President Donald Trump appears to be losing sleep over a bombshell book that, among other revelations, lays bare his late-night eating habits.
The octogenarian president posted a lengthy Truth Social message just after midnight on Sunday, lashing out at Maggie Haberman, co-author of Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, over the newly released tell-all book.
“Based on a very quick and boring briefing concerning the Magot Hagerman book about me, it is mostly made up, Fake News, largely fiction, as have been most of the things she has written about me for so many years,” Trump, 80, wrote, using an insulting nickname he has long used for the New York Times reporter who has covered him for more than a decade.
The post went on to call Haberman “a third rate writer,” who “continues to spew out garbage,” while listing what Trump described as everything the White House correspondent had gotten “wrong” about him. The president did not mention The New York Times’ Jonathan Swan, who co-wrote the book with Haberman.
Haberman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“REMEMBER, I WON THE ELECTION, BIG – ALL SEVEN SWING STATES, THE POPULAR VOTE, 86% of the Counties…” Trump went on in his post.
Among a string of claims in Regime Change, officially released on Tuesday, the president is said to have been most “infuriated” by the allegation that he is a “nighttime snacker” who leaves behind trash after late-night binges.
Haberman and Swan also portray Trump as a “night owl” who struggles with sleep, often only drifting off in the early hours of the morning, and note that he does not share a bedroom with his wife, Melania Trump.
The book goes on to detail a series of claims about Trump’s lifestyle and health, including a preference for carpets in the bathroom—a habit that reportedly concerns staffers over fears of “mold growing underneath.”
It also adds another alleged health issue to a list the Daily Beast has been reporting on since the start of Trump’s second term, claiming the president has “trouble hearing” and often asks people to repeat questions.
In his Sunday post, Trump appeared to hint at a wider claim, referencing speculation that has allegedly circulated within the White House following the release of excerpts from Regime Change, which included details of Situation Room meetings that reportedly contained verbatim quotes from highly classified discussions on Iran and the Epstein files.
“We’re afraid some of our most sensitive conversations were being recorded,” a White House source told Axios, adding that they “have no idea which ones.”
The president on Sunday highlighted that Haberman and Swan “don’t have the audio tapes that they imply they have,” despite the authors never having claimed to possess any audio recordings from the Situation Room and declining to comment when asked about the allegation.
According to the authors of Regime Change, the book is based on more than 1,000 interviews with people close to Trump, including officials, and, as Axios notes, the detailed accounts of meetings are more likely to have come from White House insiders than from any recording device.
To conclude his midnight rant, Trump went on to change the nickname he had given Haberman earlier in the post, writing: “Just another Margot Con Job!” He then shifted abruptly to another subject that has dominated his posts for more than three months, the war in Iran, adding: “And Iran will never have a Nuclear Weapon!!!”
The release of Regime Change was met with such strong demand on publication day that its publisher, Simon & Schuster, ordered an additional 150,000 copies to meet demand.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
