Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, co-authors of the book Regime Change, join NBC’s “Meet the Press” to offer a new look into President Trump’s second term and how he’s redefining the limits of the presidency. Does Trump care about the midterms?

RYAN NOBLES: You write, quote, “Trump had already climbed his own mountain with his improbable comeback in 2024. If Republicans were wiped out in the 2026 midterm elections, or in 2028, he could simply boast that they couldn’t win without him. Trump could barely be stirred to even think about the midterms.” Jonathan, does President Trump actually care whether or not Republicans win in the fall? JONATHAN SWAN: Well, it’s not black and white, and it’s not to say he doesn’t care at all. But what we found in our reporting for the book is that his closest aides, his top aides wish he cared more, okay? And there was a very revealing comment that Trump made last year when Republicans did extremely poorly in the off-year elections. He said, “People have been saying they can’t win without Trump on the ballot.” And he said, “That’s a great honor,” okay? So play that forward a little bit. He obviously doesn’t want to get impeached again. But at the same time, you know, he’s not going to get convicted. There’s no universe in which he gets convicted. The Supreme Court gave him sweeping immunity in 2024. We have reporting in our book that he happens told people privately that he’s going to pardon anyone who came within 250 feet of the Oval Office. He uses different distances. Sometimes he says 200 feet, sometimes he says 25 feet. But there’s some radius around the Oval Office which is a pardon zone. So really, what he’s spending his time doing is trying to make his own imprint on Washington, physical and figurative, and on the world.

RYAN NOBLES: So one of the other striking portraits in your book is of Vice President JD Vance. He appears to be someone, at least on some level, willing to tell President Trump things he doesn’t necessarily want to hear. The best example, of course, being Iran. You write, quote, “Vance believed a regime change war with Iran would be a disaster. In front of his colleagues, Vance had warned Trump that a war with Iran could break apart his political coalition and would be seen as a betrayal by many voters who had bought into his promise of no new wars.” How did Vice President Vance’s willingness to push back ultimately affect his standing with President Trump? MAGGIE HABERMAN: So it’s a really interesting dynamic, because he was not the only person who opposed this war in Trump’s world, to be clear. In our reporting, and we write about this in the book, none of Trump’s senior advisors, none of his Cabinet really thought this was a good idea. Although we should make clear that the people who were let into these discussions were so tiny as a group that it excluded the Treasury Secretary and the Energy Secretary, the people who would have to manage the after-effects of an energy fallout from this war, because they were concerned about leaks. But Vance was the only one who really vocally took issue with this with Trump. And it irritated Trump. It cost Vance with Trump. But he was the only person who was really sort of rattling the cages. There were other advisors who did make cases against this. We should note that Dan Caine did lay out the scenarios for what could happen. Munitions depletion, which clearly the U.S. is seeing right now in a real way, despite the fact that the administration keeps insisting otherwise. The fact that Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz. So the President will keep saying he wasn’t warned. He absolutely was warned. But Dan Caine is not Mark Milley of term one. He is not engaging in these angry arguments with Donald Trump. And you do sort of see that play out. RYAN NOBLES: But there is an interesting dynamic between the Vice President and the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio. Many view them as one of his potential successors. In any way, did the Iran debate maybe tilt that competition toward Secretary Rubio? MAGGIE HABERMAN: Trump likes to play games with people. That’s not new to anybody. He has been doing this version of whole testing, “Who do you like? Do you like Marco or do you like JD Vance?” In fact, we have this pretty remarkable scene in the book where at a dinner with Rupert Murdoch and a bunch of other people in the Blue Room of the White House last October, Vance is there, Rubio is there, several other people are there. And Trump starts asking Murdoch, you know, “What do you think of Vance?” And Murdoch, who did not want Vance to be the VP, says that JD has the potential to be great. And Trump says, “What about Marco?” And Murdoch just sort of flatly says, “Marco is brilliant.” RYAN NOBLES: Wow. MAGGIE HABERMAN: So I don’t know that it needed too much tilting. I will say, there is nothing in our reporting that suggests that Rubio is doing the things one would be doing to run. And it is still Vance’s to lose, which also doesn’t necessarily thrill Trump, who doesn’t, as Jonathan said, like the idea of somebody coming next.

