Welcome back to Lucid, and hello to all new subscribers. Today I had a great converstion with Jonathan Swan, who is a White House correspondent for The New York Times and the author, with Maggie Haberman, of the bestselling book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.
The video and edited transcript of the conversation are below. First, a few words about upcoming Lucid events.
Our next Q&A will take place on Sunday, August 2, 8-9pmET. Our guest will be one of the country’s premier disinformation experts, Renee DiResta, who is the author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality, and recently won a court victory against Stephen Miller’s America First Legal Defense Fund. Paying subscribers will receive a link at 5pmET that day to register for the Zoom gathering. If you can’t attend, you can view the video at lucid.substack.com, videos tab.
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Ruth Ben-Ghiat: So without further ado, I’m really delighted to have Jonathan Swan with us, really one of the premier reporters and also researchers and interviewers in the world, I believe. He is a White House correspondent for the New York Times. He’s originally from Sydney, Australia. And he’s been reporting on Donald Trump for over a decade. He won an Emmy Award for his 2020 interview of then President Trump and received the White House Correspondents Association Aldo Beckman Award.
We’re discussing his bestselling book, co-authored with fellow Times reporter Maggie Haberman called Regime Change, Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. Welcome, Jonathan.
Jonathan Swan: Thanks so much for having me, Ruth. Really appreciate it.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Regime Change is a provocative title. Having done so much research and so many interviews, do you see this presidency as qualitatively different, aiming at something different than others in U.S. history?
Jonathan Swan: Yeah, I mean, the title was not forced upon us. Quite the opposite. We came up with the title before [Trump] started to do foreign efforts at regime change in Venezuela and Iran. We realized that we were covering a presidency that was A, unrecognizable from his first term, But B, could not be fit into the framework of a normal transition from a Democratic president to a Republican president.
The primary issues were not debates about the marginal tax rate or what should the level of regulations on this industry or that industry be? They’re about much more fundamental issues. And what we wanted to capture with that title, is that we were actually covering a form of regime change in this country, in the United States. And that we were covering a president that was expanding power and using power like no president in our lifetimes. And in some respects, like no American president ever. So it was very, very deliberate choice of title and not one that we walk away from at all.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: I agree with that analysis, and I’ve always maintained that authoritarians are in office for totally different reasons than democratic with a small d presidents. They’re not actually that interested in governing. We’ve seen that Trump often falls asleep, is arguably bored by meetings, is not interested in governing.
Why are they there? They’re there to make money, enrich themselves privately off of public office, and to consolidate so much power that they have de facto or real immunity from prosecution. So this is a qualitative difference.
Does that match up with your findings? Spending time on things that will enrich him, spending time on things that will consolidate power, or are there other things that I’ve missed?
Jonathan Swan: Well, those two are big focuses of our book. We get very much into the self-enrichment and the family profiteering, which has been unprecedented. We’ve never seen anything on this scale in American history. There is no one even in the neighborhood of the sums of money that we’re talking about. So there’s that.
And then consolidating power and retribution, which is a huge thread throughout this book, not just his own immunity, which was conferred by the Supreme Court in the 2024 decision, but also turning the Justice Department essentially into his own personal law firm and instrument to go after his enemies, which we’re seeing. I would say there’s another third area, and we saw this very vividly when finally he agreed to sit down with us, which is his desire to be a capital G great man of history and to put his own stamp on the world.
When we finally met Trump for an interview, he handed us this document, which he says has been written by a historian [who turned out to be a golf caddy, not a historian as the book recounts]. And this was describing his power and comparing himself to who he described to us as the top ten. Top ten. And it was... Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Napoleon, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, the Caesars…You get the idea. Not many small D Democrats in that group, I would say. And the whole point of the document was all about power and power projection.
And the conclusion of the author of this document was that Donald Trump is the most powerful man who’s ever existed because he’s in charge of the most powerful military that’s ever existed. The most powerful technology that’s ever existed. The most powerful economy that’s ever existed. But he’s willing to use that power in ways that other American presidents hadn’t. And that whereas all of these previous leaders and conquerors and dictators and in many cases monsters had enormous power, their power was much more circumscribed geographically. Trump has much more ability to project power. And that’s what he wanted us to do. It was an incredible moment because he was essentially, in a strange way, repeating our thesis back to us.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: This is indeed very instructive about his psychology. It’s also interesting that he showed you with pride a document that compares him to Hitler because when he was out of office, in 2022, he sued CNN, asserting that some of its contributors and anchors were comparing him to Hitler. I know all about that lawsuit because one of my op-eds was cited in the lawsuit. So when he was out of power, he took umbrage at this fact. Now he’s in power, and drunk with power, he seems to want to be compared to Hitler, as though it’s a good thing.
Your book documents logics and processes that are unfolding and have unfolded in history. What you experienced is described for other authoritarians in my book Strongmen. That’s where we are now.
