Trump’s Epstein – A new excerpt from “Regime Change” describes how Donald Trump’s White House repeatedly used the Situation Room not to manage a foreign crisis, but to manage a cover-up around the late Jeffrey Epstein. From competing demands for “transparency” to a surreal meet
There is a room in the White House built for moments like assassination plots and national emergencies—when presidents need real-time intelligence and hard decisions can’t wait. For decades, presidents used the Situation Room for exactly that purpose. John F. Kennedy commissioned its construction after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961. Lyndon B. Johnson spent countless hours there while pursuing the war in Vietnam. George W. Bush used it during the war in Iraq. And during the tense hours when the assassination of Osama Bin Laden was being carried out. Barack Obama and his team monitored the mission in the Situation Room. in photos that became familiar to the public.
But in 2025, Donald Trump used the Situation Room for something else. The excerpted account from Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s forthcoming book “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. ” published by The New York Times on Wednesday. portrays it as a staging ground for managing—and burying—a scandal tied to Trump’s long friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.
The episode is framed as more than a scandal for scandal’s sake. It becomes a portrait of what happens when the White House can’t get its own story straight—when internal rivalry and self-protection collide with the promise of transparency.
Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, who died, is presented as a legitimate cause for concern. The account also connects the Epstein controversy to the 2024 election. describing how Trump and his leading supporters—many of whom took high-ranking positions in the administration—cynically used the Epstein case to discredit their opponents in the Democratic Party and the so-called “deep state.” The effect. the excerpt says. was to rile up the MAGA base. That anger turned into frustration when Trump’s team, in the account, betrayed its promise of transparency.
The tension inside the White House is described as sharp and persistent. Haberman and Swan write that “the White House needed a gesture of transparency to appease an increasingly angry base. but also a way to convey the message that the president was sympathetic to his supporters’ concerns.” The excerpt immediately adds why that plan was doomed: “Which itself was a problem. because he clearly wasn’t.”.
Trump, the account says, worried that some wealthy friends would be implicated. It also says he wanted the Epstein issue buried and was “snapping at anyone who mentioned it.” That combination—seeming to promise transparency while pushing to bury the story—set the stage for a stalling campaign that enraged not only the MAGA base but a broader public. too.
The contradiction then showed up inside the ranks of senior officials—some of whom had positioned themselves as transparency champions. Vice President JD Vance appears in the account as a strong advocate for transparency. but the excerpt suggests the motive could be political theater. tied to a potential 2028 presidential run. or possibly driven by access journalism realities. since the book relies on that kind of reporting and Vance may have been a major source.
The problem for the administration, as the excerpt presents it, is that those same officials served a president who wanted the opposite.
Kash Patel. identified in the account as FBI director. and Dan Bongino. identified as former FBI director. and former attorney general Pam Bondi all appear as part of a White House tangled in its own messaging. The excerpt also gives nicknames and street-level details that underline how personal the infighting became.
The situation reached a surreal point. The account describes senior administration officials meeting in the Situation Room to discuss how to handle claims about Trump abusing a trafficked Epstein victim.
The person at the center of those claims is identified as Epstein survivor Sarah Ransome. In the excerpt. Ransome claims “she knew a girl in Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring named Jen. who said she had sex with Trump.” She also claims that Jen told her that Trump had a predilection for nipples and that he had aggressively flicked and sucked hers.
The details are presented without embellishment, but the response inside the White House is depicted as chaotic. Haberman and Swan write that some advisers in the Situation Room “had never heard of the nipple claim,” while others had only “seemed to have only a passing familiarity with it.”
From there, proposals hardened into something closer to improvisation. One adviser. identified as White House counsel David Warrington. suggested the issue could be solved by offering a pardon to Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell. Vance, the excerpt says, wanted Tucker Carlson to interview Maxwell, with the view that this would clear Trump’s name.
Bondi is depicted as the figure whose approach backfired immediately in public. She is described with a right-wing nickname: “Blondie.” The excerpt says she made a major bungle by claiming in a press event that she had Epstein’s files on her desk.
That misstep is portrayed as especially enraging to Bongino. in part because of his podcasting background and what the excerpt calls his fear of being seen as betraying his audience. Haberman and Swan report that Bongino fumed. “Blondie fucked this whole thing up.” In a separate meeting with Bondi. the excerpt says Bongino yelled. “You fucked this thing up from the start. The way you’ve been talking about this — that dumb fucking charade with the Epstein files. the ‘They’re on my desk’ nonsense. all the promises to the folks out there.”.
When a White House can’t even align internally on what it claims to know. what it claims to fear. and what it intends to do—when its own people are arguing in the same spaces built for emergency intelligence—the scandal stops being only about the alleged misconduct at its center. It becomes about the machinery around it.
Eventually, the excerpt says, Congress forced Trump’s hand through the bipartisan Epstein Transparency Act.
The account returns to a broader argument as it moves beyond the Epstein story. It describes the Epstein cover-up as a bungled process that highlights how dysfunctional the Trump administration is, and it places that infighting and incoherence next to a second crisis: the war with Iran.
In that conflict, the excerpt says Trump has repeatedly indicated he is looking for an off-ramp, but it calls the current ceasefire “merely nominal,” marred by constant attacks on both sides. The negotiations are described as precarious and vulnerable to being derailed.
One reason, the excerpt says, is that the Trump White House is deeply split. A powerful hawkish faction in the GOP. allied with Israel. is described as unable to accept the concessions Iran is demanding. The excerpt also points to what it characterizes as wild shifts in policy—moving from threats of renewed bombings one day to indications that a deal had been struck the next—as further evidence of an administration divided against itself.
The story’s through-line. as the excerpt frames it. is stark: the dysfunction inside the White House doesn’t just undermine the presidency. It also endangers the wider world—precisely because the same kind of disorder described around Epstein is presented as a feature of decision-making in the most consequential foreign-policy moment.
As the excerpt puts it, the Situation Room’s purpose is to support the hardest decisions in the hardest hours. The new account suggests Trump’s administration turned that purpose into a place for denial, delay, and internal power struggles—an approach that, once set in motion, is hard to contain.
Donald Trump White House Situation Room Jeffrey Epstein Ghislaine Maxwell JD Vance Kash Patel Dan Bongino Pam Bondi David Warrington Sarah Ransome Epstein Transparency Act war with Iran ceasefire Tucker Carlson U.S. politics