The latest in the unending genre of Trump books, covering primarily the first year of Trump's second term, is Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump (Simon & Schuster), by two New York Times journalists, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. (Haberman, author of an earlier 2022 book on Trump, Confidence Man, has followed Trump since his New York real estate days.) The two veteran journalists conducted over a thousand interviews, including an hour-long Oval Office interview with the President himself in March 2026.
Much of what the authors report is already familiar from current news, but this book is filled with detailed reporting about the personalities and practices of this unique administration, that reflect their ability to access consequential information from their sources. Above all, the book captures the administration's atmospherics - the feel of a quasi-imperial court, presided over by a mercurial and vengeful would-be autocrat, who brags about being more powerful than "Napoleon, Hitler, Mao, Stalin," among other historical luminaries. It is an interesting and engaging account, that is at the same time tedious and depressing.
First and foremost, this is a chronicle about a second term that is radically different in many respects even from Trump's first term, which was much more cautious and more wedded through its personnel to traditional institutional mechanisms. "In his second term," the authors write, "President Trump has bent and even broken institutions. No modern President has so quickly reduced his party in Congress to such thorough compliance as Trump did in 2025. And no President in modern memory has so openly used the powers of the office to pressure into alignment the major pillars of civil society and the private sector, from the largest tech companies to the most venerable news organizations to Big Law and the Ivy League universities."
It is also an account of the performative theatricality of it all, a cocktail of fact and fiction thrown together to produce a good show, with the President as the star and the Vice President, cabinet members, other public officials, and even foreign leaders as supporting players with their assigned subordinate parts. The anti-"wokeness" cultural takeover gave Trump "the kind of theatrical opportunities stymied since he ws a young man," who "had wanted to attend film school," and " had tried producing a Broadway show in 1970."
The local cast of subordinate supporting characters includes J.D. Vance, of "Have you [Zelensky] said thank you once, this entire meeting," fame. There is Marco Rubio, for whom the Oval Office, not Foggy Bottom, became "now his de facto workspace," and who"had long wanted to force regime change in Cuba, and he had unfinished business in Venezuela." There is Stephen Miller, "known as the keeper of grievances," who "had an impulse for autocracy that matched Trump's." And then there is Elon Musk, the "self-styled demolition man," of whom Trump lamented, "They always leave me," after Musk opposed the Big Beautiful Bill. "They always do this. This is why I can't have friends."
When it comes to foreign leaders, the cast of characters is familiar enough. One foreign leader whose story has since acquired enlarged significance in the light of recent international events is Benjamin Netanyahu. Perhaps one of the most remarked upon passages in the book is the authors' amazing account of the meeting in the Situation Room in February 2026 at which the Israeli Prime Minister made the case for war with Iran. His arguments were largely rebutted later by intelligence officials, but - as we all now know - the President made his own disastrous decision, swayed somewhat by his earlier successful attack on Venezuela.The case for war also "benefited from the fact that Trump's information loop in his second term was much tighter than in the first. Trump rarely heard from skeptics. He had largely tuned out his critics and was surrounded by flatterers."
The debate before the short-term June 2025 attack on Iran's nuclear facilities anticipated the same concerns that would surface later with the more disastrous 2026 war ("Operation Epic Fury"). In Washington in 2025, there was worry that the Israelis "were unwilling to entertain any option other than a military campaign against Iran, and that they were steadily working to dislodge the White House from its diplomatic solution." Meanwhile, the Iranians worried "that Trump was so eager to get a deal that he would sign on to something that they couldn't live with."
Besides JD Vance, Tucker Carlson also argued with the President prior to the 2026 war. Carlson "had come to the Oval office several times over the previous year to warn Trump that a war with Iran woudl destroy his presidency. ... 'I know you're worried about it, but it's going to be okay.' Trump said. Carlson asked how he knew. 'Because it always is,' Trump replied."
The authors conclude that Trump is "an American President willing to deploy the full range of the nation's economic and military power without the inhibition that had characterized many of his predecessors, eradicating whatever systematic checks he could and often ignoring the ones that remained." They agree with him "that if he had served a consecutive second term beginning in January 2021, he would never have accumulated the power he now wielded." How has this happened? "The indictments, the conviction, the assassination attempts, the four years of exile that allowed him to shed the restraining forces of his first term, to assemble a team of true loyalists who had spent years studying the levers of government and plotting how to seize them - all of it had, paradoxically, made Trump stronger, more ruthless, and more commanding than he could have been otherwise: the most powerful President of our lifetimes."
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