The scene was the Situation Room, the bunker-like nerve centre deep in the bowels of the White House where the US President retreats with his generals and intelligence chiefs to deal with America's greatest crises.

And the crisis in question? How to handle accusations that the leader of the free world had an obsession with women's nipples.

According to a blockbuster new book that lifts the lid on Trump's anarchic second term in the White House, this weighty issue was discussed last August in the third of a string of top-secret meetings at which senior members of his administration discussed how to handle the release of the Justice Department's eagerly anticipated files on Jeffrey Epstein.

The Trump aides knew there would be hell to pay if it wasn't done in a way that minimised embarrassment to President Donald Trump, the late paedophile financier's old pal from their Palm Beach partying days.

One idea, rapidly dismissed as too shameless even for the Trump administration, was to have Right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson interview Epstein confederate Ghislaine Maxwell in prison so she could exonerate Trump of any blame, perhaps in return for her sentence being commuted.

The files included emails sent by Epstein accuser Sarah Ransome in which she claimed she knew a young woman called Jen in Epstein's sex-trafficking ring who said she'd had sex with Trump and 'that he had a nipple fetish and had flicked and sucked her nipples'.

Ransome claimed she'd seen the evidence and said Jen's nipples looked 'incredibly painful… and I remember wincing when I looked at them'. (The President has denied any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein.)

According to political journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, the authors of Regime Change: Inside The Imperial Presidency Of Donald Trump, Vice-President JD Vance said he thought it was 'OK' to release the nipple-related files as their boss had been accused of worse.

But Susie Wiles, Trump's formidable chief of staff, argued that he would 'not, in fact, be OK with it'.

The authors write: 'One of the officials present would later observe, it was a 'surreal' experience to be discussing Donald Trump and abused nipples in the White House Situation Room.'

It was indeed surreal and there are plenty more such moments in a book, published this week and based on more than 1,000 interviews, that has reportedly both infuriated and worried Trump and his closest aides.

Some have accused its authors of obtaining classified Situation Room audio tapes or even bugging the White House themselves.

Given some of the outrageous behaviour – from dressing down Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office to hosting a sleazy cage fight on the White House lawn earlier this month – that Trump is prepared to exhibit in public, no wonder there's tension over anyone exposing what he and his inner circle get up to in private.

TYRANT LOVE

After refusing to talk to the authors of Regime Change for nearly two months, the notoriously mercurial President changed his mind in March – possibly because his popularity was plunging over the Iran war.

They found him in the Oval Office, his desk covered not with maps and charts of the conflict but with pictures of maple trees he wanted to buy for the White House gardens.

He shocked them by claiming he was more powerful than any of history's strongest leaders, including Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Stalin, Mao and Hitler.

'They didn't have airplanes, right? You couldn't travel around,' he told his stunned guests.

Trump recited the names of these supposedly lesser leaders from a two-page 'Top Ten' list he said had been compiled by a 'presidential historian'. 

The list ended with William the Conqueror, about whom the historian said: 'If President Trump is the American Eagle, William the Conqueror was merely a sparrow.'

What was revealing, say the authors of Regime Change, was 'the evident pleasure he took in the company of Mao, Hitler and Stalin, masters of state control through murder, torture and detention'.

Who was this perspicacious historian? Trump couldn't remember his name but, says Regime Change, it turned out not to be some Ivy League sage but the former caddy of golf champion Gary Player.

GOLDEN TOUCH

Trump's love of gold and gilded decor is no secret, nor are his efforts to add some bling to the Oval Office. But until now, few knew that he did any of the actual redecorating himself.

According to Regime Change, White House Press secretary Karoline Leavitt once entered the Oval Office to find him clutching a tube of superglue as he attempted to fix gold decorations around the marble fireplace.

His aides were generally unenthusiastic about his gold obsession but Trump reassured them that when 'people look at it, all they see is cash'.

Trump is said to defer to no one on matters of interior design, especially when it comes to his own private quarters.

He and his wife Melania are known to have separate bedrooms. But, although the First Lady got the White House's master bedroom, Trump 'seemed almost to be competing with her – determined to have the better room'.

When she was absent from the White House during the early weeks of his second term, he shamelessly looted objects from her bedroom for his own, carrying them himself, as part of his plan to 'spruce up his bedroom with gold and other flourishes'.

He has two TVs in his bedroom and another in his bathroom. He also insists on having wall-to-wall carpet in the latter room – a very 1970s touch, which led staff to take emergency measures to stop it going mouldy. 

And despite his reported germaphobia, he can be a bit of a slob.

He frequently snacks in his bedroom at night (he often stays up until the early hours posting manically on social media), leaving an 'array of empty potato chip bags, Starburst wrappers and ice cream cartons in the trash or on the floor', reports Regime Change.

Staff had to begin checking the rubbish bins, after it emerged he was sometimes carelessly throwing out White House sterling silver utensils with his trash.

MISS UNIVERSE

Many critics would regard Trump's notoriously ungracious treatment of visiting Ukrainian leader Zelensky at their first Oval Office meeting in February 2025 as one of the low points of his second term. 

He, apparently, thinks the complete opposite.

Trump described the televised encounter, in which he and Vance berated Zelensky for everything from being ungrateful for US support in the war with Russia to not wearing a suit, as 'better TV than The Apprentice', the business reality series that boosted Trump's fame.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had advised the President not to have the Ukraine leader in the Oval Office, according to the new book. 

