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Donald Trump declared he would not doing to war with Iran last year, according to a new book, which claims he told Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk: “We’re not doing that.”

The US president is said to have provided the assurance during an Oval Office meeting with rightwing commentator Carlson and SpaceX CEO Musk – the world’s richest person, who recently became its first trillionaire – early last year.

According to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, though Carlson had criticized Trump from his perch as an influential rightwing media voice, Trump “solicit[ed] Carlson’s advice, believing he still had sway over a significant portion of the base”.

“Carlson had criticized Trump for refusing to knock [Israeli prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu over the Gaza carnage; now he would make clear to the president that a broader war would be his ruin,” Haberman and Swan write. “‘They want you to go to war with Iran,’ Carlson said. ‘We’re not doing that,’ Trump answered.”

Trump is also said to have told Carlson: “I don’t think there’s ever been an American president as powerful as I am.”

“Struck by this hubris,” Haberman and Swan write, “Carlson replied: ‘Certainly not since FDR. Really, the only thing that could wreck it is war with Iran.’”

This year, on 28 February, Trump attacked Iran. An agreement ending the war was signed earlier this week.

Haberman and Swan’s reporting appears in a book, Regime Change, that will be published in the US on Tuesday. Excerpts have included accounts of Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran, Situation Room discussions about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and attempts to suspend legal rights amid an immigration crackdown.

Trump is also said to have “regaled” Musk and Carlson with “lingering” descriptions of injuries including “mutilated genitals and missing hands” caused by Israel’s 2024 “exploding pagers” attack on Hezbollah.

The US president told “horror stories of the destruction that the explosions had wrought” in the Oval Office, Haberman and Swan write.

“He had seen pictures, he said. Mutilated genitals and missing hands. He was horrified by the injuries, but fascinated as well, lingering on the scenes and the details,” according to the book. “One survivor, he said, ‘looked like a great white shark came and just took a chunk out of him. It was like a shark bite. It was horrible.’

“He grew volatile, repeating, ‘It’s horrible, horrible!’”

The Oval Office scene with Musk and Carlson is an example of extensive reporting about the ageing president’s increasingly erratic behavior.

Israel carried out its pager attack on leaders of Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy group, in Lebanon in September 2024.

Haberman and Swan’s depiction of Trump’s fascination with injuries caused by the pagers appears to have been informed by Carlson, a critic of Israel and the Iran war. Musk, who was then leading the “department of government efficiency” attack on the federal government at the time of the exchange, is depicted as “transfixed” by a golden pager presented to Trump by the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Carlson’s words and those of Trump are presented in quotes, which the authors say indicates personal knowledge of words and situations.

“There was something else that captivated” Trump, the authors write. “Many of the devices had detonated in public, and it was hard to know who was holding a pager when it exploded. The indiscriminate nature of the killing and maiming had shocked Trump, and while he was taken by the ingenuity, he showed a measure of disbelief at its recklessness.

“He seemed at once enthralled and horrified.”