How many years have we spent listening to politicians in Washington argue about how to make healthcare insurance more affordable? Obamacare was supposed to fix it. Then we needed bigger government subsidies to make Obamacare affordable. Those subsidies expired. And guess what?
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Or visit weShareHealth.org and take a look for yourself. Chronic migration. 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more, can make me feel like a spectator in my own life. Botox, onobotulinum toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month.
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Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck, and injection, side pain, fatigue, and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lugerik's disease, myasthenia gravis, or Lambert Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. Why wait?
Ask your doctor, visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com, or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more. Jonathan Swan. White House reported for the New York Times. I get that. I download it.
I pay much of his salary. Regime changes the name of the book. It's bestseller. Has been for quite some time. Made it number one in the country inside the imperial presidency of Donald Trump.
Jonathan, welcome back. How are you? I'm good, man. Thanks for having me. Hey, first off, how's your family?
How are you adjusting? What's going on?
Well, I have a new number three just arrived four weeks ago.
So we're in newborn, the newborn phase again.
So I'm doing my best, mate. I know. You're doing your best. And I know you have this work-life balance because I remember asking you a few times: listen, I just want to write for a while and I want to be able to spend time with my family.
So I know for you to put this book together was a big commitment.
So regime change inside Donald Trump II. You knew this guy well, the President, well, going in. You've seen the ups and the downs. You've seen the controversies. You've seen the manufactured ones and maybe ones that you thought were real.
What are we finding about Trump two that's different from one? I think in many ways it's unrecognizable from Trump 1. In Trump 1, he came into office with no experience in Washington, no experience in government, and he really didn't know the people that he was appointing in these top roles. I mean, he was meeting many of them from the first time: people like James Mannis, Rex Tillerson, H.R. McMaster, you can go down the list, Gary Cohn, John Kelly.
Because of that, he hadn't done the digging to know that many of them had worldviews that differed from his. In many cases, some of these people viewed Donald Trump himself as dangerous and saw their jobs as protecting the country or the world from Donald Trump. Those people do not exist in this term. He has a group of people around him who like him, who support him, in some cases who went through the off years with him. And that was a very galvanizing experience when he was investigated, indicted, when they're in the attempted assassinations.
Some of them themselves received subpoenas. And so I would say, generally speaking, it's the team that he wants that sees their job as executing on his behalf much more than stopping him from doing things that they disagree with.
So I read 32 chapters.
So I'm almost done with the whole book.
So I truly appreciate it.
Some of the stuff I knew and other stuff. The good stuff only comes in 33. Which I heard. And that's the problem. But that's probably.
Why the sales are so big? People have such a positive review in the last few chapters. But, Jonathan, as he went in, number one, he's enjoying himself. I know he blows up at Bibi Netanyahu sometimes and gets a little angry at other times, but I think he's thoroughly enjoying the job. And he has not forgotten how hard, how close he came to almost going to jail.
And he has certain ideas of who's to blame for that. And he's doing the best he can to get retribution, don't you think? Yes, all all of that's true. And I I think one thing that people Under Estimate is that in term one, he felt under siege from day one. And so much of what he was doing was reactive.
This time around, He really had nothing to worry about. He had a Supreme Court ruling in 2024 that was very favorable, giving presidents sweeping immunity. And his team had had time to prepare. When he came back in the second time, Stephen Miller had that they had he was overseeing an Excel spreadsheet of something like a hundred or more executive orders. That really aggressive opening gambit was so carefully prepared by that team.
So it was just a completely different posture that he came in on. And Trump himself had had time to think about what he wanted to do differently from the first term.
So a couple of things. It looks like. People thought that Christine Noam was a mistake at Home End. And the president said, listen, she's been unbelievably loyal. I got to give it to her.
And it didn't work from day one, right? That's true. And one thing we report in the book is that Stephen Miller actually, when they were deciding on these roles at Mar-a-Lago during the transition, did not think it was a good idea to put Christy Noam in. Once Trump made the decision, he obviously got behind it. But she was somebody who was not thought of very highly by the inner circle, that's for sure.
So she was out, and there's been a change there. Also, at Tulsi Gabbard, you mentioned that the president, after a short while, was cutting her out of meetings. You got that confirmed? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, she was not involved, she was not in the room at all, for example, for any of the planning meetings that led up to the Iran war.
