President Trump’s standing as one of the most powerful presidents in United States history is not even a “disputable premise,” New York Times reporter Jonathan Swan, co-author of the book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, said during an appearance on Breitbart News Saturday, discussing the realities of Trump’s second term.
Host and Breitbart News Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle zeroed in on how the book points to Trump’s status as “one of, if not the most powerful presidents in American history, certainly in our lifetime, given how a lot of the way that things have shaken out.”
“Yes, I don’t even think it’s a disputable premise,” Swan said. “I mean, when Maggie and I sat down with President Trump to interview him for the book, he actually said this himself.”
Swan attributed this to the interruption between Trump’s two terms, giving him four years away from the presidency. This, in turn, has made it so he has been able “to govern much more powerfully this term to exercise power much more expansively than he would have if he’d had a consecutive term… after the 2020 election,” Swan explained, providing one clear example of this the second time around: the team he assembled in his second term is quite different than the first.
“And look, you can see that in a few different ways, but one is the team, right? In the first term, and Matt, you covered the first term as well. You would know this. There are a lot of people, senior people in the administration, who thought Donald Trump was dangerous, who saw their own jobs as protecting the world, protecting the country from Donald Trump,” he said, listing off people including James Mattis, John Kelly, Rex Tillerson, and John Bolton.
“There’s a very long list of people. Those people don’t exist in this term. He has a very tight inner circle. People who support him, who like him, who are loyal to him,” Swan said. “Some of them went through the campaign with him, and we write about this in the book. That experience was a very galvanizing experience.”
“It wasn’t just Donald Trump that received subpoenas and that was under investigation. Many people in his inner circle received subpoenas, and that experience was sort of almost like they’re in the bunker with him. So when they get in again, they were determined to do things quite differently,” he said, also highlighting what he described as “the amount of long-range planning that went on for the second term.”
“In particular, Stephen Miller and Russ Vought, two really important people in the policy side of things, spent a lot of time planning for this term. We interviewed Stephen Miller in 2023, right? So just during the campaign, like but ahead of this term, talking about his plans, and he outlined what they had in mind for immigration, almost to a letter. It’s what they’ve executed in this term,” he said, explaining that this term has not been as “improvised.”
“A lot of stuff with Trump is improvised, but the key, some of the key elements of this term had long range planning. So that’s some of the stuff that we get into,” he added.
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