Jon Stewart put the authors of a bombshell new book about Donald Trump on the spot during a tense interview, pressing them to reveal who inside the president’s orbit supplied some of the volume’s most explosive claims.
New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan joined Stewart on The Daily Show on Monday to discuss Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, which was published on Tuesday.
The book by Haberman and Swan generated intense scrutiny even before it hit shelves after reports emerged that some of its most explosive revelations were drawn from secretly recorded conversations inside the White House Situation Room.
The disclosure reportedly triggered alarm within the Trump administration, and senior officials began searching for the source of what appeared to be an unprecedented leak from one of the government’s most secure facilities.
“We’re afraid some of our most sensitive conversations were being recorded. And we have no idea which ones,” one administration official told Axios.
According to the book, one of the leaked meetings involved top aides gathering in the Situation Room without Trump as they scrambled to contain a growing MAGA backlash over the administration’s handling of the Epstein files.
The authors report that Trump wanted the controversy to disappear and reacted angrily whenever it was raised, prompting advisers to discuss the issue in meetings from which the president was absent.
On Monday’s Daily Show, Stewart voiced his shock at the level of access Haberman and Swan had been granted and pressed them to reveal who their “rat” was.
“Without giving away the secret, who’s the rat?” Stewart asked, prompting laughs from the two journalists.
“Tell me the rat. Who—who—is it Bessent? It’s—it’s Lutnick,” he added.
Swan hit back, “You sound like Trump right now.”
Stewart then proposed a different theory.
“Can I ask—when I read the book, honestly, there was a part of me that thought, I bet Trump called them,” Stewart said.
“Like, he—some of this—is a lot of this information from Trump?"
But Haberman and Swan stayed tight-lipped, reminding Stewart that Trump was not in the Epstein meetings, so he could not have been the leaker.
“They had the Epstein meetings without him because they knew he didn’t want to talk about Epstein,” Swan said.
Haberman added, “This was to—this was to protect against him not wanting to discuss this and leaks. Those were the reasons that these meetings happened.”
“How’d that go?” Stewart joked.
Stewart then pressed the authors over how they obtained such sensitive material from what he described as a tightly controlled and loyalist administration.
“I am baffled that this administration, who is—they are so tight knit and so loyalist, that you would be able to glean this—did you have—was it on tape? Is that—people have suggested it might be on tape?” he asked, questioning whether secretly recorded conversations were involved.
When the authors declined to confirm the reporting methods, Swan responded, “Yeah. We’re not going to speculate or talk about that.”
Stewart pushed back, replying, “I’m not asking you to speculate. I’m asking you to tell me.” Both journalists ultimately refused to disclose their sourcing.
Stewart also questioned their level of access, asking, “Are you even surprised at the level of access and information that you got? When you went into this, did you think you would get people to grant you the kind of inside information that you were granted?”
Swan said simply, “It was really hard.”