She was literally not in any of those meetings where they were planning and discussing the details that led up to the Iran war.
So by that stage, which was towards the end of her tenure, she wasn't really in the loop for the most meaningful conversations.
So the role of Susie Wiles, how would you describe it compared to other chiefs of staff?
Well, she's been the most long-lived of those Chief of Staff. I mean, remember, we went through four of them in term one, and we saw all different models of the Chief of Staff. She had an advantage because Both she and Donald Trump were with each other at their lowest points.
So people forget how that relationship was forged. She worked for him in the first campaign, 2016, and he credited her with delivering Florida. She worked again for him in 2020, but Ron DeSantis tried to stop that from happening. They had a big falling out. She used to work for Ron DeSantis.
Trump hired her anyway, and she was always grateful for that. And then, of course, she was with Trump during those really difficult years of 2021 and 2022, rebuilding his political operation when he was under huge legal pressure and many people were counting him out politically. Yeah, and we still don't know exactly what that fallout was, do you? With this answer. With Susie Wiles and DeSantis?
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that relationship was very bad, and there were. Accusations by DeSantis allies that they were trying to accuse her of leaking, and it got very, very nasty. And there was no love loss there. I think she was very happy to be on a campaign that defeated him.
So let's talk about Liberation Day. And early on you found out that they came up with some numbers and Howard Luttnick had some numbers about an imbalanced trade and it wasn't an imbalance as everyone thought. And the President said go back and get some new numbers. Do you think Liberation Day is looked at as a mistake from your research?
Well, the team became very worried, particularly Scott Bessett, the Treasury Secretary and Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary. After Liberation Day, the bond markets got very wobbly. There was a period of time Six or seven days, I think it was, after Liberation Day, maybe even less than that, where the bond markets looked like they might melt down. And those two officials I don't want to say pleaded, that's probably too strong, but certainly made a really strong case to President Trump that you should put a pause on some of these tariffs because you're just trying to bite off too much. Starting a trade war essentially with the whole world may be not the best move.
So what they did was they put a pause on the vast majority of those tariffs and they kept the China tariffs on for that moment. But the goal of The tariffs was what the president wants to rebalance trade. He felt as though those, he's been saying since the 80s. He's like, why are we giving such great deals to people? They need us more than we need them.
And he's landed 20 trade deals. Um Do you look at that as a victory? I mean, you use tariffs as a wedge in order to get a better deal with the most significant countries on the planet. Probably the best example of a victory in this sense was with Europe. um where he got terms out of Europe that uh I don't think the Europeans were particularly happy to agree to and it was By wielding that power.
One thing about Trump, which you know very well, Brian, is he doesn't like to deal multilaterally. He likes to deal one-on-one. And the reason for that is because when he sees multilateral groups getting together, countries getting together, he just sees leverage building up. He likes to use the power of the US economy to deal one-on-one. And when it's with smaller or middle powers and they're not working collectively, you can squeeze them really hard and get quite a lot for the United States.
And there's many examples of Donald Trump doing that. Where it becomes more difficult is when the country actually has leverage of its own. And Xi Jinping had spent a lot of time preparing for this trade war. He had the rare earths, the magnets. He had leverage of his own.
And Trump ended up sending Bessett to Geneva and working out a détente with Xi Jinping.
So, you know, Jonathan, I never looked at this. Is what I was intrigued about the book about because you are not getting up every day. I don't like Trump. I think 80%, you could agree or not. Get up on a daily basis and go, I can't believe this guy's president.
I never took you as that. I always thought you were a case-by-case. Guy. But as you look at it, now that you've known the President for so much for so long, Do you think he, some of these things that he is doing now, do you think he's showing a template of how to move fast? Where other presidents didn't think it was possible.
He's changing so many rules. He's actually showing people, in some ways, how to get things done.
So, it's such an interesting question because I think a lot as a thought experiment about. what happens with uh let's say you have a Democrat Come into office and they survey the Trump years. What Trump has taught, I think, both sides is that many of the restraints. That have been on the modern presidency have been self-imposed restraints, or restraints by norms, not by laws. And when Trump shows that you can just act, whether it be, Building a ballroom.
