Not even Donald Trump’s own Cabinet is safe from his vitriol.
A new book by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Regime Change, peeks behind the curtain of Trump’s first 14 months back in the White House, pulling together over 1,000 interviews and three years of work.
Excerpts released by CNN shine a light on the inner workings of the Trump administration, including what happens when his top lieutenants don’t give him exactly what he wants.
It was a lesson learned the hard way by U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick last year, the book claims.
“You used to be a killer, Howard,” the authors report Trump saying during a discussion with Lutnick about the impact tariffs could have on the U.S. auto industry. “I remember when you were thirty-five, you were a killer. And now you’ve got your beautiful wife, and your big house, and you’re just soft. And you’re a p---y. You know what you are? You’re a p---y.”
The authors also reported that Trump said coming to Washington had made him “weak” and that he “used to be tough.”
Lutnick did, however, get his own back, according to the authors. When tariffs started to earn big bucks, Lutnick referred to himself to Trump as “your twenty-five-billion-dollar-a-month p---y.”
It’s a far cry from the intra-Cabinet relationship the administration wants the world to see. Cabinet members are often corralled into a conference room at the White House, where they take turns under the gaze of television cameras to pay their boss compliments and try to win his affection with flattery.
In those incidents, Lutnick has been heard adopting a very different tone.
“And this is all driven by your tariff policies. No chance this’d be happening without you,” he said in one such suck-up fest.
“We invented the lightbulb, the transistor, the G.P.U., so they keep buying us. And the only president to ever understand it, and you understood it in the ’80s and the ’90s,” he said in another. In a hat trick of telling Trump he can do things no one else can, he also said, “We’ve got $165 billion for TSMC, but you’re going to watch the whole ecosystem come home because Donald Trump is the only president who understands.”
Lutnick’s tough day at the office wasn’t the only revelation in the new book.
Elsewhere, Haberman and Swan revealed that the gold decorations Trump has adorned the Oval Office with were affixed with super glue.
What’s more, when White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt started putting them up, Trump got involved and started doing it himself.
It also saw Trump claim to the authors that he is more powerful than bloodthirsty tyrants Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler.
Haberman and Swan report that Trump said that those men, “however fearsome in his day, had no global reach. Their power was local. But (Trump’s) was not.”
The book also reveals how Trump is a late-night snacker who leaves chip bags and wrappers lying around on the floor.
“The staff had to begin monitoring the trash after it was discovered he was sometimes throwing out White House sterling silver utensils,” the authors add.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
