About the first 14 months of Trump’s second term, the book is the product of three years of concentrated research by New York Times investigative reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, who say it “has been the hardest thing either of us has ever done professionally.”
It’s number one on the best-seller lists and should stay there for a while because it’s an impressive example of evidentiary journalism. Skeptics might ask, so what else is new, but what distinguishes the book is its documented fact-finding and fairness, and the wide sweep it makes of interviews, documents, and primary and secondary sources.
It’s not a tome to be read fast. It’s too overwhelming, too detailed in its explorations and explanations of a president in love with himself and his own power, and the ways in which he has normalized what was in earlier times considered outrageous and illegal. The book concentrates on Trump and his team of enablers, some of whom had been vocal critics in his first term. It quotes how he cruelly enjoys pitting key personnel against one another, or leads some on in public while having already made plans to get rid of them. The picture is clearly of a man for whom vengeance looms large over vision and who trusts his own gut instincts over considered policy debate. He’s still so obsessed about convincing the public he won the 2020 election that he emerges, ironically, not as an ideologue like Stephen Miller, pursuing beliefs, but a case study.
Structured as four sections -- Whirlwind, Retribution, The Enemy Within and Plunder – Regime Change ends with extensive notes and a short epilogue in which the authors, fruitlessly, meet with the president for an hour to get his reaction and do some additional fact-checking. He welcomes them, is affable, but unfocused, going off on tangents and irrelevancies. Readers looking for breakthrough moments or concessions will be disappointed, though they may come away with a sense of Trump as a more active and concentrated leader than news accounts suggest. The reason is that Regime Change does not follow Trump’s daily life, which surely includes downtime- when Trump is simply out of it – due to fatigue, medical problems, indifference, TV watching, forgetfulness, or attention to cosmetic sessions having to do with optics.
The book also does not cover his relationship with Melania or with Barron, who gets a consoling shout-out after Charlie Kirk is killed: “Calm down, honey, calm down.”
The book is what its subtitle promises: an inside look at a man bent on establishing and sustaining an imperial presidency. Inside – and outside – readers will see and hear a leader full of foul-mouthed hatred, intent on making over history, the White House, the world. And doing it fast, Stephen Miller’s M.O. Susie Wiles, Trump’s Chief of Staff, is quoted as sometimes taking a more moderate line than her boss, but not arguing with him, and then going along.
Some readers, however, may sniff out motives suggestive of Trump’s lifelong behavior. He has a dedicated staff of advisors and followers, but apparently no real friends, and it would seem that he will never get over thinking that he somehow failed his father, who taught him how to lie and cheat, or find anyone as reliable as Roy Cohn, who told him never to admit mistakes. At a couple of telling moments (to me) he acknowledges that his “Dad” would not have been proud of him after certain actions. Fred Trump’s infamous line was: there are only two kinds of people: “killers and losers.” At one point, Trump notes that when he was younger, he wanted to pursue music and film, but was forbidden to do so.
The book ends with these sentences. Haberman and Swan have used up their hour: “We gathered our things and walked out. The rain had eased, though a heavy gray still hung over the capital.” Read that metaphorically.
