President Donald Trump and his team have been on the hunt for a leak, but it isn't going very well. Asawin Suebsaeng at Zeteo wrote on Tuesday that the leak hunt has been stalled "for a hilarious reason."

Describing the Trump administration as a "fascist-‘Office Space’" environment, Suebsaeng described the constant backbiting from a “den of snitches, ‘freaks,’ and paranoid tyrants.”

The constant paranoia and "snitching" has only grown worse in the last year, Suebsaeng wrote.

According tot he report, Trump is particularly upset about leaks from April reports that he's grown frustrated by a new book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. Among the reports in the book is the characterization that Trump’s increasing volatility is causing him to make "reckless" decisions, particularly when it comes to the war with Iran.

“The leak hunt is a big deal right now,” one administration official said in April. Another source told Zeteo that staff in the administration were warned by a superior that “if you talked to Jonathan or Maggie [you] better be good at covering your tracks.”

The hunt for the leaks has continued over the past several weeks.

"By May, the president was so livid and paranoid about the leaks that he pushed his Justice Department to seriously consider raiding the homes of reporters, or just jailing them until they sold out their anonymous sources," the Zeteo writer said.

As of the beginning of June, the probe appears to have stalled, according to the site's sources. The reason, which Suebsaeng found to be hilarious, is that the list of possible people is too long.

“We started making a list of likely suspects, and it got too long,” a Trump administration official told Zeteo.

"I cannot possibly pretend that it isn’t hysterically funny how Trump has put himself in a position where it’s very hard for him to find the leakers because the senior personnel he tapped to be the leak-hunters-in-chief are also the ones who’ve been doing the leaking," wrote Suebsaeng. "Good help is hard to find!"

Two senior officials, one currently in the administration and one previously from the Trump White House, answered "of course" when asked if they've leaked. They felt they had cover because the information they had would be known to anyone at their level.

“It’s one of the worst-kept secrets at the White House,” the current official said. “I’m not ratting myself out; that would be ridiculous.”

A different advisor described the leak hunt as akin to the scene in the movie "Reservoir Dogs" in which characters point loaded guns at each other, ensuring their mutual destruction.

Asked about the matter, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle attacked the website, its founder and the reporter.

The new expose, "Regime Change," will be out later this month.

President Donald Trump is traveling considerably less in his second term than he did in his previous one between 2017 and 2021. It was assumed the 80-year-old was slowing down or couldn't hack it with the rigorous schedule he once kept. But it appears there might be another reason, Maggie Haberman teased on Friday.

Speaking to CNN's Audie Cornish, Haberman, co-author of the new book Regime Change, explained that the administration is scared.

Reports are unfolding about the shocking revelations that the reason Trump swapped planes in Turkey to fly part of the way back to the U.S. is there were credible threats of a possible attack on Trump's plane.

"This is a president who has survived assassination attempts," Cornish noted. "Does this kind of concern loom large for him?"

Haberman said that those attempts "really radicalized" him and his team.

"The assassination attempts that he faced, in particular Butler, happened around the time that someone had been charged with being part of a murder for hire plot involving or set up by Iranian officials. Allegedly," she said. "And in his mind and in the campaign's mind at the time, it all became one thing."

It's for that reason, Haberman said, Trump and his team saw the new threats from Iran as serious and concerning. These kinds of threats are part of why Trump isn't seen out and about as much.

"You are already seeing a president who does not travel outside the White House that much. Part of it is that, you know, he would tell aides at the beginning of the of the term, 'I'm done campaigning,' but part of it is legitimate security concerns," said Haberman.

Haberman noted that another challenge she sees for Trump is that he is not surrounded by top experts and experienced professionals. For example, she added, those negotiating with Iran aren't well-schooled in nuclear weapons, much less in diplomatic negotiation. It's Trump's son-in-law and his catch-all "envoy for everything," Steve Witkoff.

