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Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan are Interviewed about their New Book on Trump; Jury to Deliberate in Palisades Fire Trial; Global Oil Prices Fall. Aired 8:30-9a ET

Aired June 24, 2026 - 08:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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[08:30:47]

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: All right, this morning, a dramatic reading. Quote, "he," the president, "was also having trouble hearing, asking people to repeat questions they had just asked. Joint press conferences with world leaders were more often held in the Oval Office than in the East Room, in part because the acoustics were better, and he didn't have to stand for an hour."

That excerpt is from "Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump," released like less than 24 hours ago. But it's already sold out on Amazon.

With us now are the co-authors, our friends, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.

First of all, congratulations to both of you.

MAGGIE HABERMAN, CO-AUTHOR, "REGIME CHANGE: INSIDE THE IMPERIAL PRESIDENCY OF DONALD TRUMP": Thanks, John.

BERMAN: I mean, sold out on Amazon's a pretty big deal.

HABERMAN: Yes, we were quite surprised, but also quite thrilled that people are interested in reading it. But it is available in bookstores. If people actually want to go visit a bookstore, that would be wonderful. And it is going to be restocked as soon as possible.

JONATHAN SWAN, CO-AUTHOR, "REGIME CHANGE: INSIDE THE IMPERIAL PRESIDENCY OF DONALD TRUMP": It was not a problem we anticipated, the physical shortage of books anyway.

HABERMAN: No, it's -- it was -- it's been quite something.

SWAN: Yes.

HABERMAN: We've been hearing from people sending us our, this is not available until, notes.

BERMAN: You're going to get mobbed when you walk out of here because you have two hard copies and people are going to steal them from you.

HABERMAN: Right.

SWAN: Collectors items.

BERMAN: Listen, so I started with actually a very small passage from the book. There are huge, big themes here, which I'll get to. But one of the things I loved about it is all the little tidbits and details of things I just didn't know that I learned as I was reading it.

I didn't know the president was having a hard time hearing or his hearing was fading. How else has his age manifested itself in this term?

HABERMAN: So, one of the things that we talk about in the book is how aides are aware that he is older. What exactly goes on with Donald Trump's health is one of the mysteries, right, of the last ten years. And he is very secretive about his health. We also talk about how this is a White House, despite these displays of transparency, they're very good at keeping secrets than they want to. This is always one of them.

But he is moving differently. He has the swelling in the ankles, which, you know, he was so irritated about the coverage of that he had the press secretary go out and talk about. And most people in the White House thought it was a little strange to be going out and talking about cankles as we -- as we write. But he's very, very sensitive about his appearance.

The hearing is an issue. They've all been aware of it for a while. And it's been happening for a while.

The fact that he just is older, at 80, it is harder to mask it. And so, they're -- they are all aware of it. What exactly that portends, they don't know. But he is not a young man.

BERMAN: Big picture here. One of the main themes here is just how different he is and is approaching this second term than the first term. And it's summed up, you know, toward the end, toward the very end of the book, your interview with the president, where he yells at you guys as -- not yells, but speaks loudly and firmly with you as you're leaving, telling you to remember, quote, essentially, "I won every f-ing time."

So, Jonathan, what does that mean, that idea that he is convinced that he is a winner here? How has that manifested itself in this second term in ways it didn't necessarily in the first?

SWAN: Well, one other thing that happened when we went and saw the president in March was he handed us a document that he wanted us to read. And it was a two-page document that he said was written by a historian. And it opens with a statement that Donald Trump is the most powerful man who's ever existed on the planet by far. And then it goes on to compare him to Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Alexander the Great, the Caesars, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror. You know, all of those sort of liberal democrats of, you know, history. And Trump wanted us to understand it was not a moral. There was no

mention of a moral comparison. It was that he had power that no one has ever had before. The U.S. has the most powerful military, economy, technology, but that he's willing to use it. And that was the thing he wanted to impress upon us.

And what we had understood ourselves through our reporting was, in the first term he was much more reactive to domestic politics. If there was a turn in the polls or the stock market, he could -- he could be diverted.

[08:35:01]

This time around, he's trying to reshape the world. He's trying to reshape this country. And he's willing to take much bigger risks because of that.

And if you put it through that lens of sort of Donald Trump as a Napoleonic figure in his mind, the Alexander the Great, the presidency starts to make more sense, I think.

