In an interview posted on Monday, conservative host Ryan Girdusky spoke with Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan about their latest book, Regime Change.

Girdusky argued that as people age, and especially as they reach 80, those "around them start dying."

"What effect did that have on Trump's just opinion of legacy and his overarching idea of, like, what his life would be?" Girdusky asked the reporters.

"I mean, look, it's not like Donald Trump sits around doing sort of therapy sessions with people, but he makes — he makes comments to advisors that — and to various people and associates and confidants that they all interpret as him thinking about his own mortality," Haberman said.

She said the book did not include a moment in which Trump was seeing the late President Jimmy Carter lying in state and commented "about how that would be him in, you know, twenty years or something like that."

"Obviously that would be a very long lifespan for him," she added, noting that Trump would be 100 at that age. Haberman said Trump claims to have a "longevity gene in his family" and that mortality has been on his mind for "a while."

"When Ivana Trump died, it affected him pretty deeply, according to everybody around him," Haberman continued. "His sister was a complicated relationship. But he is talking about it a lot. You even heard him talk about it with Lindsay Graham the other day, just sort of drifting into it at a defense industry event with Dave McCormick and Pennsylvania. So getting things done and how limited his time on this Earth is, let alone in office and in power, is significant."

Girdusky said Trump has "scaled back public appearances" since the 2024 assassination attempt, but he added that even before the shooting in Pennsylvania, Trump's public events had declined from multiple times a week to at most once a week. Axios reported that in 2016 Trump held 72 rallies, while in 2024, during the same period, that number fell to 24. There were only a few months left in the election after the assassination attempt. Axios reported that in 2016 Trump held 72 rallies, while in 2024, during the same period, that number fell to 24.

The reporters also described how small Trump's world has become. Girdusky said he remembered Trump's first term, when Trump would respond to comments on Twitter, and said he now has little contact with anyone outside a very small circle of advisers. Swan described Trump playing music on his iPad while eating on the patio at Mar-a-Lago, with a steady stream of elderly, mostly Florida residents coming up to tell him how amazing he is.

Swan said that even while Trump was making decisions about a war with Iran, having people in the room such as the energy secretary or Treasury secretary likely would have been useful in warning him about what could happen to gas prices and the economy if he went to war with Iran.

Another topic they said was not fully developed in the book was how many people are using their relationship with Trump for financial gain.

"And you're right, we didn't get into that specific area of money-making in Trump 2.0 because, frankly, if we spent everything we included on the ways everybody is making money around him, the book would have been two thousand pages long," Haberman said.

She said Trump talked about "draining the swamp" in 2017 but never did it then, and that the situation is now worse.

"Lobbyists had a lot of access to him. A lot of people who had, you know, clients facing any number of issues had access to him. You know, we had — there was a whole controversy around vaping, and I think it was twenty nineteen, and that was people hiring various folks who were close to Trump, perceived as close to Trump on this. Now, it is there are so many different ways to either get close to Trump or to put money directly into the Trump family's bank accounts," Haberman added.

She also said the Trump Library is becoming another source of donations to Trump. The influencer culture, she said, is another matter because much of it surrounds the crypto industry, which Trump once said he did not believe in.

"But just the scale of moneymaking and the way in which you can get to the president and see a specific outcome is unlike anything that we have seen," Haberman said. "Which is not to say that other presidents have not had donors who you know, bring specific policy matters to them and so forth. But it's what you were saying about the gatekeeping piece."

Swan said he sees many conservatives in the Trump circle making more money than they have ever made while their credibility erodes.

On Stephen Miller, Swan said he can disappear when things are going badly, which means Trump does not naturally associate Miller with positivity over negativity.

"Stephen Miller, I think, you could easily make a case that he's the most powerful domestic policy staffer in the modern history of the White House and has his hands in everything," Swan said.

He added that Miller often acts as Trump's voice in meetings, saying "the president thinks this" or "the president says this," and that no one knows better than he does. That gives him more control over departments under his own agenda.

Haberman said Miller was very successful in preparing for the second administration with the "Project 2025" agenda, but has not been successful in implementing many of those ideas in government.

They also said Secretary of State Marco Rubio is detached from the Russia and Ukraine war and is not engaged on Iran, with his main focus on Cuba. Reports have said the military is preparing various scenarios for such a war.