The courts have ultimately blessed it, but let's say they didn't. Let's say this is a small, trivial example, but it kind of illustrates something larger. Trump by the time that the court process was sort of getting caught up to the ballroom, the hole was in the ground. Right? The cranes were in the sky.
The shovels are digging. And so Trump creates facts on the ground, and people have to react to that and they have to catch up. And in many senses, the court system was not built for a president who's wielding power in this way.
So I absolutely think that it's more likely than not that, even if they're a Democratic leftist president, that they'll be looking for lessons in these uses of power and how they can use them to achieve their own goals. The personal relationship that he has with so many people. I mean, how many times am I watching Meet the Press or Face the Nation or CNN? People that aren't really too positive towards the present. And they start the conversation with, I just got off the phone with the President.
And he gave me this story. And he told me this. and the personal interaction that he has with reporters that aren't necessarily his favorites and his favorites. Is never going to be replicated again? Or do you think that there's going to be other presidents that are going to want to?
go right to the press like this and make them feel I don't want any filter in between the message. It's pretty hard to imagine, Brian, right? Having just like you could imagine I'll give you an example. One of my colleagues managed to get hold of Joe Biden's cell phone number, right? And they called him up for comment on the book.
And the next day, Or the next day, or two days later, the team had shut off that number.
So, you know, it's hard to imagine a president. In the future, being okay with half of Washington having their cell phone number and to actually take calls directly from reporters. Obviously, I'd be all for it, but I'm skeptical that it will be repeated. How comfortable are you to I mean, it's amazing you're inside meetings. Your insight.
I mean, that's why I know this stuff. I'm doing it every day. I'm reading about it. I get up at three in the morning. And still, you're showing me stuff in regime change, Jonathan Swan, that I did not know about.
Also, it's helped me with dynamics, how people get along with each other. How do you... With it uh How do you build those sources in a brand new In a brand new administration quickly, and turn around a book like this that chronicles year one. How do you do that?
Well I've been covering Trump now. This is my eleventh consecutive year covering him. And the consecutive part of that's really important. And Maggie's been covering him longer than me, my co-author. But You know, I didn't stop covering him when he left office.
I kept covering him through those four years out of office, through all of the trials. You know, yes, there are new people in his orbit, but they're not completely out of nowhere. I mean, most of these people, you know, even the people who came in. We're starting to build a relationship with Trump at the latest in sort of 21, 22, 23.
So it's long-term sourcing. It's not just, you can't just pick it up and snap your fingers and get sourced. I mean, it's really hard work and it takes a long time. You know, there's a lot of stuff that we didn't end up being able to put in the book because we couldn't be sure it was true, or we just couldn't quite nail it down, and we sort of left a huge amount on the cutting room floor for that reason. For example, tell me what you left.
I don't want it, man, because it's not verified. I don't know. Pollute your airwaves, Brian.
So Jonathan, what do you expect over the next few months as we get closer to the midterms? Number one, if he wins, he keeps both chambers, and what if he doesn't keep either?
Well, I think one even before we get there, I think one thing that everyone's looking for, including people at a senior level in the administration, and I'm sure you're picking this up as well, is what will Iran do? before the midterms to try to mess with Trump or to hurt him, not just hurt him in terms of national US national security, but also potentially politically.
So that's something they're all Watching very closely, and obviously, we'll see what happens there. We'll see what happens with the Houthis. After the elections, look. One thing that I think Is not clear at all to me. Let's say Democrats do take the House.
Let's say the polling's basically right or close to right and they take the House. I'm not so sure that oversight will be Uh As effective as many people imagine. I think we're going to see a real fight between the branches, maybe much more than we've seen before. Pretty aggressive pushback from the Trump DOJ. Congress obviously doesn't have a way of enforcing subpoenas.
All they can do is refer it to the Justice Department.
So I think there's a really open question as to whether the Trump. Administration complies and agrees to go and submit to Democratic demands for the documents for people to testify and things like that.
So I think we could see a real war between the branches. Obviously, Democrats are already foreshadowing that they want to impeach the president. I don't think anyone would be surprised by that, but there's not really any prospect of that going anywhere in the Senate. And for Trump, look, I think on foreign policy, the one I'm watching, and I'm sure you are too, is Cuba. I've been very interested to see whether we see regime change in Cuba.
