During an appearance on MS NOW to promote their new book “Regime Change“ about Donald Trump’s current term, the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan recalled a meeting they had with the president in the Oval Office where they were surprised by his demeanor when asked about wielding power.
Haberman took the lead in answering the question about the president’s current “state of mind.”

“When we went in, first, he greeted us with pictures of maple trees, which was what he was looking at, and the amount of time that he is spending on decor and remaking the White House, Washington in his image and sort of trying to make sure that people can't take his name out of commission the way it happened before,” she recalled.
“And then we asked him a question about power and how he sees his own power, because we knew that he had been talking about this,” she continued. “And he tells Natalie Harp, who is his ever-present aide, who sits on the side of the wall in the Oval office in almost every meeting, go get the printouts and then he says ‘Do you do you know who Gary Player is?'"
”We weren't really sure where this was going, because Gary Player is a golfer and a very well-known one and so she comes back with these sheets of paper and she hands each of us a two-pager,” she recalled. “And he tells this story about how Gary Player introduced him to a historian and the historian had this theory of the case about Trump, and this paper begins that Donald Trump is the most powerful person who has ever walked the Earth. More than Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Napoleon, Caesar, yeah, he calls them ‘the top 10, these are the top 10,’ and the people he's naming are the top 10 of sort of the well known influencers of history, so to speak, and that Trump is more powerful than any of them because he has the might of the US military.”
She added, “And Trump is sort of reveling in this. You know, he's reading, he's reading the names and I wasn't reading them along with him. I don't think Jonathan was either, and hearing him say it out loud was actually sort of jarring — of Hitler, Stalin. It turned out that this was not a historian, this was Jonathan went down a rabbit hole and tracked him down. We were asking what the name was David King, he was Gary Player’s, business associate and caddy.”
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