Overview
- An excerpt from Regime Change by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan quotes President Trump using the vulgar epithet toward Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick during a dispute over the administration's 'Liberation Day' tariffs.
- The book, which CNN and Politico obtained and whose reporting draws on roughly 1,000 interviews and contemporaneous notes or recordings, attributes the line to direct witnesses or records.
- White House spokesperson Kush Desai issued a statement praising Lutnick and saying he and the president continue to work closely together, while the Commerce Department declined to comment.
- Broadcasters and reporters limited how they reproduced the expletive on air, with CNN correspondent Jamie Gangel refusing to read the word aloud, illustrating media choices about airing vulgar presidential language.
- The episode is framed by reporting that tariff revenues later eased some internal objections and that Lutnick, according to the book, later embraced the exchange by calling himself the president's 'twenty-five-billion-dollar-a-month p*ssy.'