BERMAN: It's not so much that he's shattering the world order. He's behaving as if there is no world order is basically what you write.

SWAN: Well, when you talk to leaders in other countries, and most of them won't say this on the record, the post-World War II order essentially --

HABERMAN: It's over. It's (INAUDIBLE). Yes.

SWAN: It's really -- I mean, who actually thinks that Donald Trump would go to defend a NATO country? I mean he's openly saying that, you know, they're weak, they're paper tigers, they screwed us over. We need to pull troops out. NATO is really on its last legs.

BERMAN: One of the ways this power manifests itself is through retribution. You guys write about this really in two separate parts of the book. But there's one episode that's relevant to New York. Big day here in New York. Elections last night. One of the political losers, actually the attorney general, Letitia James. Some of the candidates she backed didn't do so well. But the president had it out for her, Maggie, you write, in ways that I'm not sure people realize.

HABERMAN: Yes. So, one of the ways we take people inside, how this retribution campaign works in the White House is, we describe how they can't even always remember exactly who they're going after. So just in one separate case, that has nothing to do with Letitia James, but Stephen Miller and the president and Boris Epshteyn, who's not a White House employee, is the president's legal adviser, are sitting around and they're talking and 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. It was Chris Krebs. They couldn't even remember. They had to look up the name. And then soon there is this presidential memoranda about investigating Krebs.

Tish James, who led this -- brought this civil fraud case against Trump and the Trump Org., that could have essentially brought his company to its knees, she has been his top target, according to almost everybody that we have spoken to. And what was fascinating to us, and really laid out in very clear detail how he is looking at this, is, a, there is just -- there's really no line between the White House and the DOJ, which I think has been apparent to people, 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 because it required intent and proving it. And his -- he 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.

BERMAN: Like a lawyer.

HABERMAN: Correct. And so I'm just going to read to you from the book, which is, "Trump remained irate over the lack of progress against James. He told one adviser that Blanche needed to grasp. He didn't really care whether she was ultimately convicted. 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, quote, I want to make her life miserable, Trump told the advisor."

We asked him about this in that Oval Office session. He didn't deny it so much as hedge. "I don't think so, he said, when we asked him if he had said it, but then he said, but I would have said it. And he went on to call her a dirty cop in a very corrupt person, highly political, not smart."

So, we are -- we got a real look at exactly how this is working. And I'm sure there are many other drafts of history that will be written, but this was the one we were able to obtain.

BERMAN: All right. What we're going to do is I want to take a quick break. I have much more to ask you, including about carpeted bathrooms, including about wars with Melania over furnishing the bedrooms. Who gets the better furniture in their bedroom. Much, much more just ahead.

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BERMAN: All right, back now with the coauthors of the new book, "Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump," Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.

You write about so many different people in ways that I have not seen or heard before. One of them is the first lady, Melania Trump, in sort of this feud going on, or battle over decorations. The president going to take the best furnishings for his bedroom rather than hers.

HABERMAN: I think it was a pretty one-sided battle, but it is absolutely true that while she was not there in the early stages of this second presidency, the president was very focused, as he has been a lot, on decorating and decor. And she had items in the center hall of the residence that were put where, as the residence staff understood it, she wanted them to be. And while she wasn't there, he started taking some of them for himself and either for the Oval Office or for his bedroom. And it appeared to people as if he was competing to have the better room. And they ended up resorting to sending her photos of things that could be items that they would -- they would put out.

And in another way, you know, he took over her signature project from term one, which was the Rose Garden. She was very proud of it, And she got a lot of criticism for it, that people around her thought that was actually unfair. It's -- it, I think, remained during the Biden era. But he paved over it and just, you know, put stones down there and without her desired interest in his project.

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SWAN: She also wasn't thrilled about the ballroom.

HABERMAN: Yes.

BERMAN: Why?

SWAN: Didn't want to live in a construction zone.

HABERMAN: Right.

SWAN: Was not thrilled with the idea of the East Wing being demolished, living essentially in a construction zone. So, basically, his two major projects, the paving over of the walk -- Rose Garden and the ballroom, the first lady has not been a fan of either of them.

BERMAN: And I know she didn't like gold. She's not in favor of all the gilding. She's --

HABERMAN: She's a minimalist.

SWAN: And Trump acknowledges that. He says, you know, she's a minimalist. That's the way he says it, you know, surrounded by all the gold.

HABERMAN: Yes. He's a -- he's a maximalist.