Jonathan Swan: I don’t know if you noticed this comment from Tucker Carlson recently where he described being around Trump as like being under a spell. He used the word spell and I wouldn’t endorse that word because it has sort of supernatural connotations that I don’t apply here. But I know exactly what he’s getting at.
Trump creates around himself his own reality field and it’s quite powerful. And you have a group of people around him who this time around, it’s not just that they don’t resist him or obstruct him. It’s that they believe in him very deeply. And after the assassination attempts against him in 2024, you would hear much more from his advisors, God has put him here for a reason. This is very much a divine plan for Donald Trump to be back in power. And so that is very much a governing mindset within his inner circle.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: This was my next question, and it comes from a Lucid subscriber who read your book and noted that your reporting found that the people around Trump have a mystical belief in him. They treat him as magical, as someone for whom things will always turn out right, no matter what, as someone who is invincible.
Mussolini enabled this same quality in people, it is part of having charisma. They have an absolute belief in themselves. And as Jonathan said, they create their own reality field and draw others into it. And it’s one of their superpowers. I have a phrase in Strongmen, I believe it’s in the propaganda chapter, that says about the strongman’s lies: “They believe him because they believe in him.:
Okay, I had another question. America is unusual in having a bipartisan rather than a multi-party system. So those elites who fawn over Trump, are invested in Trump, if they start to doubt him they don’t have anywhere to go, they have no other political home. What do you foresee? Do you think they’ll just go on either really believing or pretending to believe as the errors mount?
Jonathan Swan: Well, I suppose it depends which group you’re talking about because we’ve already seen empirically that he’s lost a lot of support. It’s profound, actually. And particularly when you look at the core group of voters that delivered him the 2024 election, which was independents, swing voters, his popularity has plummeted. Absolutely plummeted within that group.
I mean, two of his greatest electoral successes were the inroads he made with Black men and with Hispanic men. And in both categories, his support has fallen. So there is still a core group in the GOP that supports him and is not receiving any negative information when it comes to the media they consume. But you are seeing within Republican voters disappointment at his handling of the economy. Because it is just an area where you can’t talk your way out of it. The price of eggs is what it is. The price of gas is what it is. And he made very explicit promises that he’s not been able to live up to. So you’re seeing them change their opinion there. It hasn’t quite translated across to their view of him. They’re still willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
I think the much more interesting question is what comes after Trump. Whatever you think of Donald Trump, he has an incredibly powerful charisma. I remember in 2016 going to the Trump rallies and just seeing the emotional and visceral connection that his voters had with him. I’d never seen anything like it in politics. It was overwhelmingly powerful. I think partly because of that, maybe even mostly because of that, Trump can glue together this sort of impossible coalition. I mean, 2024 was an impossible, a magical, from their perspective, political coalition.
You could have someone like Lindsey Graham and Tucker Carlson, who their worldviews are polar opposite, who despise each other, who think each other are evil. And yet they both enthusiastically endorse and campaign for Donald Trump and consider themselves part of MAGA.
Can someone like J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio, whoever the inheritor is, can they do that? Do they have that level of charisma? It’s hard to see. So what happens then when you have a less charismatic figure who doesn’t have this incredible force of personality? I don’t know how that resolves itself because the Republican Party doesn’t really exist outside of Donald Trump. It’s just Donald Trump. He’s absorbed the whole party. So I don’t know what that looks like when he exits the stage.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: You know, it’s so interesting to have this conversation because the other charismatic authoritarians I’ve studied and written about, and not just old-style dictators, but also Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, who was very much a precursor of Trump, they did the same thing with the Impossible Coalition. They had housewives, bankers, religious authorities, and Mafiosi. People who have nothing in common, truly, except their adulation of him. It is hard to have successors to that.
One last question: What surprised you in researching and writing this book?
Jonathan Swan: So many things surprised me. One thing that really we tried to emphasize in the book is that this is a government being run by the tiniest group of people. They view the government as essentially a hostile enemy force, and they don’t include subject matter experts or bureaucrats or people who have long decades of experience on whatever the issue is. It’s really a group of five, six, seven people making all the decisions with Trump at the center.
We report in the book about how did we got into this war with Iran. And just to give you one example of this dynamic, the war quite predictably kicked off the biggest global energy shock in history. The two people who would have to manage that shock, the Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, and the Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, weren’t even in the room for the meetings that led up to the war. They weren’t included in the planning meetings because the core team was so worried about leaks and wanted to keep things so tight that they didn’t include them. So that just gives you one little vantage point into all of this.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Ah, well in authoritarian context, this is called the inner sanctum. It does not include experts, people who actually know things. It often includes just the staunch loyalists, family members such as sons-in-law, and what I call “people from the old days,” and thus we have Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff showing up rather than seasoned diplomats at the negotiations in Ukraine and Iran.
Okay, we’ve been speaking with Jonathan Swan, co-author of the new book Regime Change. It’s very illuminating, as you see from our conversation, of how authoritarian dynamics that have unfolded abroad are now part of governance in America. So thank you, Jonathan.
Jonathan Swan: Thanks so much for having me, Ruth. I really appreciate it.