I know Marco Rubio has been very intensely focused on that. One thing we report in the book is he's been talking about regime change in Cuba since he was a child. He comes out of that community and has been very, very much focused on this.
So I'll be curious to see how they wield pressure there. And as for domestic policy, I don't know. They haven't really laid out the next phase of their agenda. Since they passed the big beautiful bill, we haven't really seen what they you know, a big sweeping policy program. I think the issue that everyone right now is focused on is AI and how are they going to engage with AI?
How are they potentially going to weigh into regulation? Trump has made clear that he doesn't think that putting guardrails on these companies is a wise idea, that it could allow China to catch up. But will the competing pressures and cross pressures change that? Very curious to follow that story. And that is Jonathan Swan.
More with Jonathan Swan in a moment. You're listening to the Brain Kill Me Show. Don't move. How many years have we spent listening to politicians in Washington argue about how to make health care insurance more affordable? Obamacare was supposed to fix it.
Then we needed bigger government subsidies to make Obamacare affordable. Those subsidies expired. And guess what? People are paying more again at some point. Maybe the question isn't, how do we keep fixing the same system?
Maybe the question is, what else is out there? That's why I want you to take a look at WeShare Health. WeShare isn't health insurance. It's a nonprofit, Christian healthcare sharing organization, and their members pay up to 60% less than they would for Obamacare. You still get access to a nationwide PPO network and over a million physicians plus unlimited telehealth.
So stop waiting for Washington or the insurance companies to make healthcare affordable for you. Do your own research. See what your options are. Call 1-88-WeShare for a free quote. That's 1-888-WESHA.
Or visit weSharehealth.org and take a look for yourself. Chronic migraine, 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more, can make me feel like a spectator in my own life. Botox, onobotulinum toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month. It's the number one prescribed branded chronic migraine preventive treatment.
Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck, and injection, side pain, fatigue, and headache.
Allergic reactions can include rash welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lugarix disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambert Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. Why wait? Ask your doctor, visit Botoxin.
Botoxchronicmigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more. Hey, we are back. Jonathan Swan was kind enough to join us. You know, he had just had another kid, so, and when his book comes out, Regime Change, which is doing extremely well one year inside the Trump administration, he couldn't really do any publicity for us now for it. And now that he can, he joined us.
We spent some time. I think he's very fair. I don't know what Maggie Haberman wrote and what he wrote, but he's always been very fair to Trump, and I think that's why he's got access. I have not. That's all I can say, I haven't seen President Trump say anything.
bad about him. Uh at all. And You heard the first 20 minutes of my interview with him. Here's a little bit more. Will you be are you in the process of following up with another book?
On this? Absolutely not. I am very hostile to the idea of doing a book again, Brian. That one just about killed me.
So I'll stick with reporting for a while.
Well, how would you characterize your relationship with the President now? I mean, it's the same as it's always been. It's just professional. I cover him. You know, I don't take it emotionally if he.
complains about Says anything. I just, you know, like you said, I get up, I report, I try to get the information out, and I don't. get emotional uh about you know things like this. I also don't want to ever portray myself as some kind of a Protagonist or righteous man coming in on a white horse holding a sword with my journalist badge on. You know, I'm just doing my job and it's You know, it's a reporting for a newspaper is a pretty kind of workmanlike.
You know, you you get in, you get the information, you report it. That's what the job should be. But also your goal is if you could get that great intelligence and great information, your stories are better, your columns are better.
So that means interaction with the guy making the most news in the world, right?
Well, not just that, you have to actually interact with the people who are making the decisions across the government. You can't be sort of. You have to get into these rooms. I mean, it's just simple. If you try to get the information that we want, you have to try to break into these rooms.
And to do that, you know, there's a pretty tight group of people that are actually making the decisions in this administration.
So we watch Cash Patel and Scott Besant. We watched them testify today. You talk about stuff that we've also known about the Treasury Secretary. You know, he, Jonathan, he was doing our radio show, and they say, hey, by the way, he's a finalist to be a Treasury Secretary. And he came in for two years before he got the job on a regular basis.
