President Donald Trump’s nasty nighttime habits leave staff scrambling to clean up in the morning, a bombshell new book has revealed.
The 80-year-old president is a late-night snacker who leaves chip bags and wrappers lying around on the floor, according to Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, a forthcoming book by White House correspondents Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.
A sneak peek of the book, obtained by the Daily Mail, pulled back the curtain on Trump’s snacking routine.
“A nighttime snacker, the president would frequently leave an array of empty potato chip bags, Starbucks wrappers, and ice cream cartons in the trash, or on the floor,” the authors wrote. “The staff had to begin monitoring the trash after it was discovered he was sometimes throwing out White House sterling silver utensils.”
Trump, who rose to fame in New York City as a builder, also has an odd—and apparently unhygienic—design preference: carpets in the bathroom.
“The portion nearest the shower would often be soaked through; the staff was never quite sure why, but they worried about mold growing underneath,” Haberman and Swan wrote. “The solution was to lay a small piece of the same carpet—never an actual bath mat—over the larger one.”
“Several of these pieces were kept in rotation, swapped out and dried,” they added.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Though carpeted bathrooms were trendy in the ‘70s, they are now widely considered unhygienic due to the risk of bacterial growth and foul odors.
Trump’s preference for carpets in the bathroom barely scratched the surface of oddities in his living arrangements inside the White House.
The president doesn’t share the traditional master bedroom with First Lady Melania, according to Haberman and Swan. Instead, the first lady occupies the primary bedroom while Trump has taken over the space just next door, which is typically labeled the second-floor “living room” on White House maps.
After moving back into the White House last year, Trump launched a bizarre decor standoff with his own wife, the new book reveals.
“In the early weeks of the new administration, items were spirited from the second-floor corridor into the president’s bedroom,” Haberman and Swan wrote. “Sometimes Trump carried the objects in himself, rearranging things across the private quarters on a whim.”
At the time, however, Melania wasn’t around to comment as objects “vanished” into Trump’s bedroom.
“Once, when staff gently reminded the president that he was taking things from the Center Hall his wife had personally selected, he made clear he didn’t care,” the authors wrote. “He seemed almost to be competing with her—determined to have the better room.”
To make up for the sudden disappearance of Melania’s items, White House staff would photograph replacements and send them to her for approval.
“The president’s redecorating generated such a flurry of activity that staff often felt caught between the two Trumps, who were the only presidential couple to regularly use and maintain separate bedrooms since Richard and Pat Nixon,” Haberman and Swan wrote. “Trump’s obsessive focus on interior decorating made the staff yearn for the First Lady to return and hopefully rein him in.”
But Trump’s one-sided contest with his own wife didn’t stop at bedroom decor—it later extended to the Rose Garden and the historic East Wing.
“When early talk made the rounds that Trump now intended to turn the garden into a version of the Mar-a-Lago patio, word came back from the First Lady’s team that she was very unhappy,” the authors wrote.
The first couple later settled on a compromise: the grass would be paved over with white stone, but the rose bushes would remain intact.
Melania was also skeptical about Trump’s swanky ballroom ambitions, the authors reported.
“Mrs. Trump, who preferred a quiet environment with minimal disturbances and objected to living in a construction zone, had repeatedly expressed concern about the size and location of the ballroom,” they wrote. “For several weeks in early 2025, White House aides had tried accommodating the couple’s competing desires about the future of the complex.”
But Trump emerged victorious in the end, taking a wrecking ball to the 123-year-old structure to make way for his 90,000-square-foot ballroom.
“Mrs. Trump would soon lose a larger battle over what would become the president’s signature project, which he announced in July: a White House ballroom that, like a sponge in a glass of water, continued expanding until by early 2026 it was expected to be larger than the White House building itself,” Haberman and Swan said.
