Maggie Haberman, a journalist for The New York Times whose book “Regime Change” offered a detailed insider account of President Donald Trump’s administration, has previously profiled Trump’s hostility to expertise and obsession with remaking Washington D.C. in his image. Now, during an interview on The Media Confidential podcast, she explained how Trump has created a press environment in which many of the journalists who interrogate him are sycophants.

“It used to be that when it was groups of reporters covering the president, they would be able to have each other’s back,” Haberman said during the appearance. ”If somebody asked a tough question, you would know that the person next to you is going to follow it up or ask a version of it.”

Haberman added, “Now it’s you ask a tough question, a rigorous question, and the president filibusters for four minutes and then the next question is, ‘Sir, how are you so handsome?’ from one of these influencers, or ‘Sir, is it hard that the media is so unfair to you?’”

She concluded that this was “very much by this White House’s design.” As a result of their decision to stock their press pool with sympathetic far right journalists, they have created a “massive challenge” for everyone who could be considered a real journalist — that is, willing to ask tough questions of powerful people.

“It’s to everybody’s detriment, because many people rely on us for this coverage and he’s doing very real sit-down interviews and press conferences,” Haberman argued.

Haberman’s reporting here is similar to when she pointed out that Trump’s tendency to take advice from whoever is around him has caused him to become very erratic from a policymaking standpoint. He prefers people who praise him, and can then be manipulated by them — but this depends on proximity to the president, who rarely leaves the seeming sanctuary of the White House and the reporters who frequently go there.

"[Secretary of State] Rubio did tell people that he felt the need to be around Trump because, as you say, this is a very tiny group of people making decisions and you could be at the top level of a major Cabinet agency and have no idea what is happening if you are not in the room with him," Haberman said. "So, that is how Rubio has functioned. I don't know whether Trump will sour on him."

New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman was the one who blew the whistle on President Donald Trump's relationship with his aide, Natalie Harp, who was among those included in her book about the White House staff.

Haberman said that, according to those she's spoken to in Trump's world, Harp "doesn't do much outside of work. She works constantly for him."

She explained that it's a "huge amount of value" to Trump, who often relies on aides to make him feel better.

"I described her the other day as, as you know, a binky, for lack of a better way of putting it, a comfort blanket," said Haberman. "There are men who have played that role for him too. One of them would be Boris Epstein, about whom, you know, his legal adviser, you know, of whom the president describes him as his psychiatrist."

Haberman quoted Trump saying, "Sometimes you just want somebody to tell you everything is going to be okay. That is a lot of what the president values."

CNN host Wolf Blitzer mentioned national security concerns about Harp and the clearance issues. It was reported by MS NOW's Jake Traylor and Jacqueline Alemany, on Wednesday, that it took Harp over a year to handle her clearance paperwork. The reasons for it were unknown, but the president personally intervened on Harp's behalf.

"So, our understanding is that she does have a security clearance. We haven't independently corroborated that she was delayed on her SF-86 forms to get a longer-term one," said Haberman. "She came in ... with a temporary clearance, the way that most other people working in the White House did."

She noted that most people know that Trump speaks via a cell phone that "everybody has the number," including world leaders.

"That includes a bunch of people. And, you know, we don't quite know exactly how secure that phone is. I think the bigger issue that people have had about concerns is just her level of, of, you know, intense devotion to him. And that was what became a question for the Secret Service."

She went on to mention that the White House appears to be realizing that they made things worse by "elevat[ing] attention around Natalie Harp by bushing back on Jon Ossoff and going further than what Ossoff had said about their relationship themselves."

Ossoff mentioned that all Trump wanted to do was "build his ballroom and fly around with Natalie." GOP apologists and MAGA allies quickly began talking about an affair and claiming Ossoff was "insinuating" something.

"But there's also, you know, the way a president's world functions and, you know, this who is around him, who helps provide him with information that is going to be of interest and importance in any administration," Haberman said. "She's a government employee. It should not be a surprise."

CNN White House reporter Alayna Treene echoed the comments, saying that some in the White House now admit "that some of those more aggressive posts defending Harp actually had the adverse effect of drawing more attention to this relationship and dragging this story out."

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.

With the United States' 2026 midterms less than three months away, U.S. voters, according to polls, are especially worried about the economy, inflation and the Iran war. Yet President Donald Trump, according to author and New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, is heavily focused on something that isn't a high priority for voters: makeover and renovation projects for Washington, DC. And she explained Trump's reasons for that focus during an interview with Axios' Mike Allen.

Haberman and fellow journalist Jonathan Swan takes an in-depth look at Trump's second presidency in their new book, "Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump" — which Haberman has been promoting in a long list of media appearances. Talking to Axios, Haberman explained why makeover projects in D.C. are so important to the president when voters are worried about the economy and the war.

Haberman told Allen, "He is spending a huge amount of energy, mental and otherwise, on these renovation projects, beautification projects around Washington, and then monuments to self. (There) is no precedent in U.S. history of a sitting president devising such endeavors in their own name…. What interests him are things that you can see and touch."

