AI Summary
5 min readMaggie Haberman, co-author of Regime Change alongside Jonathan Swan, tells Ezra Klein that the single best book on the first 14 months of Donald Trump’s second term was built around a specific puzzle: the administration’s first year was ferocious and energetic, but by year two, much of that force seemed to have run out of steam. Haberman pushes back on that framing. “It’s not black and white,” she says. Doge collapsed, the trade war got gutted by the courts, and the Iran war is injecting fresh chaos. But the border crackdown, the DEI rollbacks, and the trans sports ban are still running. The real pattern, she argues, is not that Trump’s agenda ran out of steam but that it “ran into Trump reality”—the president’s chronic lack of strategy, his tendency to create events he then has to react to, and his willingness to govern by fiat without a legislative backup plan.
The Iran Decision: Netanyahu, Revenge, and a Miscalculation
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What you'll learn
- 1 How Trump Has Changed, With Maggie Haberman
- 2 (01:03) **The Opening Frame: Trump's First Year vs. Current Reality** - Ezra sets up the puzzle: the ferocious energy of Trump's first six months has given way to a sense that things have "run out of steam"
- 3 (04:02) **The Iran War: How It Actually Happened** - Maggie walks through the decision-making chain that led to the military intervention
- 4 (06:44) **The Assassination Attempt and Iran's Role in Trump's Mindset** - Trump's personal grievance against Iran runs deeper than policy
- 5 (11:09) **There Is No Trumpism, Only Trump** - A key diagnostic distinction about how to understand the administration
- 6 (14:16) **Did Trump Actually Lose His Base?** - A debate about whether the cracks matter
- 7 (15:42) **Trump's Information Diet in Term Two** - How radically different his information environment is now
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Guests on this episode
Show Notes
The first year of President Trump’s second term was a whirlwind of action: on immigration, on trade, on political retribution. But things seem to me to be slowing down quite a bit. Trump is incredibly unpopular, and he’s now bogged down in a war with Iran that he doesn’t seem capable of ending. He often appears more concerned with his many White House renovations than with whether the Republican Party can hold the House and the Senate in November. So what’s going on in this administration? Where is this all going?
It’s hard to think of a journalist more qualified to answer those questions than Maggie Haberman. As a White House correspondent for The New York Times, she’s published some of the hardest-hitting reporting about Trump’s second act as president and the group of loyalists that now surrounds him.
Haberman, alongside her New York Times colleague Jonathan Swan, just published an extraordinary chronicle of this extraordinary political moment, “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.” In this conversation, we discuss how decisions get made in this White House, what Trump has achieved so far and what’s really motivating him as we head toward the midterms.
This episode contains strong language.
Mentioned:
“Maggie Haberman on What an Unleashed Trump Might Do” by The Ezra Klein Show
“Trump Says He Decides What ‘America First’ Means” by Michael Scherer
Book Recommendations:
Takeover by Charlie Savage
Strangers by Belle Burden
I Regret Almost Everything by Keith McNally
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected].
You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge
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