The White House is bracing for potentially damning leaks in a new book on President Donald Trump featuring hundreds of interviews with administration insiders.
A star political reporting team from The New York Times is publishing the book just after Trump’s 80th birthday in June.
Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan is set to be released from Simon & Schuster.
The book describes how Trump has fundamentally altered executive power, making his second term in office more akin a foreign regime change than a presidency, according to the publisher, which touted Haberman and Swan’s “unprecedented reporting from deep within the administration’s most closely guarded rooms.”
The book is based on about 1,000 interviews, Axios reported, and is causing anxiety among Trump insiders.
Over the past few weeks, senior administration officials have discussed leaks to Haberman and Swan from meetings in the Oval Office and the Situation Room, including conversations that took place this year.
The book also apparently explains why the president fired off an angry Truth Social post about Haberman last month.
“Maggot Haberman, just another SLEAZEBAG writer for The Failing New York Times, insists on writing false stories about me, even though she fully knows and understands that the exact opposite of anything she says is usually the truth,” he wrote.
The post also threatened to add Haberman and some of her “associates” to the president’s lawsuit against the Times, which “very happily, seems to be proceeding nicely,” Trump wrote.
The post’s timing was odd considering Haberman and Swan had been on book leave for months, according to Axios.
Three days after the Truth Social post, Haberman and Swan were spotted in the West Wing, where Trump reportedly answered their questions for an hour.
The pair spent two years working on the book, with Swan reportedly speaking to sources until late at night, according to Axios.
The president has attacked Haberman for years, calling her a “third-rate reporter” back in 2018.
In June, Haberman told Vanity Fair magazine that it was harder to find sources willing to speak out against Trump than it had been during his first term.
She attributed the reticence to chief of staff Susie Wiles running a “much tighter ship” than her predecessors, and to sources feeling they had nothing to gain from criticizing Trump.
The administration has also been less of a revolving door of high-level appointments this time around, though that could be about to change with two Cabinet members—former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and former Attorney General Pam Bondi—being fired in the course of a month.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment on Regime Change.