And I couldn't believe how smart he was, intelligent was. I didn't know how tough he was. Could you give our audience a sense of how tough he is physically behind the scenes?
Well, we have a couple of scenes in the book which a lot of people have talked about. One is he got into quite an argument with Elon Musk early on in the administration last year, and it actually at one point got physical. They were arguing and it got pretty heated in the Oval Office and there was a shove and depending on who you talk to, who shoved who, but there was certainly physical contact. And after the incident, Trump had one question that he wanted to know, and it was who won?
So he wanted to know who won the fight.
So, you know, Besant is a brawler both verbally and. Yeah, if required physically. Yeah, he and also very competent. In terms of the different cabinet secretaries, I mean, RFK gave a pretty brilliant speech, I thought one of the best speeches for President Trump of the Republican Party, talking about how he used to be a Democrat and how they really wouldn't let him run. And then they wouldn't let the the few delegates he had, he wouldn't be able to give them up.
And he just talked about how things have changed and how Donald Trump has lived up to every promise that he promised me when I jumped aboard and how different he is, how he's been portrayed in the press. Uh and how he how much more depth he understands about the issues. And I've heard people go both ways.
Some people say, I can't believe how little he knows. Other people say, I can't believe how detailed he is. Where does Jonathan Swan stand about with that? Yeah, I wouldn't co-sign the RFK statement. I think Trump, I don't think there's a huge difference between the private Trump and the Trump that you see publicly.
I think that he can be more profane. He has different modes, and he can obviously be incredibly flattering, charming, hospitality mode. Everyone who's been with him has experienced that. But I don't think he's. Spending a ton of time poring over policy papers.
I don't think he's steeped in healthcare policy or anything like that in particular. I think he's a gut instinct player who doesn't, he's sort of the opposite of George W. Bush in the sense that I'm not saying Bush wasn't instinct driven, but Bush wanted there to be total consensus with his team. He went through a policy process that the NSC was coordinating, deputies up to principals. Bush wanted them all to agree to present to him.
He would make the decision. It's the precise reverse with Trump. Trump knows what he wants to do, particularly on national security. He says, I want this, and then it gets forced down through the system and that gets done. He's not wanting there to be this, he doesn't really care about a policy process or NSC or anything like that.
And it's a gut-driven decision-making. That's my view from covering him.
So, the one thing that's happened, I've got a chance to meet somebody like Steve Witcoff, for example, and you talk about him in the book. Obviously, you have to if you cover him the first year. And you talk about when the first meeting with the foreign minister, Witcoff suggested that Iran be allowed to maintain a civilian. Program at levels negotiated under the 2015 JPEG. JCBO.
I mean It's amazing. You talk about gut instinct, the same thing as he meets with Vladimir Putin, the same thing as he meets with the Foreign Minister. There's a guy who's extremely intelligent, obviously very successful, but ill equipped to do that job. I mean, not putting the time in prior to that or having somebody who's steeped in tr uh, who's steeped in international relations, if you're going to go in and be the chief negotiator. That it's astounded me that you that you chronicle that in the book.
One thing that would surprise people at a senior level when they saw Witkoff operate is just how unstaffed he is. He's really sort of a sole operator, you know, very thin staff. He went to meet Putin on his own, doesn't really rely on the subject matter experts and follows that.
So that's how you get incidents like that, which he had to walk back, by the way, because Trump was like, no, we're not doing the Obama deal.
So that got reversed pretty quickly. But yeah, no, he came to all of these issues pretty much cold with Donald Trump's blessing and not very much staff around him to help him. And we'll see what happens because there's two things that he's got to do, the President, before he's out. He's got to fix it, end this Ukraine war, and he's got to find a resolve in Iran. And now it's getting more complicated because the Houthi rebels are now involved, and we've got two straits that could be shut down.
They're certainly being hindered at this hour, and gas is over $100 a barrel, right? Yes, all of that's true. And you have very anxious Gulf states in the middle of it. Trying to sort of Figure out how they're going to get back to rebuilding their economies. And their whole vision has sort of been put on pause as well during this war.
All right.
So, Jonathan, regime change inside the imperial presidency of Donald Trump. Congratulations on your sustained run on the best seller list, continued success, and congratulations on your growing family. Thanks, Brian. Really appreciate it. Thanks for having me.
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