He told associates: 'I've dealt with this little f***er. He's tricky. He's like the special-needs child for the Europeans. And he's acting like Mr Bean on crack.'

Trump needed little convincing, however. At a meeting to discuss the Ukraine conflict shortly after he became President for the second time, he told aides: 'I am not a big fan of Ukraine. Except their women. They keep winning Miss Universe.'

According to the authors of Regime Change, Trump then 'looked at his long-serving aide Dan Scavino with a smirk' and added: 'Dan knows what I'm talking about.'

It was unclear what he meant, but Secretary of State Marco Rubio 'looked stunned'.

Team Trump was, of course, far less hostile towards the man who actually started the Ukraine war.

Steve Witkoff, Trump's chief negotiator on Ukraine, once asked Vladimir Putin to sign a piece of paper he had been doodling on during negotiations. Witkoff took it home, the book says, and framed it.

NIGHTMARE BOSS

Zelensky may not agree but many visitors to the Oval Office are 'charmed' by the friendly reception they receive from a usually 'solicitous and flattering' Trump 'offering Diet Cokes and candy', says Regime Change.

He likes to tell bawdy jokes and will compliment guests on how good they look. He also loves to show off the quality of the outdoor speakers piping his favourite music – Pavarotti, Sinead O'Connor and James Brown – into the Rose Garden.

Another habit is to pepper foreign visitors, especially leaders, 'with questions about the dangerous animals in their countries with the fascination of a child'.

It sounds endearing but he is a nightmare to pin down. 'I still can't fully describe what the Oval Office is like with him,' one visitor told the Regime Change authors.

'I'll never forget talking about a highly classified programme, and this guy – looked like just a salt-of-the-earth, country guy – walks in and he's got samples for the Rose Garden paving. Pops them on the desk. 

And the President stops what we're talking about, gets up, and walks out there with him and I see a lot of hands moving.

'And he comes back and then looks over our shoulders, and the curator is there with somebody to drill the cherubs into the wall that he had brought up from

Mar-a-Lago [Trump's private club and residential estate in Florida]. And then he goes back to the people on the phone, gives them guidance. And then he tries to come back to us, but we're out of time.'

SILICON VALLEY SYCOPHANTS

He may be a solicitous host but Trump also delights in humiliating people, either behind their back or to their face.

Observers were stunned by the sight of so many Silicon Valley billionaires, who'd once been fierce critics of Trump, attending his inauguration to pay homage.

This hypocrisy didn't escape Trump, who reportedly openly mocked the craven ways in which the tech barons who once scorned him were now 'kissing my ass' after his 2024 election victory.

He enjoyed showing friends a photo of a letter that Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg had got one of his young daughters (the oldest of whom would have been eight or nine) to write to Trump after the election in which she said she looked forward to the 'golden age of America'. 

Trump also brandished a post-election 'greeting' he received from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in the form of a 'smiling selfie' of him and Lauren Sanchez, now his wife.

The President's best friend in Silicon Valley, Elon Musk, had no sympathy with his tech rivals. 'First-class grovelling,' he told Trump.

PORTABLE FAN CLUB

Other sycophants Trump can forgive, however.

One is a young blonde aide named Natalie Harp whose job appears to be to keep his ego pepped up at all times. 

She follows him around, reading out supportive media reports and social media comments which she later copies on a portable printer. 

She also writes him 'adoring letters' of her own that she leaves in his 'personal spaces' including one that read: 'You're all that matters to me.'

On learning about Harp's duties, even Wiles, Trump's White House chief of staff, couldn't quite believe it, telling others she remembered thinking: 'Where am I?'

IRAN TALKS

Regime Change describes a hush-hush visit, just four months ago, by Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House Situation Room in which he persuaded Trump to join him in their ill-fated attack on Iran.

Netanyahu confidently assured the President – who had previously told underlings he regarded the Israeli as a 'con-man' – that victory was 'near certain' and they would overthrow the Iranian regime, weakening its military so much that it wouldn't be able to close the Strait of Hormuz.

'Sounds good to me, the President told the Prime Minister,' reports the new book.

At a subsequent meeting without the Israelis, his advisers chorused that he should not agree. 

The director of the CIA called Netanyahu's plans 'farcical'. Secretary of State Rubio called it 'bulls**t' and the Pentagon's most senior general warned that the Israelis 'oversell and their plans are not always well-developed'.

But Trump wasn't listening to his experts. As everyone else quickly fell in line with his decision, not daring to defy him, only Vice-President Vance continued to hold out, calling going to war with Iran a 'terrible idea'.

LOOKING AFTER NUMBER ONE

One thing that will never change, say the book's authors, is Trump's fixation on his own interests.

They are convinced that the main reason Trump ran for President again in 2024 was, faced with myriad charges, impeachments and even criminal convictions, he simply wanted to stay out of prison.

During his 2024 hush-money trial in New York, in which he was convicted of 34 criminal counts for falsifying business records over a pay-off to porn star Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about her accusations they'd had an affair, Trump heard about an incident that had occurred across the street.

A mentally ill man, 'consumed by conspiracy theories', had set himself on fire in a park opposite the court. 'Do you think he did it for me?' Trump asked an aide, according to the book. 'Let's tell people that he did it for me.'

It will be down to future generations to judge whether Trump is, as he appears to believe, the most powerful leader in history – or the most feckless clown to ever occupy the White House.