Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump

A riveting, intimate and revelatory account of the most radical and consequential presidency of our time.

From the two reporters who have covered him more closely than perhaps anyone else over the past decade comes this definitive portrait of Donald Trump in the White House. Regime Change covers the first year of Trump’s second presidency – a term liberated from every constraint that defined his first. The generals who once told him ‘no’ are gone, and the lawyers who remain have learned to pick their battles. His administration has flouted court orders and he has claimed powers that Congress once checked. What remains is a President willing to take enormous risks that have upended global markets and toppled heads of state; an imperial President operating almost entirely on instinct alone.

Based on hundreds of interviews and unprecedented reporting from deep within the administration’s most closely guarded rooms, Regime Change takes the reader inside the Situation Room and into the secret Oval Office deliberations that have launched a new war in the Middle East and seen Trump seal the border, surge National Guard troops into cities, and send immigration agents into deadly clashes with protestors. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan bring us behind the scenes of a presidency that has transformed the culture, turned the Justice Department into an agent of retribution against the President’s enemies and the office itself into a brazen vehicle for profit. They reveal a second term propelled by a historical irony that Trump himself has come to understand: that the indictments, the convictions, the assassination attempts and four years of exile made him not weaker but far more powerful, more vengeful and more willing to gamble than any President in modern history.

This is the story of how Trump has used that power, who has tried to stop him, and why nearly all of them have failed. It is also the story of something American journalists are more accustomed to chronicling in distant capitals than in their own: a President who has fundamentally altered the nature of the office he holds – and, with it, how the rest of the world understands American power. It is an account of Regime Change right here in America – a landmark real-time history of a modern presidency like no other.

About the Author :
Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent for The New York Times. A New York City native, Haberman worked at the New York Post, New York Daily News, and Politico, before joining the Times in 2015. She has covered six US presidential elections and several gubernatorial and New York City mayoral races. She was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on President Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia. In 2021, she was part of a team that was a Pulitzer finalist for coverage of President Trump’s handling of the coronavirus. She has received the White House Correspondents’ Association’s Aldo Beckman Award, as well as the Newswomen’s Club of New York’s Front Page Award for Journalist of the Year. She is the author of Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America. She lives in New York City with her husband and their three children.

Jonathan Swan is a White House correspondent for The New York Times. Originally from Sydney, Australia, he has reported on Donald Trump since 2015, covering all three of his campaigns and his first term in office. Previously at Axios and The Hill, he won an Emmy Award for his 2020 interview of then-President Trump and received the White House Correspondents’ Association’s Aldo Beckman Award. He began his career as a teenage copy boy at a Sydney newspaper and later covered federal politics in Australia’s capital for The Sydney Morning Herald. He became a US citizen in 2024 and lives in Virginia with his wife and two children, with a third on the way.