REGIME CHANGE: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan
In January 2026, The New York Times asked Donald Trump why, having told his family not to make new business deals in foreign countries during his first term as president, he was permitting them to do so now. He answered: “Because I found out that nobody cared. I’m allowed to.”
In “Regime Change,” the New York Times journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s riveting and richly textured narrative of the first 14 months of Trump’s second term, the authors include this reply as part of a coldly devastating account of how the Trumps have added more than $1 billion to the family fortune.
By “nobody,” as Haberman and Swan make clear, Trump meant those who enable his impunity: the sycophantic courtiers with whom he has surrounded himself; the Republican majority in Congress that abandoned its duty to check executive power; the tech moguls who rushed to pay homage to him; the MAGA base that venerates him. So long as none of them publicly objects to his actions, he has permission to do whatever he wants.
All this presents a profound challenge to journalism. The profession is shaped by an assumption that has been around at least since the Greek tragedians: Revelation is followed by reversal. When Oedipus’ (or Richard Nixon’s) crimes are exposed, he must fall from power. But not so Trump. With a few notable exceptions, he relies on a collective shrug of indifference from those in his support system, and defies exposure. What can journalists do in a world where there is no shame and, apparently, no consequence?
Haberman and Swan have spent more than a decade covering Trump’s political career and the events they portray are in themselves well known: the excesses of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, the chaos of Trump’s tariffs, the vampiric return of Jeffrey Epstein, the militarization of American cities, the unleashing of ICE on migrant communities, the abuse of the justice system to go after Trump’s perceived enemies, the assault on the independence of the Federal Reserve, the headlong stumble into war on Iran.
What the authors add is the vivid detail that makes these events feel actual. They wrest reality itself back from the distorted world of entertainment, illusion, fantasy and denial that Trump has generated around himself. It is this flood of provocation, atrocity, self-dealing and fabrication that makes Haberman and Swan’s counternarrative so vital.
In an hourlong interview with the president in March 2026, Trump reflects on his legal battles and presidential campaigns and tells the authors, “Essentially I won every fucking time,” but then complains, “And I’m tired of winning and winning and winning and just getting bad fucking press. It’s about time that you tell the truth. Okay?”
T.S. Eliot wrote that “human kind/Cannot bear very much reality,” and in this at least Trump is all too human. Here is a man who, as Haberman and Swan report, employs an aide, Natalie Harp, to immerse him in “a fresh stream of positive news stories and social media comments that she would often read aloud.” Harp, the authors note, “wrote Trump adoring letters that she left in his personal spaces, including one that read, ‘You are all that matters to me.’”
Triumphant Roman emperors are said to have had an enslaved attendant whisper in their ears that they were, after all, merely mortal. Trump, even as he is planning to mark his own immortality with a colossal triumphal arch in Washington, has his ears filled with constant trills of adulation.
In this bath of self-glorification, even imperial conquest seems easy: Haberman and Swan write that, alongside his public desire to annex Canada and Greenland, Trump privately “told several associates that Venezuela could be America’s 51st state and that he would appoint a governor to run it.” The success of the daring raid on that country in January 2026 and the capture of its president, Nicolás Maduro, reinforced Trump’s certainty that he could reshape the world quickly and painlessly.
Haberman and Swan burst all these bubbles. “Regime Change” is that good old-fashioned creation: a chronicle. And chronicles have never been more necessary — or more countercultural. The “constant stream” of positive stories that Trump’s aides feed him is recycled into the posts he pumps out on his own social media platform, sometimes nearly all night long. (Haberman and Swan report that when the United States appeared to be joining the Israel bombing campaign against Iran in June 2025, reporters seeking comment from the White House “were directed to Trump’s Truth Social feed.”)
Moreover, the authors depict the weird fusion of reality and show business in the White House. “We need plot twists,” Trump tells a “startled ally” as he muses on the possible appointment of his vanquished rival, the Florida governor Ron DeSantis, as defense secretary. “I’m not a big fan of Ukraine,” he announces at a high-level Oval Office meeting. “Except their women. They keep winning Miss Universe.” He nominates John Ratcliffe as C.I.A. director because, “if you were going to cast a guy to play C.I.A. director, that’s who you’d pick.”
He also declares his scandalous public dressing-down of the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, in February 2025, “great television” and “better than ‘The Apprentice.’” And his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, keeps Trump supplied with gruesome video footage of the bloody effects of drone strikes on human targets, described by one official as “Hegseth’s snuff films.”
There are episodes in “Regime Change” that read like satire. Trump, worrying about his own envisaged arch, calls the French president, Emmanuel Macron, to ask him whether there is a viewing deck on the Arc de Triomphe and, if so, whether it is dangerous: “What do you think, Emmanuel, do people jump off it?”
In ordinary times, the authors’ exercise in almost instant history might seem premature and precipitate. But if these crazy times are not to become ordinary — if we are not to be habituated to the recklessness of autocratic misrule — we cannot afford to wait for the archives to be opened.
The plot twist that Trump will not relish is that by the end of this saga of unrestrained hubris, there are intimations of the nemesis that must follow: the war on Iran throwing the Strait of Hormuz into chaos, the rising cost of living making a mockery of his promise to control inflation, his popularity slumping to new lows. Trump will not want to read this book because it shows him, not winning and winning, but gradually losing it as reality has the temerity not to bend itself to his whims. Will anyone whisper in his ear that Haberman and Swan have done what he demanded and told the truth?
REGIME CHANGE: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump | By Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan | Simon & Schuster | 464 pp. | $34
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