President Donald Trump is failing at his presidency because he is ensconced in a bubble of “flattery,” according to a pair of authors who wrote a bestselling book about his administration.
“He is living, to some extent — to a large extent — in a hermetically-sealed bubble,” The New York Times’ Jonathan Swan, who co-authored the book “Regime Change” with his colleague Maggie Haberman, told MS NOW’s Katy Tur. “I mean, all this comes back to the information flow. In the first term, at least he would scroll Twitter, and so he would be exposed, through Twitter, to random things coming across the transom. He is really someone who watches Fox, cable news, the old — you know — newspapers and things like that. And when he hears from people, it’s on the patio at Mar-a-Lago, and they’re mostly just flattering him. It’s actually quite rare that he hears from critics.”
He added, “His aides are not eager to bring criticisms to him — in fact, mostly they keep them away from him, because they know there’s a limited amount of capital that they’re willing to spend by being the one to say, ‘Hey, here’s some bad news.’ So really, the inputs are all, you know, to whatever extent positive and reinforcing, and that’s how you get this detachment from the way the public’s feeling.”
Tur asked Swan and Haberman who the people are surrounding Trump and whether they are losing faith in him because of his failures on issues like implementing tariffs and waging war against Iran.
“They do believe in him,” Haberman replied. “I mean, you know, even if they don’t — even if they’re not full true believers, as in the people from 2021 to 2024 — they absolutely believe in him more than the old Republican Party, and certainly more than Democrats.”
When Tur inquired as to whether they see anything about Trump as dangerous, both Haberman and Swan immediately and emphatically said “no” repeatedly.
“They believe that many of them have been so radicalized by being in with him in this campaign, by these investigations,” Haberman said. “I mean, one of the things that we write about in the book is how his own advisers would say, very plaintively, after he was indicted federally in 2023 — which at that point, I think, was the second or third indictment — ‘He has to win, he has to win.’ If he did not win, he was facing prison, and they saw themselves as imperiled too. And they believe that he, through whatever frequencies that he hears that others can’t, lifted himself there.”
Haberman added, “And he benefits obviously from luck. As you know, his advisers often talk about how he is the luckiest man in the world. That’s a quote that has been said to us by innumerable advisers.”
Trump’s bubble is in part the product of his narcissistic tendencies. Less than a week before Election Day 2020, former Yale University professor and psychiatrist Dr. Bandy X. Lee warned this journalist for Salon that Trump’s inability to accept bad news would pose a threat to democracy if he was defeated. Throughout his life Trump has always claimed to have been robbed if he lost something he wanted, whether it was getting an Emmy nomination for his reality TV show “The Apprentice” and winning the 2016 GOP Iowa caucuses to winning the popular as well as electoral vote against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general presidential election.
“When there is an all-encompassing loss, such as the loss of an election, it can trigger a rampage of destruction and reign of terror in revenge against an entire nation that has failed him,” Lee said at the time. “It is far easier for the pathological narcissist to consider destroying oneself and the world, especially its ‘laughing eyes,’ than to retreat into becoming a ‘loser’ and a ‘sucker’ — which to someone suffering from this condition will feel like psychic death.”
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