Regime Change

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. He has ignored court orders and claimed powers that Congress once checked. What remains is a President willing to take enormous risks that have toppled heads of state and taken the country to war again in the Middle East; 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 remade the global trading system and launched military operations that have shocked the world, and 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. Haberman and Swan 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.