Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that the title of their new book, Regime Change, refers to President Trump’s second term redefining the powers and limits of the presidency:

RYAN NOBLES: Yeah. If there was a thesis in your book, and there are so many great points that you raise, and so many inside conversations that you guys reveal, it’s this idea that perhaps losing the 2020 election ultimately ended up benefiting Trump. What you write is, “The indictments, the convictions, the assassination attempts, the four years of exile that allowed him to shed the restraining forces of his first term, to assemble a team of true loyalists who’d spent years studying the levers of government and plotting how to seize them, all of it had paradoxically made Trump stronger, more ruthless, and more commanding than he could’ve been otherwise, the most powerful president of our lifetimes.” Trump himself has kind of hinted at this, right, that maybe losing– well, he would never say that he lost, but not retaining the White House in 2020 had made him more powerful. Was losing the 2020 election the best thing that ever happened to Trump? JONATHAN SWAN: I don’t even think it’s disputable. I mean, if he had won that election he would’ve been hobbled. He was already pretty unpopular. COVID was raging, inflation was raging. Instead, Biden was the one who ate all of those conditions. And now the whole point of this book, the title, Regime Change, is we’re watching presidential power expressed in a way that we haven’t seen in our lifetime. When George W. Bush took America to a war in Iraq and Afghanistan, it went through Congress, the branch of government that under the Constitution authorizes wars. Trump didn’t even talk to Congress. He just did it. When he went and snatched a sovereign head of state out of his bedroom in his pajamas in the middle of the night, he didn’t talk to Congress. He just did it. When he started a trade war with the whole world, he didn’t talk to anyone. He just did it. And then of course it takes weeks and months for the court system to catch up. He just changes facts on the ground. So he is governing like no president in our lifetime. And it occurred to us that we were covering a form of regime change in our own country. There’s no universe he would’ve been able to pull that off if he had just one executive term. RYAN NOBLES: And Maggie, I’ll let you have the last word. MAGGIE HABERMAN: No, I was actually thinking about exactly this, listening to your interview with Roger Marshall. One of the things that that interregnum period let him do is continue grinding out any pockets of resistance to him in the Republican Party. And you saw it systematically. Remember, one of the first things that he did was start targeting the people who had voted to impeach him. And he would merrily write about, you know, “Ten to go,” or something like that when he had a win. He couldn’t do a lot of what he was doing even without going to Congress– Congress in other times would’ve voiced an objection, even without being consulted. You do hear some of that now a little. But it’s not at all what it would’ve been under other circumstances. RYAN NOBLES: Yeah, I would argue a very little. Yes, that’s an excellent point. Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, this is an excellent read. MAGGIE HABERMAN: Thank you. RYAN NOBLES: Terrific reporting. Really well put-together. Thank you guys so much for being here. JONATHAN SWAN: Thanks for having us.
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