BERMAN: So, this talks about the first, you know, year plus in office, but it also casts an eye forward perhaps to the midterms and the rest of this term here. And you talk about polling, which he isn't as interested in, in domestic politics, which Jonathan, you said, he's not as interested in as he was in the first term. In some cases, not even paying attention to it. But there's a passage here I'm going to read about how his pollsters, and this was at the end of last year, came to him basically and said, hey, look, you've got some issues. You're taking on some water here and you've got to shift gears and focus on the economy. And here's a quote from the book, "if POTUS and the GOP want to gain ground ahead of the midterms, they need to be honest that there is an affordability crisis and confront the issues causing it. HABERMAN: Yes, so this was from an internal polling memo. We got our

hands on some internal polling documents or focus group documents that were -- and roundups that were sent around to a small group of Trump advisers. And this was the quote at the end of one of them from December, which was after a several month stretch where Trump's advisers were trying to redirect him, trying to raise with him the fact that there is an affordability crisis for voters, that they do want to hear more about it, that this is an issue on which he had been seen favorably, and he was really losing altitude on.

And he doesn't like hearing bad news, as we have all written repeatedly. So, trying to redirect him had been done gently. But this was said very directly and very pointedly, that things needed to be dealt with or otherwise the party and the president were going to have problems. But what really stood out to us was the line about honest, because the president has repeatedly said, you know, this is a -- it's a hoax. You know, this is Democrats who have invented this word, which is obviously not the case. But it really underscores how much people around him can see certain things that are coming, and they still can't really get him to change.

SWAN: The other thing that's really coming through in their private data is the ballroom is cutting through.

HABERMAN: Yes.

SWAN: The fact that while we have an affordability, you know, crisis in this country, or many people living, you know, paycheck to paycheck, the visuals of Trump building this grand ballroom and all the gold, it's actually cutting through to voters in a way that I don't think many of his aides anticipated.

BERMAN: It seems to be an unwillingness or an inability for him to shift either on affordability or the ballroom in terms of the way he talks about it, which does beg a question, just a bigger question here. So much of this period you're writing about the president is unchecked or relatively unchecked. You know, operates with relative impunity. Any sense of what happens if the Democrats take control of a chamber of Congress next November?

SWAN: It's very uncertain because, you know, there's a sort of conventional wisdom of, let's say they take the House. Well, now it's oversight season. Well, what happens if you have an administration that doesn't respond to subpoenas? What's the enforcement mechanism for that? The Trump DOJ? Oh, yes. OK. Yes, no, they'll be really cracking down hard.

So, you know, we don't know. It's a real black box for us as to what happens after November. And Trump has already said many times, and we have this in our book, he has told people in Oval Office meetings, I'm going to pardon anyone who came within 250 feet of the Oval Office. Sometimes the distance changes. Sometimes he says 200 feet.

HABERMAN: Twenty-five.

SWAN: Sometimes he says 25 feet. But some number of feet. So, he knows he has immunity conferred by the Supreme Court, and everyone around him knows they're going to get pardons. So, what's the accountability mechanism? It's very unclear.

BERMAN: A quick lightning round of things that I found fascinating just in passing. Number one, and the guys all moaned when I mentioned it before, he likes carpeting in his bathrooms.

HABERMAN: Yes. This was a continuous thing in term one. And everybody had to restore everything to how it was in term one. Remember, term one, by the way, I just move away from bathrooms and carpets for two seconds.

BERMAN: Yes.

HABERMAN: He hung like nothing in the Oval Office in term one. He made almost no changes to design or what was in there. And now it's like every square inch is covered, which aides had seen as something of almost like a -- like a therapy session for him because he liked doing it. It was his happiest hour of the day.

One of the restorations was this wall-to-wall carpet that he likes in the bathroom. And for -- instead of a bath mat, there was always a little piece of carpet near the shower.

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And there were concerns about mold and health. So, in term one, it would often -- there were a few of them and they would be replaced. Anyway, whatever, you got the point.

BERMAN: Yes, it was incredible. I think nothing grossed the guys out more than that here on the set.

OK, in his initial draft of the inauguration speech that he ended up giving inside this term, he had planned to announce that he was going to pardon the January 6th rioters during that speech.

