President Donald Trump was more enthusiastic about buying “good maple trees” for the White House than discussing his recently-launched war with Iran when visited by two reporters in March, a new book claims.
In the latest advanced extract from Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, the authors recount an hour-long Oval Office meeting with the president in the early weeks of the conflict, a moment in which the Strait of Hormuz was newly-shutttered, driving up global oil prices.
Trump had attacked Haberman on Truth Social three days before the sitdown as a”SLEAZEBAG writer” but the pair found him in a buoyant mood.
“Trump entered the Oval Office from the corridor connected to his private dining room,” Haberman and Swan write. “He was in smiling salesman mode. ‘Nice to see you,’ he said, gesturing for us all to sit down opposite him at the desk. It was the 17th day of his war with Iran.
“Thirteen American service members had already been killed, and more than 200 had been wounded. Thousands of Iranians were dead, including the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.”
They continue: “As he greeted us, the war seemed the furthest thing from Trump’s mind. On the Resolute Desk, instead of a map of the Middle East, were printouts of maple trees. ‘I’m ordering trees for the White House,’ Trump told us. ‘I know how to buy good trees. Maples.’
“The problem, the president said, was that nurseries cut these maples from the bottom so that they could fit in the trucks,” Haberman and Swan write. “Uncut, they were much more beautiful.”
The, rather than discuss the conflict: “Trump held another printout. The headlines screamed ‘339 billion all-time views’ of Trump TikToks. ‘Can you believe it?’ the president asked us… ‘That’s some number, huh? Can you believe? I guess that’s why it’s worth a lot of money, right?’
“Then Trump showed us two final printouts, renderings from different angles of the grand ballroom he was building on the White House grounds. He was in a convivial mood.”
The passage continues with the journalists describing their struggle to pin the president down to one subject and the conversation instead meandering from his on-off friendship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the raid that saw Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro removed from power in January, with Trump reportedly marvelling over the speed and efficiency of the mission.
Haberman and Swan report that the president subsequently mused on the idea that his superior global reach potentially made him a more powerful figure than some of history’s greatest conquerors, even Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan and Napoleon Bonaparte.
“They didn’t have airplanes, right? You couldn’t travel around,” Trump reportedly observed, also noting that it would be unwise for him to talk about his power publicly because it “doesn’t play well.”
The Independent has reached out to the White House for comment.
Regime Change, which arrives in book stores Tuesday, has already created waves after it was revealed that top administration officials met in the Situation Room of the White House last year to discuss the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
Another extract says that Trump “vented” at Vice President JD Vance for failing to echo his precise rhetoric regarding the damage done to Iran’s nuclear facilities by last summer’s Operate Midnight Hammer air strikes.
The authors also claim that administration officials discussed the prospect of suspending a centuries-old constitutional right to speed up the president’s anti-immigration agenda and deport tens of thousands more people.
Other tit-bits to have emerged include the claim that Trump and first lady Melania Trump entered into a redecorating contest to make over the official residence, that White House staff habitually monitor the president’s trash for fear he might have thrown out expensive silverware and that he addresses his son Barron as “Honey.”
