Trump book reveals what drives his delusion that he rules the world

US President Donald Trump’s reputation for chaos and power flexing is well known, but the extent of his disregard for political process and world order is staggering. 

New York Times journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan have pulled back the curtain to expose what’s really going on in Trump’s tumultuous second term.

The accounts collected from Trump’s inner sanctum are jaw dropping, from the fear and retribution to the deadly dangerous and the plain silly.

Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump takes us from the brink of economic abyss to the war in Iran to better understand what drives this American president who believes he rules the world.

Over the past three years, the journalists conducted more than 1000 interviews with anonymous staffers, department officials, former aides, donors, friends and foes of the president, and even Trump himself. 

Their highly anticipated account of what they uncovered has already raised the hackles of the commander in chief.

Read more

Vulnerable Aussies charged more than $100 million by aged care provider, lawsuit alleges

“If you want to understand how the most powerful country in the world is being run, how Donald Trump is operating with a tiny group of people, five or six people are running this country,” Swan said.

“And there are senior people in the US government who are at the State Department and the Pentagon and the intelligence community who have no earthly idea what’s actually being said and done in the Oval Office.”

As an example, he said the number of people who saw the memorandum of understanding to end the Iran war before it was published was “microscopic”.

The war’s beginning was just as extraordinary.

On February 11, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was granted rare access to the highly secure Situation Room in the basement of the White House to make his pitch for a joint assault. 

Certain Iran was already weakened by last year’s bombing raids, Trump was happy to be convinced by Netanyahu that a regime change would be sharp and swift. 

People within Trump’s administration did not agree.

“Trump, at a very deep gut level, thought this would be a fast war,” Swan said.

“What Trump does is when he has an instinct, he will shop around until he finds someone to support that instinct,” he added.

Haberman said Trump would often look around for aides to blame for “bad advice”.

“But people warned him what could happen, munition shortages, the Strait of Hormuz closing,” she said.

“He went ahead with it. It was his choice and the after effects are – are his.”

According to the award-winning reporters, in his second term Trump is a president who does what he wants. 

With control of Congress, a favourable judiciary and complete disregard for due political process the regime change has been much closer to home.

“He sent Delta Force into Caracas in Venezuela to snatch a foreign head of state out of his bedroom in his pyjamas in the middle of the night and change the leadership of that country. He didn’t even talk to Congress,” Swan said, adding it was the same for the war in Iran.

“He decided that fishing boats carrying cocaine were enemy combatants. He redefined them as enemy combatants, and he just killed them. He just bombed them. 

“There was no authorisation for the use of military force. This was, he, he just, he said, ‘These are terrorists and we’re killing them’.”

Trump’s abuse of power and blatant disregard for the chaos he was causing was dramatically and chillingly evident early in his second term when he started slapping tariffs on countries around the world.

His formula of who should pay what was only devised the night before he announced the penalties on April 2 last year on what he called America’s Liberation Day. 

Swan said Trump was “playing roulette with the global economy” and their reporting uncovered that behind the scenes it was “even more haphazard than people might have imagined”.

“For him to pull back. Yeah. I mean, it was really at the absolute, uh, last minute, uh, essentially,” Haberman said.

“And we describe in the book how terrified so many of his own advisors were about how close the car came to going over the cliff.

“And I think that it’s, it’s hard for them to look at sometimes. These are his decisions. And then you see what the aftermath is.”

He may be bombastic, juvenile and lawless but Swan and Haberman say he has also proven to be an effective leader. 

Whether or not you like the policy, his success on border control is a measure of getting things done. 

But Trump has also been a chaotic and vengeful president who has spent much of this second term seeking retribution against those who challenged him during his first administration, shamelessly quashing dissent.

Before going to print, Swan and Haberman met with Trump to fact-check the extraordinary details covered in their book.

“We asked him about his presidential power and he handed us a two-page document, and he said it was written by a historian and he wanted us to read it,” Swan said.

“And so it opens by saying Donald Trump is the most powerful man who’s ever existed, ever lived on the planet by far.

“And then it goes on to compare him to what Donald Trump said was to us the top 10 and it was Stalin, Mao … Hitler, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan.”

Swan said the document turned out to be written by a former golf caddy, not a historian.

“But as strange as the source of that document was, the premise was actually basically the premise of our book, uh, expressed in a different way, which is that Trump is willing to use his power like no American president of our lifetime,” he said.