SWAN: That's right. And one of his aides, in one of the prep meetings, raised the point to the president that there's going to be a bipartisan audience here in the Capitol. And if you do announce that you're pardoning the people who stormed the Capitol, half the room will get up and go out. And Trump said, oh, I hadn't thought about that. Maybe I won't do it. So, he didn't do it. Of course, he then pardoned them. But, yes, there was an initial plan from Trump to announce that during his inaugural address.

BERMAN: Rising and falling cast of characters behind the scenes you guys write a lot about. I mean the personality wise, Musk and Vance and Lutnick and Bessent. A sense of who is most on the rise, most ascendant right now?

HABERMAN: So, it's an interesting question. And I think that we tried to sort of take a pan out as opposed to the internal up, down. Trump continues to make comments about Howard Lutnick, who, and we write about this in the book, gave a $25 million donation to the planned Trump presidential library. That donation was made within the -- within the past eight months or so, at a time when Lutnick was on the ropes, as he often is. I would say that Musk actually is the one who's on the rise because it is always better if you're in Donald Trump's world if you're a bit outside.

BERMAN: That's fascinating, given that you talk so much about his descent early on in this book.

OK, very quickly, again in the end here, Iran has been so important here. And you write, and you've talked extensively about the fact that Donald Trump was more into this Iran operation than I think a lot of people realize.

Based on that, Jonathan, any sense of where this goes next now that it's pretty clear, look, I guess we don't know what's going to happen, but it's clear until now the main goals have not been met.

SWAN: Right. And they're in a bit of a bind because they explicitly laid out these goals. Marco Rubio said, we want to dismantle the ballistic missile program, and we've had reporting that Iran retains access to something like 70 percent of its missiles.

So, look, Trump wants to get out of this. He wants a deal. He's trying to sell the deal. And he's trying to desperately show that it's not the JCPOA. But some people on the right are worried it's going to be worse than the JCPOA on certain --

BERMAN: Right. But they may underestimate his connection to -- his initial passion to going after Iran, stronger, I think, than many people may have thought initially.

HABERMAN: There's no question about that. I mean there is this -- there is this belief that Netanyahu sort of puppeteered Trump into this. And certainly Netanyahu spent many months trying to compel Trump to join him.

But Trump was a willing partner. And one of the striking things he said to us in that March interview we did, we asked about Netanyahu as a wartime partner, given the tensions they've had over time. And he spoke very approvingly of Netanyahu, saying he's not afraid of war. So --

BERMAN: Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, congratulations on the book. Sold out at Amazon. But you can get a digital copy. You can preorder your own hard copy. Do it because it's a phenomenal read. You will not regret any minute you spend reading this. Congratulations and thank you.

HABERMAN: Thanks, John.

SWAN: Thanks so much.

BERMAN: Kate.

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: So, this morning, a jury is set to begin deliberating in the trial over the Palisades Fire. During the trial, the man accused of igniting that massive blaze and deadly blaze, prosecutors painted -- tried to paint Jonathan Rinderknecht as angry at the wealthy and vengeful against society. His defense team, though, argued that there is no evidence that he started the fire and said that he was a scapegoat.

CNN's Nick Watt has been following this from the very beginning.

Nick, what could happen today?

NICK WATT, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, the jury is going to start deliberating at 8 a.m. Pacific Time. They've had about a week and a half, two week trial. They heard from Jonathan Rinderknecht's lawyer. As you say, he says his client, who's a 30-year-old former Uber driver, he says his client is a scapegoat and a convenient suspect. Now, the prosecution says he is an angry, vengeful man who went up to the top of the Palisades New Years Day morning and lit a fire near a home where he used to live in happier times during a previous relationship. He lit that fire as revenge against the rich, who he saw as ruining the world and ruining his life.

Now, take a quick listen to what Rinderknecht's lawyer had to say yesterday after the jury was given the case.

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STEVE HANEY, JONATHAN RINDERKNECHT'S ATTORNEY: I think the lack of scene preservation, the fact that they got there after a lot of the evidence was missing, not a lot of direct evidence -- it's a very circumstantial case, which is always difficult as a prosecutor to prove.

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But they did a good job and they put on a lot of evidence. And I think we put on a good defense. And now it's in the hands of the jury.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WATT: Now, when he's talking about the scene there, here's the issue. So, Jonathan Rinderknecht allegedly started this fire just after midnight New Year's morning, January 1st. The Palisades Fire, remember, didn't ignite until the seventh. So, what prosecutors say happened here is Rinderknecht lit this fire, the fire department came, thought they'd put it out, but, in fact, it was burning in roots. What's called a holdover fire. And on January 7th, when the wind picked up, it reignited, burned down 37 square miles, took almost a complete neighborhood off the map, killed 12 people, destroyed more than 6,000 structures.