The group of influencers is also kept extremely small, meaning if someone like Witkoff isn't in the room, they have no clue what is going on. One of the more significant things that happened as a result of that is that Witkoff felt he was close to a deal with Iran, but Trump decided to bomb them out of the blue. The lack of expertise meant that Trump wasn't properly prepared for what he'd face and never crafted an exit strategy.

"It became very clear that foreign policy — as someone said, and we quote them anonymously in the book, is 'whatever Trump says at any given moment,'" said Haberman.

During his first administration, Trump was rushed to the presidential bunker out of fear as a crowd grew near the White House protesting the police death of George Floyd. In his second term, a major project for Trump has been rebuilding the same bunker beneath a giant ballroom.

President Donald Trump has so many revenge campaigns and such a huge list of grievances that the White House staff is struggling to keep them straight.

Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, a new book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, details a number of exchanges with aides. Haberman explained on CNN Wednesday morning that there is no longer a line between the Justice Department and Trump.

"But we make clear in the reporting how true that is he wanted the top DOJ officials to understand — as they were trying to obtain an indictment against Letitia James — and there was this question of whether a mortgage fraud charge could actually be brought. Todd Blanche, who was then the deputy attorney general, was not convinced this was going to work," Haberman explained.

"[Blanche] was operating, in our reporting, from the perspective of if you're going to bring a case, you need to be able to actually prove the case," she said.

"Like a lawyer" host John Berman cut in.

Haberman read an excerpt illustrating Trump's frustrations with James and the lack of progress in going after her.

"He told one adviser that Blanche needed to grasp: He didn't really care whether she was ultimately convicted," the book explains. "The president's true goal was to drag into court the New York Attorney General who had won a nearly half billion dollar civil fraud judgment against him."

Trump told the advisor, "I want to make her life miserable."

When they asked Trump whether he said it, Trump said he didn't think so, but agreed, "I would have said it."

He attacked her as a "dirty cop" and "very corrupt person."

"So, we got a real look at how this is working," said Haberman. The reporter also detailed a case in which top aides Stephen Miller and Boris Epstein were talking about one of Trump's targets from 2020 that they couldn't remember.

"They're talking about 'who was that guy involved in the in the elections,' in the machines and the security of the elections in 2020?" Haberman said, noting they couldn't even remember and had to look up who the person was. It was Chris Krebs.

"And then soon there is this presidential memorandum about investigating Krebs," Haberman explained.

The revelatory book “Regime Change,” by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, is the gift that keeps on giving, said MS NOW journalist Paul Waldman. But he said it’s also revealed a “sinister” relationship between Trump and his aids that have created a “cocoon of sycophancy Trump has built around himself, with dire consequences for the country.”

“The president has finally created an administration that works exactly how he wants it to, and the result is a vicious cycle of incompetence and moral corruption,” said Waldman, citing the new book’s insights. “In short, everything about how the White House operates exacerbates Trump’s most pernicious instincts and character flaws. His aides enable him to be the worst version of himself, and in turn he makes them the worst version of themselves.”

His cocoon was being constructed from the moment Trump began staffing up his second administration, according to Waldman. We know how much Trump has always valued loyalty, but as Haberman and Swan report, “there was a new acid test: January 6.”

“Anyone seeking a place near the center of power had to say it was the act of patriots who were subsequently abused by the Biden administration,” said Walkman. “That weeded out anyone with a real commitment to American democracy. And it forced everyone to publicly proclaim a lie. When you abandon your integrity in that way, you become much more willing to do terrible things in the future.”

Occasionally someone raises a doubt or gently suggests a different course for Trump to take, such as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent urging the president to say publicly he had no intention of firing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell in order to calm markets. Former deputy AG Todd Blanche told Trump there were no grounds to indict New York Attorney General Letitia James. But the authors note those moments of moments of dissent are few and far between, and Trump can only be constrained for a moment.

