An upcoming book from The New York Times Trump reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan is reportedly causing “high anxiety” in the White House.
The new book will be titled Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, according to Axios. It is expected to be released on June 23.
Trump laid into Haberman in March and at the time it wasn’t clear why.
“Maggot Hagerman, just another SLEAZEBAG writer for The Failing New York Times, insists on writing false stories about me, even though she fully knows and understands that the exact opposite of anything she says is usually the truth,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
He then threatened to sue her, saying he was “thinking of adding Maggot, and some of her ‘associates,’ into my Florida-based lawsuit against The Times which, very happily, seems to be proceeding nicely.”
The book will reportedly dig into the ways Trump has shifted executive power, with the authors making the case that his second term has been more like a foreign regime change operation than a presidency.
Haberman and Swan conducted around 1,000 interviews for the new book, which has some Trump insiders worried, according to Axios.
Both Haberman and Swan had been on book leave for months when Trump made his Truth Social post and three days later were spotted speaking to Trump at the White House, the outlet reports.
The book includes a claim that Trump’s top advisers mocked the idea of “regime change” in Iran, with one even calling the idea “bulls***,” according to The New York Times.
That scene recounts a meeting with Trump and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Dan Caine, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and others, where they reportedly discounted intelligence about Iran provided by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
According to the NYT story, which was written by Haberman and Swan and draws from the book, Netanyahu’s intelligence was broken into four parts: decapitation, which described the need to kill the nation’s supreme leader; the neutralization of Iran’s ability to target neighboring countries; the need to incite an uprising among the Iranian people; and finally, a total regime change to install a secular leader.
The gathered U.S. officials reportedly believed the first two points were achievable, while the latter two were fantasies.
Ratcliffe reportedly used a single word to describe Netanyahu’s presentation: “farcical.” Rubio agreed, calling it “bulls***,” according to the new book.
The Independent has requested comment from the White House.
