Regime Change: Maggie Haberman on Trump’s unchecked second term

Are we witnessing the most consequential presidency in history? It’s a question that looms large as the country heads into a summer celebrating 250 years since its founding. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, White House reporters for the New York Times, explore that question in their new book, “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.” The two have conducted hundreds of interviews taking them inside the oval office to reveal an unconstrained Donald Trump making unprecedented use of executive authority on everything from the economy to immigration.

Join us for a conversation with Haberman led by Here & Now co-host Indira Lakshmanan. Signed copies of the book will be available to purchase from our bookstore partner Brookline Booksmith.

About “Regime Change”

From Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, the two reporters who have covered him more closely than perhaps anyone else over the past decade, comes a definitive new 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 protesters. Haberman and 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.

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