“He did get his bogus indictment of James, for instance, a case that quickly fell apart,y fell apart,” said Waldman. “… The result is an administration full of people who either agree with Trump’s most self-destructive impulses or know that objections are all but pointless.”

Few Trump aides called out the danger of sending in the National] Guard to American cities to enforce immigration law, wrote Haberman and Swan report, and the results were deadly disaster. And when Trump suggests the U.S. take possession of Gaza — a self-evidently ludicrous notion — no one disagrees.

“It’s a strong move,” Communications Director Steven Cheung told Trump, when asked about the prospect, even though Trump aides privately conceded the suggestion was “legitimately nutso.”

What comes of this are disasters like the Iran war. Vice President JD Vance expressed misgivings about the war, said the authors. “But with the exception of the vice president, nobody on the senior team — not his secretary of state, not his chairman of the Joint Chiefs, not his chief of staff — had made a real effort” to talk Trump out of it.

“This is a portrait of an unserious president surrounded by unserious people, all bringing out the worst in each other,” said Waldman. “Most frightening of all, there are still 2 1/2 years left.

An extensive passage from an upcoming book exposing the inner workings of the second Trump administration has leaked to Axios, and it once again shows his proclivity for pitting his would-be MAGA successors against each other.

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, veteran New York Times reporters who have extensively covered Trump's time in politics, are set to release a new book next week, Regime Change, chronicling the chaotic goings-on behind the scenes of his return to the White House. So far, early previews for the book have already caused major headaches for the administration, exposing the panicked reaction of top officials to the Epstein crisis while Trump tried to bury it.

The latest glimpse of the book has leaked to Axios, and features a description of a private dinner at which Trump asked NewsCorp tycoon Rupert Murdoch what he thought about Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio as potential 2028 nominees for president. Trump has reportedly been known to ask attendees at private gatherings similar questions, and is also said to relish pitting his allies against each other.

According to Axios, Murdoch's reaction was far from encouraging for the vice president, as he now weighs whether or not to even bother running in 2028.

"In a scene from the forthcoming 'Regime Change,' President Trump asks a guest at a private dinner last year to compare Vice President Vance to Secretary of State Marco Rubio," Axios detailed. "Trump often does that to stir the pot on 2028 speculation. But this time, the judge was Rupert Murdoch. And with Vance and Rubio sitting awkwardly at the table, Murdoch was notably more effusive about Rubio. The media mogul had privately tried to talk Trump out of choosing Vance as his running mate in 2024."

The report continued later: "Trump's parlor game — recounted in a 3,000-word passage in 'Regime Change,' by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, out next Tuesday — shows that Vance, as the authors write, can be sure Trump won't 'make it easy for him' to get the 2028 GOP nomination."

According to the leaked passage, when Trump pressed Murdoch about Vance at the dinner, held in October of 2025, he said, "Well... I think JD has the potential to be great." When pressed about Rubio, he was much more effusive: "Marco is brilliant." Guests present at the dinner supposedly "would talk privately about the moment for weeks after the dinner."

The new book by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan is set for release and has the White House "extremely worried."

According to Axios reporter Alex Thompson, some of the reports in the book are so detailed and quoted verbatim that the White House fears someone is recording conversations, even in the Situation Room, which is so secure that even cell phones aren't allowed inside.

One of those excerpts includes a conversation with Vice President JD Vance, who told top officials in the administration that it was time to invoke the Insurrection Act after the shooting deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good.

"It would be painful in the short term, he said, but the message it would send —that paid agitators could not get away with disrupting ICE operations — would make sure no one tried it again," said the report. It also noted that there is no evidence that paid protesters were involved, and certainly no evidence that Pretti and Good were paid by anyone.

Thompson told CNN on Monday morning that the book isn't merely poised to disrupt the administration, but JD Vance's political ambitions as well.