RYAN NOBLES: Yeah. Well, let’s talk about the backdrop of Iran, and that’s President Trump’s relationship with the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. And you describe a very tense phone call between the two leaders when President Trump suspected that Netanyahu was trying to back out of negotiations around the ceasefire in Gaza. I’m sure many people have seen this quote many times. I’m going to read it anyway. “Bellowing, Trump told Netanyahu that he was sick of his antics. ‘I’ve done everything to protect you. You better effing go along with this. It’s been going on for too effing long. “‘Everybody’s sick of you, Bibi,’ Trump said. ‘All the Jews are sick of you. Even the two Jews on this call are sick of you,’ Trump added, referring to Kushner and Witkoff.” And Jonathan, you’ve gone on to write that President Trump has used his leverage with Netanyahu in a way that President Biden never could have. Why is that? JONATHAN SWAN: In that instance, he did. And what was really notable about that instance was it was the first time that Trump had used his leverage against Bibi. He got him to go along with the hostage deal with Hamas. And it was a genuine accomplishment. They got the final hostages out of Gaza. And we write about how Trump in that moment squeezed him. What’s been notable for the rest of the presidency, until pretty recently, is Trump hasn’t used his leverage with Netanyahu. The first bombing campaign last June, Operation Midnight Hammer, initially Trump was very skeptical about going to war in Iran. And he’d been warned by people like Tucker Carlson and others that this would, you know, ruin his presidency. He wanted to do a deal with Iran. Netanyhau did a months-long charm offensive. He brought him a gold-plated pager, you know, that they used to blow up different Hezbollah operatives and others. And so in the end, Trump decided to go along with it. He didn’t use any of his lever against Netanyahu. So that was a very interesting moment because you can see what he’s capable of. I mean, Israel can’t fight alone. It’s just a fact. And there’s a perception that they can. But when you actually look at the numbers and what they’re using in terms of air defenses, they absolutely cannot fight this war alone. But Trump so far, it’s mostly been rhetorical. He hasn’t really used his full leverage.

RYAN NOBLES: Yeah. Let’s talk now about the Epstein Files. That’s been an issue that has been very difficult for the Trump administration. President Trump’s decision to move on from the Epstein files, that launched a series of top secret meetings in the Situation Room. Maggie, what do those moments reveal about how Trump’s top advisors handled that crisis? MAGGIE HABERMAN: So you have to set this picture here, Ryan. This had been something that top officials in the Trump government, JD Vance, Kash Patel, the FBI director, Dan Bongino, the Deputy FBI Director, they have spent years talking about how there was a secret cabal of pedophiles. And once they were in charge, they would open this up and make this visible. Trump, to be fair, had never actually really quite gone that far. He had talked about it more in 2015, but it kind of went away. RYAN NOBLES: He certainly didn’t reject it, though. MAGGIE HABERMAN: Yeah, I mean, as he often does, he sort of leaves it as an option. And there were a number of senior officials in Trump’s White House who didn’t understand what a driving force this was for the MAGA base, for Trump’s own base. Trump wanted nothing to do with any of this. He didn’t want anything out. He was snapping at people who would talk about it. And then he started attacking his own supporters and saying, “This is a hoax.” So we write about a series of meetings in the White House Situation Room, which is intended to deal with national security crises, with foreign wars, you know, with sensitive matters, but not usually matters about, you know, Epstein PR crisis comms. And there were several of these, but we zeroed in on a few. These start, the ones we write about, right after the White House has used all of its political capital on the One Big Beautiful Bill, which you know, was what they would’ve rather been talking about. And it’s the top levels of government. JD Vance, White House Chief of Staff, Attorney General, Deputy Attorney General, Kash Patel, you know, several lawyers. And that’s, like, half the crew who were in some of these, talking about how how to get themselves out of this. And this goes on, and on, and on. And all it does is allow a greater clamor among Trump’s supporters, including this surreal meeting that we end up writing about, where they were planning on putting out some public-facing website with things old and new, and you know, they were discussing what universe it would be. And then somebody had looked up in that mock website they were setting up Trump’s name. And up pops up this unverified, already public claim with an allegation that, you know, was made second-hand, but it was about Trump. And that was sort of the end of that.