In March, Haberman and Swan interviewed Trump in the White House for their book. And she emphasized, during her Axios interview, that the makeover projects in D.C. were a higher priority for him than the Iran war — which had been launched in late February.

Haberman told Allen, "It was very clear what his mind was on while we were there. And what it was not really on was the war…. He didn't really want to talk about that. He didn't really want to talk about policy specifics. He wanted to describe himself as winning. And he wanted to show us how he had remade Washington."

Trump has been pursuing a variety of makeover and renovation projects in and around Washington D.C., with proposals ranging from a White House ballroom to a "triumphal arch" near Arlington National Cemetery. Another priority for Trump is putting his brand on the Kennedy Center.

Haberman told Swan, "You would think that on the 17th day of the war, that he would have maps of the Middle East or maps of troop deployments — who knows. He picks up these pictures, and (they're) of maple trees. And he says: 'I am choosing maple trees for the White House. I am good at picking trees.' I'm paraphrasing here, but that is pretty much what he said. Under that were designs of the ballroom. And he starts talking to us about the columns and how some of the columns are evocative of Rome. And then on the other side, the columns are evocative of Athens. And he's happy that they are a little bit either wider or more spaced apart or both than the columns at the Supreme Court. And that was like the first 15 minutes of this hour that we had."

During a Monday morning appearance on MS NOW, author and journalist Maggie Haberman revealed that President Donald Trump's own team pleaded with him to address voter anxieties, but he has so far seemed content to ignore them as the midterms approach.

Haberman, fresh off the success of her Trump administration exposé, Regime Change, appeared as a guest during the latest edition of Morning Joe, where host Joe Scarborough pressed her about the president's evident disinterest in engaging with voter concerns, even as polling indicates that his approval numbers are cratering even in the traditionally conservative South.

"What I don't get is you look at those numbers in the Deep South, -31 in Georgia, -25 in North Carolina, that's just for a guy from the Deep South, that's staggering to me that he's that low, even -22 in Texas. I didn't think I would ever see that," Scarborough said. "And yet the president seems so oddly disinterested. He's, as you said a couple of weeks ago, he's focused on construction projects and vengeance. He never got out and campaigned for the big, beautiful bill, as republicans called it. He doesn't talk about affordability without mocking and ridiculing it. The thing that I mean right now, my big question is why is he so disengaged from the fact there's an election coming up?"

In response, Haberman discussed a piece of internal polling that she and co-author Jonathan Swan obtained while writing their book. Conducted by Trump's "main pollster" Tony Fabrizio, and circulated to many of his advisers, which "was very clear on where the voters are on the economy."

"And it was... a warning that Republicans and the president need to be honest, 'HONEST' in all caps, about where things are," Haberman explained. "It's the end of August. I don't think that the president has really turned that honest view around."

Haberman added that, for all he likes to tout economic success, discussion about the economy "bores" Trump, which is a well-known fact about him by those who have worked around him during his time in Washington, D.C. Now, despite the looming midterm disaster waiting for Republicans, Trump is more interested in doing the things he wants to do, rather than what he ought to do.

"This politicking, domestic politicking bores him," she added. "It was more interesting to him when it was rallies that were about him. It was more interesting to him when he was fighting for what he would say was survival, when he was very realistically facing prison time during the first campaign, if he did not win, which he was open about with people in private conversations. And now this is the part where he wants to do what he wants to do. You know, you and I both know, Joe, that often the question with him that people will ask is, why does he do X, Y, Z? And the answer is often because he can."

Haberman continued: "He has told people, and we wrote about this in the book, that he is proud Republicans don't do as well when he's not on the ballot. He doesn't want to get impeached again. They don't want a lot of oversight. He's not looking at this the way they did in 2018 or 2019. In 2018, he was sort of indifferent to the fact that Democrats were probably going to take the House and what that could mean for him. He has made very clear he's going to pardon any number of people who have come within a certain number of feet of the Oval Office. I don't expect we are going to see this government comply with subpoenas in any meaningful way. And so the intensity of it for him is very different than it is, you know, for other people in his government who don't necessarily have the same protections."

President Donald Trump's recent Air Force One switch fiasco has seemingly revealed much about the things he prioritizes from his staff, according to reporter Maggie Haberman, based on the choices he made about who joined him on the secret flight.

Haberman is a journalist and author who has extensively covered Trump's time in national politics, including the bombshell recent book about his destructive second term, Regime Change, which she co-wrote with Jonathan Swan. This week, she sat for an interview with Jessica Yellin, the founder of News Not Noise, and during the start of the conversation, she pressed Haberman about the implications of the staffers that Trump chose to come with him on a secret military flight out of Turkey last month.

As Yellin established in the discussion, Trump opted to be accompanied by his close personal assistant Natalie Harp, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, top aide Walt Nauta and Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, along with the press pool, notably remained on the legacy Air Force One model that Trump snuck out of amid fears of an attack by Iran.

Digging into the particular connection each person on the secret flight had to Trump, two likely reasons for their inclusions emerged: personal support and social media.

