicans, how much money mainstream media was describing him as making through these ventures. Then he filed his personal financial disclosure form, and there it was. There is absolutely no precedent for this.

AMY GOODMAN: You have been following Trump for decades, covering Donald Trump. What has most shocked you?

MAGGIE HABERMAN: Covering Donald Trump in various ways, but — and others, not a lot has shocked me, honestly. I mean, there is a lot of what we are seeing right now that is what I expected the first year to look like of 2017. And in some ways, what you are seeing now is what 2020 was set to look like after the impeachment trial, where he was, you know, acquitted, is the headline that he likes to hold up, and then COVID hit. And that changed everything about that year. This level of loyalty as the dominant factor, this level of vengeance and retribution as an animating theme, that is what I expected this to be for a long time.

AMY GOODMAN: Have you been shocked by the lack of resistance?

MAGGIE HABERMAN: I have been shocked at the degree to which Congress, in particular, is just handing over its power, the House Republicans. I have been shocked at how tech leaders were — and we describe this at length — you know, many of whom had declared themselves Democrats before or had contributed to Democrat causes, even if they were doing both parties, just brought these — 

AMY GOODMAN: Zuckerberg, Bezos.

MAGGIE HABERMAN: Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, you know, Tim Cook — although he had a relationship with Trump in term one — just bringing these tributes to him. I mean, we get into detail in this in the book.

I would say the one thing I was really surprised by, honestly, if I have to look at it, was Elon Musk, which was that Trump essentially — It’s been really memory holed, and we get into this a lot in the book, but Trump essentially made him a co-president. He wasn’t exactly a co-president, but he was basically a co-president. And what Musk wanted to do was not always aligned with what other people in Trump’s West Wing wanted to happen. So, the first several months of this term were really hijacked by DOGE and what Musk was doing — again, some of which they liked. Musk also did things like get rid of a congressionally created agency in USAID, just got rid of it, gutted it. And the rump was taken over by the State Department and Marco Rubio, who was not thrilled to be doing this. That did surprise me. Trump only pulled Musk back after a meeting my colleagues and I reported on, where he was supposed to be getting a briefing on the China war plan in the Pentagon in a room called the Tank. It’s a sanctuary of sorts.

AMY GOODMAN: A meeting with Hegseth.

MAGGIE HABERMAN: Correct, and some others. But it was clear to Trump, in what he was saying to his advisers, that, you know, this was problematic conflicts-wise. Trump has problems when other people get him bad headlines for conflicts, less so himself and his family.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you for spending this time with us. Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. Maggie Haberman wrote this book along with Jonathan Swan. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. She’s also author of Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.

Coming up next, we look at President Trump’s son-in-law and envoy, the billionaire builder Jared Kushner, who held separate meetings with Hamas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. We’ll speak with the political analyst Mouin Rabbani. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: The New York City Palestinian Youth Choir.