The last time New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan took readers inside the White House Situation Room was in April, when they revealed how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a case for striking Iran to President Donald Trump that helped put the U.S. on a path to war. That reporting was drawn from their forthcoming book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, which hits shelves on June 23. On Wednesday, in their first excerpt from the book, the pair returned to the Situation Room to chronicle another fraught moment in the Trump presidency: July 2025, when the president and top officials were consumed by the political fallout over the president’s past ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
The excerpt quickly caused a stir on Wednesday with Trump unloading on “laughing stock” MS NOW host Joe Scarborough following a Morning Joe discussion about the excerpt. (Scarborough later read Trump’s Truth Social broadside on air: “Thank you for chiming in, Mr. President.”) There will surely be intrigue in Washington about who spilled to the authors, though a source suggested something more extreme to CNN’s Brian Stelter: “There is a massive leak hunt underway.” It may be an extensive probe given that Haberman and Swan acknowledge conducting 1,000 interviews for the book with “campaign officials, White House staff members, officials serving in government departments and agencies, former aides, donors, lawmakers, friends and business associates” — and yes, Donald Trump. It should be no surprise that Trump, who may vilify a journalist one minute and take their calls the next, gave the authors an hourlong interview in March.