"There have been in these early excerpts, Mr. Vance has been portrayed in some ways, as conspiratorial and as you as you suggested, he's aligned himself with Stephen Miller, one of the most controversial members of this administration, one of the most hard line and and was advocating, in some cases for deploying the Insurrection Act, which the inside the White House, even some of the most firebrand like very conservative members were saying this is just blatantly unconstitutional," said Thompson.

He also noted another scene in which Miller argued "we haven't tested the limits of the Insurrection Act." He had to be fact-checked because he didn't know that it was used as recently as 1992, after the police who beat Rodney King were let off without consequences for his death.

"The fact that JD has aligned himself with the most controversial members could be a liability going into 2028. It's why so many members of the Trump administration are desperate to get their hands on this book early, before it comes out next week, because they don't know what's in it or how it could affect their own political standing," said Thompson.

CNN host John Berman asked Thompson if the White House appeared nervous and Thompson agreed, "Oh yeah, absolutely."

"I mean, you had reports that some of the quotes in this book are so verbatim that there's even speculation inside the White House that Maggie and Jonathan have got their hands on recordings, not just from inside the room, but inside the national security rooms, which — you are not allowed to bring recording devices into those rooms. That's how worried they are about this book and how explosive it could be in terms of disrupting not just this white house, but to 2028."

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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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President Donald Trump was the "biggest obstacle" in the way of his own administration handling the Epstein files, according to a legthy new report from The New York Times, as insiders were "paralyzed" with fear and paranoia about how to handle the growing "crisis" despite him not wanting them to say anything about it at all.

The report was written by longtime Trump-beat veterans, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, based on material from their forthcoming book about his second administration. According to the pair, the sense that White House officials gave, that Jeffrey Epstein was a minor non-issue for the administration, could not have been further from the truth, and Trump's repeated insistence that the story was "boring" or a "hoax" made it nearly impossible for them to adequately address it.

"People in his orbit found him snapping at them if they even raised the issue of Jeffrey Epstein," Haberman explained in a video accompanying the report.

In July of last year, several top administration officials convened a meeting about the issue in the Situation Room, a place typically reserved for "classified and high-stakes national security matters." At the meeting, Haberman and Swan said it was clear that Vice President JD Vance was the most adamant in pushing for full transparency on Epstein, with some in the administration suspecting that he had bought in fully to past conspiracy theories about the deceased sex trafficker.

While the rest of the officials balked at Vance's suggestion, the meeting resulted in two moves that ultimately did nothing to quell the growing discontent over the Epstein files within the MAGA base: pushing for judges to release grand jury materials related to Epstein to the public, and having then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche interview Ghislaine Maxwell in prison. The latter idea was put forward as a way to make the White House seem like it was fighting for disclosure, but in a way that the judges would likely never allow.

In the video, Haberman noted that the idea of releasing the files became a "non-starter" for the administration as soon as it discovered that Trump's name was mentioned many times within them, even if it was often in reports detailing unverified allegations made against him over the years.

Among the new revelations from their reporting, the pair revealed that they were able to view an internal document from "Trump's top pollster," Tony Fabrizio, which revealed that the Epstein files were still the sixth most important issue for GOP voters, based on focus groups conducted in March, well after an act of Congress forced the release of the files. This made it a more pressing issue for them than things like crime, safety, the military and AI data centers.

“There is also a consistent mention of the Epstein files, which came up in every group and is a real negative with some of these voters," Fabrizio wrote in the "key takeaways" section of the report.

Swan said that Trump was growing "more and more fed up" with the story dominating the narrative around his presidency, with Haberman adding that he was not used to losing control over what his MAGA base thought about things. She also stressed that all of the conversations roiling the administration about Epstein had to do with how to contain or "spin" the narrative, not about getting justice for his many victims.

"The Epstein crisis had exposed something that some of Trump’s closest advisers spent months refusing to see," the report concluded. "The president could break institutions, redirect the federal government against his enemies and bring the world’s richest men into the Oval Office bearing tribute. But he could not, it turned out, make Jeffrey Epstein disappear."