"In terms of the personal aides that Trump brought with him, it isn't surprising," Haberman explained. "In the sense that Walt Nauta, he is now the head of Oval Office Advance. He was also Trump's indicted co-conspirator in the Mar-a-Lago documents case by special counsel Jack Smith."

She continued: "Natalie Harp is with him in almost every meeting. She is the person who sits alongside the wall in the Oval Office, she goes and gets him printouts, as she did when Jonathan and I were in the Oval Office for a fact-checking interview for this book. And Dan Scavino is another longtime source of support. One throughline for Harp and Scavino is that they operate his social media feed, and so I could see a world where he wanted them there to help him with that."

Haberman was also quick to note that there might have been a simple practical reason for Rubio, and numerous other top-ranking officials, staying behind on the older Air Force One model. As Haberman noted, it would be reasonable to imagine concerns about too many leading figures in the administration being in one place, raising the possible damage that could be done by one attack.

President Donald Trump has a pick for White House counsel: Will Scharf, who has been serving as White House staff secretary since 2025. And according to New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, Scharf has his work cut out for him — as Trump has a history of being "very hard" on his White House counsels.

During a Monday morning, August 10 appearance on journalist Peter Alexander's new show on MS NOW, Haberman noted that Scharf is very much a Trump loyalist. But she also argued that he could run into problems as White House counsel because he "has limits on what he will do."

Along with journalist Jonathan Swan, Haberman wrote the 2026 book "Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump" — which takes an in-depth look at Trump's second presidency. During her appearances on MS NOW and CNN, Haberman has been stressing that Trump is much more brazen during his second presidency than he was during his first."

Talking to Alexander, Haberman emphasized that although Scharf is on board with Trump more often than not, his willingness to buck the president on occasion could prove problematic for him.

When Alexander described Scharf as an "ultimate loyalist" to Trump, Haberman responded, "He is, but he also has some limits, Peter, on what he will do. One of the things we wrote about in the book, Jonathan and I did, is two issues where Will Scharf drew a line over the course of the last year and a half — where he got concerned about what could entangle this administration in legal fights that they might not be prepared for. One was about when to invoke the Insurrection Act, which is, you know, a loaded weapon on the shelf, as is the idea of suspending habeas corpus rights for undocumented migrants."

Haberman continued, "You know, the right to due process under habeas corpus is an idea that predates the Magna Carta. It's enshrined in the Constitution. The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld it very broadly. There was an episode that we wrote about where the president and (Trump White House adviser) Stephen Miller were really aggressively discussing, possibly just broadly, suspending these rights. But in general, Will Scharf is, as you say, he is somebody who generally believes in pretty expansive executive power. He was part of the president's team that fought for the immunity ruling at the Supreme Court, which has allowed President Trump, in President Trump's mind, to plow through all kinds of limits this term."

Appointed to White House counsel, effective September 1, Scharf replaces Trump ally David Warrington — who is returning to the private sector. Scharf has been a strong supporter of Trump's proposed White House ballroom, helping secure approval for the $400 million project.

President Donald Trump's rage failed to squash the momentum of a new book that acts as an often embarrassing exposé of his second term, with Axios revealing in a new report that it is on track to smash sales records.

Last month saw the publication of Regime Change, a hotly anticipated new book from New York Times reporters and Trump experts, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. Based on years of extensive reporting and interviews with close sources, the book exposes Trump's unprecedented abuses of power since his return to the White House, as well as various unflattering new details, including his staff's attempt to go behind his back over the Epstein files and his disgusting bedroom snacking habits.

These explosive revelations and more have made the book a notable sales success, especially for a non-fiction title in an age when concerns are rampant about the decline of reading. According to an Axios report from Wednesday, Regime Change has surpassed 500,000 units sold across its first month of publication, based on combined hardcover, audiobook and e-book sales figures. This is a significant milestone for any book, and also seems poised to make Haberman and Swan's Trump exposé the bestselling non-fiction title of 2026.

"Reports of the death of the nonfiction book have been greatly exaggerated," Matt Latimer, co-founder of Haberman's literary agency, Javelin, told Axios.

"This doesn't necessarily mean that Trump books are back," Keith Urbahn, the other co-founder at Javelin, added. "It's still uphill sledding for political books... This book is different. Maggie and Swan pierced the veil of a White House that has been pretty locked down on scoops and scenes. 'Regime Change' is a unicorn of publishing. It goes well beyond political circles to people who are hungry for a narrative and frame to make sense of Trump 2.0. Even Trump and his team aren't disputing the facts."

In its own report about the sales milestone, The Daily Beast noted that the success comes as a major blow to Trump after he attempted to smear and bury the book as a "Fake News" hatchet job on Truth Social.

"Based on a very quick and boring briefing concerning the Magot Hagerman book about me, it is mostly made up, Fake News, largely fiction, as have been most of the things she has written about me for so many years," Trump's post read, later tarring Haberman as "a third rate writer and intellect."

In response, Swan, whom Trump did not mention, invited the president to respond in an on-camera interview "any time he wants."