The New York Times has spent years throwing everything it has at Donald Trump.
Now Trump is firing back, and he’s not pulling any punches.
And the Times’ Jonathan Swan just got a public dressing-down he probably wasn’t expecting from the President of the United States.
Trump Unloads on the Times Over “Regime Change”
Trump recently posted on Truth Social, targeting journalist Maggie Haberman and her Regime Change co-author Jonathan Swan, along with a number of other grievances aimed squarely at the media.
Haberman and Swan authored Regime Change, a behind-the-scenes look at the beginning of Trump’s second term in the White House, which included interviews with the President himself.
Trump wrote on Truth Social that “Maggot Hagerman has covered me incorrectly for ten years,” and warned she “will pay the price when our Multi Billion Dollar Lawsuit against The Failing New York Times gets to Court.”
And Trump didn’t stop there.
The President defended his health, writing, “I just finished a perfect physical at Walter Reed, I do it every six months, and I requested another Cognitive Test, the only President to do so, three times, and I aced them all,” adding that “Few people in Washington, DC, could do so, including Maggot and her flunky associate, Jonathan Swan.”
Trump added, “I would be willing to bet they couldn’t get 50% of the questions right. Anyway, don’t buy their book, it’s garbage!”
The book itself touched a nerve. Haberman and Swan appeared on MS NOW’s The Weekend, where host Jonathan Capehart questioned Trump’s fitness for office, asking, “Given all the reporting that you and Jonathan have done, should the American people be concerned about the mental acuity of this president?”
Haberman answered that “a lot of people do have that concern,” and called Trump’s health “like a black box inside that administration,” noting the White House has released “less and less information” about his Walter Reed visits.
Trump saw that segment. He had a few things to say about it.
The President Makes His Case to History
In his Truth Social post, Trump pointed to his 2024 results: “I win the Election IN A LANDSLIDE against the entire Dumocrat Party, and almost 100% negative news — I won 86% of the Counties in America, 2,750 to 525, won the Electoral College, 312 to 226, was the first Republican in decades to win the Popular Vote, and decisively won all seven Swing States, all 50 States shifted toward the Republican Party for the first time, EVER.”
That is a real record. Trump is the first Republican since George W Bush in 2004 to win the popular vote. He did it while the media ran a decade-long campaign to destroy him, while surviving multiple assassination attempts, while facing criminal prosecutions that many conservatives believe were politically motivated from start to finish. The numbers are what they are.
Trump challenged the press to finally acknowledge reality, writing: “Isn’t it time they say, ‘TRUMP IS THE BEST POLITICAL ATHLETE OF ALL TIME! CONGRATULATIONS, MR. PRESIDENT. YOU HAVE BEATEN US FOR 10 YEARS, AND WE ARE NOT GOING TO WASTE OUR TIME FIGHTING YOU ANY LONGER. WE CAN’T WIN. DO A GREAT JOB, SIR, RUNNING OUR COUNTRY. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!'”
He also went after the Democrat Party itself. Trump wrote that “The Dumocrats don’t have what it takes, their Policies are wrong, and they are, generally, stupid people,” and that “They are going COMMUNIST because they are a desperately ‘sinking ship,’ and there’s not a thing they can do about it.”
In a shorter follow-up post, Trump repeated his “LANDSLIDE” claim and accused the media of having “NO CREDIBILITY,” writing, “With only bad Press and Fake News, I won the Presidential Election IN A LANDSLIDE. Therefore, the Media has NO CREDIBILITY! If it did, that Historic Win would not have been possible,” before adding, “I want them to gain the Respect which they have so sadly lost, and help, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
Swan and Haberman Fire Back — and the Book Sells Out
Swan’s response to being called a lightweight? He kept it short.
Swan posted on social media: “Many people disagree with the president’s assessment. Thanks to you all for reading.” He then issued an invitation: “I would be honored to do another on-camera interview with President Trump whenever he wants.”
Haberman played it even cooler. She pointed out that her book is sold out and publishers plan to restock copies, writing, “Extremely grateful for the interest in our book.”
In response to Trump calling the book “boring” and filled with “fake reporting,” Swan posted a screenshot of Amazon’s “Top 20 Most Sold & Most Read Books of the Week,” which placed Regime Change at number one for the week of July 5, 2026.
So the book Trump told people not to buy is the best-selling book in the country. That’s the situation.
But here’s what the coverage of this spat keeps missing. The press treats every Trump Truth Social post as a meltdown. They’ve been doing that for ten years. And for ten years, Trump has kept winning. The media called his 2016 campaign a joke. They said 2020 was over. They spent 2024 running wall-to-wall negative coverage, and he swept all seven swing states anyway.
The New York Times isn’t just a newspaper to Trump — it’s the flagship of an establishment that has spent a decade trying to take him down and failed every time. Haberman and Swan got extraordinary access to the White House. They sat with the President. And the book they produced is, by Trump’s read, a hit job dressed up as journalism.
Whether or not you agree with how Trump expresses it, the underlying frustration isn’t hard to understand. A man wins the popular vote, sweeps the Electoral College, carries every swing state, and the paper of record responds by writing about fast food wrappers in the bedroom. The framing never changes. The narrative never updates. The press decides who Trump is, and no amount of election results seems to shift it.
The Times and its allies have spent years insisting they are the guardians of truth. But the voters who handed Trump a second term weren’t confused. They weren’t deceived. They looked at the record — the border, the economy, the endless foreign wars, the COVID lockdowns that shuttered their businesses and kept their kids out of school — and they made a choice. The media’s job, at some point, is to reckon with that. So far, they haven’t.
And Swan’s offer to do another on-camera interview? That’s a smart play. His 2020 interview with Trump became one of the most-watched political exchanges of that year. But calling yourself a neutral journalist while co-writing a book with a colleague who has publicly questioned the President’s cognitive fitness — that’s a posture that’s getting harder to sustain.
Trump has been making this argument for years: that the press is not a neutral referee but an active participant in the political fight against him. Every time the Times runs another story framing his victories as flukes and his supporters as rubes, he gets a little more mileage out of that argument. The book may be number one on Amazon this week. But the credibility gap between the legacy press and the American public keeps widening, and no sales ranking fixes that.
Sources: Mediaite, The Hill, Raw Story, Wikipedia (Jonathan Swan), FactCheck.org