New York Times’s Haberman, Swan: Trump ‘answers more questions than Joe Biden’

New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan said Monday that President Trump “answers more questions” from reporters than his predecessor, former President Biden.

C-SPAN released a clip of an interview featuring the two reporters with “Q&A” host Peter Slen, set to air Monday at 9 p.m. EDT, where they discussed being unable to directly interview the president for their new book, “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.”

“Let me be clear about something: He answers more questions than Joe Biden,” Swan said, to which Haberman agreed. “He’s more available. There are reporters asking him questions when they’re in the pool, there’s no question about that.”

Swan emphasized that when he and Haberman “want to get inside a room, the Oval [Office], the Situation Room for the most sensitive conversations, the way to get that is not to call Donald Trump on a cellphone for three minutes. … It’s not that useful.”

Both reporters said they have his cellphone number but said they have talked to him very little during his term. Haberman said that it was clear to her and Swan that they would have to directly ask Trump to sit down for an interview.

“This is a book where he is the subject,” Haberman said. “We wanted to give him the opportunity to answer direct questions, but we also did not want it to just sort of be ‘open mic night’ and sit down ‘How’s the news of the day, sir?'”

Trump frequently takes questions from reporters, even when at times there might be confrontations based on the question, the reporter or the news outlet. The president held 88 press conferences during his first term and 16 as of April 20 in his second term, compared with Biden’s total of 37, according to the University of California, Santa Barbara’s American Presidency Project.

Biden, however, held fewer press conferences and media interviews than most modern presidents since former President Reagan. Before his term ended, Axios reported in June 2024 that Biden held 164 press conferences and media interviews, citing analysis from presidential scholar Martha Joynt Kumar. Second to Biden was former President George W. Bush, with 248 interviews and press conferences.

By comparison, the same report had Trump with the second-highest number of press conferences and interviews at 468, behind former President Obama’s 570.

The second Trump White House has frequently made shows of transparency and called the administration the “most transparent … in modern American history.”

Haberman said this was “simply not true.”

“I’m not rating him against other presidents,” she added. “This is not a transparent administration. So those calls allow him to maintain that veneer while really dictating the terms and not answering much at all.”