New Trump book’s authors detail how they pried loose White House secrets: ‘We nearly killed ourselves’

T hey cracked the White House situation room, unearthing secrets from the heart of a secretive administration. But the reporters behind Regime Change, a blockbuster new book on Donald Trump’s second term, ran up against a wall when reporting on one issue surrounding the 80-year-old US president: his fitness for office. “His health has always been a very specific lockbox for him, going back decades,” Maggie Haberman, co-author with Jonathan Swan, said in an interview. “Illness freaks him out; he perceives illness as weakness, usually, and he certainly perceives any sense that he is having an issue as a projection of weakness, and his advisers are very, very attuned to that. “So the number of people who actually know what is happening with his health … they’ve provided less and less information, except for saying things like, ‘He saw 22 specialists,’ but they won’t say who the specialists are at Walter Reed [National Military Medical Center], and it has been on just a sliding scale since term one. Frankly, 2018, I think, was the last time we got real information. Remember, they were not honest at all about how sick he was during Covid in 2020, and so we’ve never really known the extent of that, or any after-effects. “Will we know before the end of his term if there is something more significant? Doesn’t seem likely on that trajectory. I don’t want to make predictions.” Donald Trump has sought to cover up a bruise on his right hand with make-up. …