In an interview posted on Monday, conservative host Ryan Girdusky spoke with Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan about their latest book, Regime Change.
Girdusky argued that as people age and particularly as they reach 80, those “around them start dying.”
“What effect did that have on Trump’s just opinion of legacy and his overarching idea of, like, what his life would be?” Girdusky asked the reporters.
“I mean, look, it’s not like Donald Trump sits around doing sort of therapy sessions with people, but he makes — he makes comments to advisors that — and to various people and associates and confidants that they all interpret as him thinking about his own mortality,” said Haberman.
She said that they didn’t include it in the book but that Trump was seeing the late President Jimmy Carter lying in state and commented, “about how that would be him in, you know, twenty years or something like that.”
“Obviously that would be a very long lifespan for him,” she added, as Trump would be 100 at that age. She said that Trump claims to have a “longevity gene in his family.” Still, it’s something he’s been thinking about “for a while.”
“When Ivana Trump died, it affected him pretty deeply, according to everybody around him,” Haberman continued. “His sister was a complicated relationship. But he is talking about it a lot. You even heard him talk about it with Lindsay Graham the other day, just sort of drifting into it at a defense industry event with Dave McCormick and Pennsylvania. So getting things done and how limited his time on this Earth is, let alone in office and in power, is significant.”
Girdusky said that Trump has “scaled back public appearances” since the 2024 assassination attempt, but even prior to the shooting in Pennsylvania, Trump’s public events had shrunk from multiple times a week to at most once a week. Axios reported that in 2016, Trump held a whopping 72 rallies, and in 2024, during the same period, that number shrank to 24. There were just a few months left in the election after the assassination attempt.
They went on to describe just how small Trump’s world has become. Girdusky said he remembered the first term in which Trump would respond to people’s comments on Twitter and now he hardly has contact with anyone outside of a very small group of advisors. Swan described Trump playing music on his iPad while eating at the patio at Mar-a-Lago with a steady stream of elderly, mostly Florida, residents coming up to him to tell him how amazing he is.
Even as he was making decisions about the Iran war, Swan said that having people in the room like the secretary of energy or Treasury secretary would likely have been helpful in warning him of what could happen with gas prices and the economy if he went to war with Iran.
Another point they didn’t detail in the book is how many people are using their relationship with Trump for financial gain.
“And you’re right, we didn’t get into that specific area of money-making in Trump 2.0 because, frankly, if we spent everything we included on the ways everybody is making money around him, the book would have been two thousand pages long,” Haberman said.
She noted that he talked about “draining the swamp” in 2017, but never did it then anyway. Now it’s far worse.
“Lobbyists had a lot of access to him. A lot of people who had, you know, clients facing any number of issues had access to him. You know, we had — there was a whole controversy around vaping, and I think it was twenty nineteen, and that was people hiring various folks who were close to Trump, perceived as close to Trump on this. Now, it is there are so many different ways to either get close to Trump or to put money directly into the Trump family’s bank accounts,” Haberman added.
Meanwhile, the Trump Library is becoming another source of donations to Trump. The influencer culture, she said, is another matter because a lot of that surrounds the crypto industry, which Trump once said he didn’t believe in.
“But just the scale of moneymaking and the way in which you can get to the president and see a specific outcome is unlike anything that we have seen,” Haberman said. “Which is not to say that other presidents have not had donors who you know, bring specific policy matters to them and so forth. But it’s what you were saying about the gatekeeping piece.”
Swan said that he sees many conservatives in the Trump circle who are making more money than they’ve ever made while their credibility erodes.
When it comes to people like Stephen Miller, Swan said that he’s very good about disappearing when things are going badly. So, Trump naturally never associates Miller with positivity over negativity.
He said, “Stephen Miller, I think, you could easily make a case that he’s the most powerful domestic policy staffer in the modern history of the White House and has his hands in everything.”
The other thing Miller does is play the “voice” of Trump in meetings, claiming “the president thinks this” or “the president says this,” and that there’s no one who knows better. So, he’s more able to control the various departments under his own agenda.
Haberman noted that Miller was very successful in preparing for the second administration with the “Project 2025” agenda. He has not been successful in implementing a lot of those ideas in government, however.
Other details included Secretary of State Marco Rubio being completely detached from the Russia and Ukraine war and isn’t engaged on Iran. His major focus is on Cuba. Reports revealed the military is preparing various scenarios for such a war.