Now, nobody is denying that Jonathan Rinderknecht was on the hill that night. He made 17 phone calls to 911. His lawyer said he was a guy trying to help. He saw a fire. The prosecutors say he was doing too much. He lit the fire, then made all these 911 calls to try and create an alibi. There is no video of him setting the fire. There are no witnesses.

There is no confession. His lawyer said, beyond a reasonable doubt, not even close. Prosecutors reminded the jury, doesn't have to be beyond all possible doubt, just beyond a reasonable doubt.

Kate.

BOLDUAN: Great summation. Let's see what happens with the jury today. Thank you so much, Nick. Really appreciate it.

Sara.

SARA SIDNER, CNN ANCHOR: All right, happening now, a milestone for oil prices. Brent crude, the global benchmark, now below $75 a barrel. The lowest level since the day before the war with Iran began four months ago. Another milestone, Diesel prices also falling, dipping below $5 for the first time since March. Traffic in the Strait of Hormuz has been steady, and now it is time for a lot of Middle Eastern countries to get oil wells that have been shut down during the war back online. But there is uncertainty surrounding what happens after those valves are turned back the other way.

CNN's David Goldman joining me now.

Look, I guess the first question is, are you surprised that this is happening so quickly? Because we knew that it was going to take some time for things to start running again, so to speak. And you're seeing these prices come down very quickly.

DAVID GOLDMAN, CNN BUSINESS SENIOR REPORTER: Yes, I am surprised. I think the entire oil industry is a little bit surprised.

President Trump wasn't surprised. He said that prices were going to fall like a rock. And it turns out that he was right. So, you know, I mean, it's certainly some -- there's a little bit of divergence between what is actually going on in the oil market and the reality of physical oil on the ground.

SIDNER: Gotcha.

GOLDMAN: And one of the reasons why, and we talked about barnacles this morning, right? You got to scrape those things off the ships to get them out. Another thing, to your point, is about when you turn production back on, it's like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're going to get. Because sometimes when you turn those valves, it's less than you had to start before you shut in that well, because a lot of stuff can happen underground, including explosions.

So, President Trump talked about this ad nauseam in April, saying three times, in three separate interviews, that oil was going to just explode. Iran had three days to restart production otherwise all their oil wells were going to explode. OK, that didn't happen. But he's right, sort of, that there is a lot that goes on underground.

SIDNER: It's a possibility. GOLDMAN: It's a possibility. And when they start, when the Middle

East, now that ships are coming out of the Strait, empty ships are going to be coming back in, well, we're going to see what those wells produce because we don't know what happened underground.

SIDNER: And you talked about just the ships being there. What happened to them as they were just sitting still in the waters?

GOLDMAN: Yes, they got disgusting. So, you know, when you're anchored for four months, all this gunk gets on them --

SIDNER: Yes.

GOLDMAN: And you legally need to clean them. It makes them more efficient. But also a lot of invasive species get on those ships.

SIDNER: Well, there's a lot to do, but it looks like, you know, the market is also based on emotion, as much as people don't want to think that.

GOLDMAN: Yes.

SIDNER: And --

GOLDMAN: It's such an important point. It's such an important point.

SIDNER: It's down. I mean, and gas prices will follow.

GOLDMAN: And that's great news, right?

SIDNER: Yes.

GOLDMAN: We shouldn't poo-poo it.

SIDNER: No.

GOLDMAN: That is great news for you and me and everybody who has to fill up their car.

SIDNER: That's right.

David Goldman, it's great to have you on. Thank you so much for being here this morning.

GOLDMAN: Thank you.

SIDNER: Kate.

BOLDUAN: So, this morning, a video has gone viral showing the moments that a Sacramento man, take a look at this, allegedly drove off in a police cruiser, kicking off a 40-mile chase. Officers had been chasing the suspect on foot when they say that then he managed to get into the vehicle. Once inside, he was then reportedly able to access a rifle and started firing. The department had thought the rifle was locked up. They're currently investigating how the suspect was able to access it, and clearly much more. [09:00:01]

A wildfire in Utah has now burned more than 31,000 acres and is still not contained.