MS NOW host Lawrence O’Donnell spoke with journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan for their first live television interview to discuss their new book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. Swan said Trump increasingly views himself as a capital-G “Great Man of History,” citing an Oval Office meeting where the president shared a document comparing himself to historical figures including Mao, Stalin, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Hitler, Genghis Khan, and Attila the Hun.

LAWRENCE O’DONNELL: So when you — there’s so much in the book, but — but I just want to sort of start at the end, which is when you get in to the Oval Office, it reads as one of those things where he is just doing that Trump thing, where he just keeps talking about stuff that has nothing to do with what you want to talk about. How do you — we saw — we saw you try to, actually we saw it on video. You were the only person we saw on video really seriously try to hold him to a thought and keep him right here and answer this about Ghislaine Maxwell, or answer things about COVID death rates at the time in America. But what — in the Oval Office, do you have any ability to try to keep him on the point you’re trying to keep him on? JONATHAN SWAN, CO-AUTHOR: We tried. I mean, you know, and we had specific things that we wanted to give him visibility of in our reporting, just as a matter of process. But it was one of the most — I mean, I’ve been covering Donald Trump for, this is 11 years consecutively, maybe even longer. It was actually the most astonishing encounter I’ve had with him. He sits across from us in the Oval Office, and we’d asked him a question about power because he’d told Tucker Carlson, he’s the most powerful president ever. And he hands us a two-page document that he says was written by a historian. And the first sentence says, Donald Trump is the most powerful man who’s ever lived on the planet, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And it goes on to compare him to who he described it as the top 10. O’DONNELL: Mm-hmm. SWAN: Mao, Stalin, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Hitler, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun. MAGGIE HABERMAN, CO-AUTHOR: The Caesars. SWAN: The Caesars, William the Conqueror. There was no discussion of a moral dimension to any of this. It was about raw power. And he wasn’t alarmed to be in their company. In fact, he was relishing it. He was reading it aloud. You know, Napoleon, it’s very interesting, Mao. These people used fear to create power. And what became very apparent to us, which is already kind of apparent in our reporting, is he’s a very different president from the first term in terms of his psychology. In the first term, he was much more reactive to domestic politics. If there was a move in his poll numbers or a gyration in the stock market, he was far more responsive. It’s not to say he doesn’t care about them now. It’s not black and white. But now he is playing to be, you know, as he told us, essentially told us himself by giving us this document, he wants to be the capital G, Great Man of history. He wants to reshape the world. And that risk-taking that we’re seeing on the global front, I don’t think he would have gone to war in Iran in the same circumstances in term one. I don’t think he would have rolled the dice on what he did in Venezuela. I’m not sure — and we know because he didn’t. But even with the same circumstances, he wouldn’t have started a trade war with the whole world. And he didn’t. But he’s in a different mindset, and he’s untethered from all of those domestic political considerations that he was in the first term. So that, you know, was brought to life in a very vivid way, just sitting across from him. O’DONNELL: Yeah. When I — when I got to that part, and then we discover who the historian was, who wrote this document that he gave you. And that turned out to be? SWAN: So we said, who is this historian? And he said, oh, Natalie. Natalie Harp is his aide. They call her the human printer because she prints everything for him. So she texts us this guy’s name, Dave King. And so Maggie and I start Googling, who’s Dave King? Is there a historian Dave — couldn’t find any historians named Dave King. Anyway, long story short, I sort of, you know, go on this — down this rabbit hole. He turns out to be the former caddie, golf caddie for Gary Player, the South African golf — golfer. And that’s how he got to know Donald Trump. He’s a businessman, whatever. So that was the coda to — to that story.

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