There’s a telling scene in Regime Change, the devastating new chronicle from New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan about the first year of the second Trump administration. Elon Musk, erstwhile DOGE leader, had just split with the president over the Big Beautiful Bill, ranting on social media that the signature piece of legislation was an “abomination.” Swan and Haberman describe President Trump’s reaction when he sees the post: He looked at it for several beats, an expression close to pensive crossing his face. “They always leave me,” he finally said. “They always do this. This is why I can’t have friends.”
President Trump, the most powerful man in the world, maybe in history, comes off in these pages as among the most miserable of humans — surrounded by sycophants and toadies, living in a gilded palace, filled with rage and bile. It’s an unpleasant and chaotic portrait, one that could almost be satirical but for the fact that his wars, police-state tactics, and pettiest grievances have affected all of our lives.
Divided into four parts — “Whirlwind,” “Retribution,” “The Enemy Within,” and “Plunder” — each section covering just what their titles suggest, Regime Change starts in the Oval Office as Trump takes command from a dazed and polite Joe Biden, and ends with the launch of the Iran war. So much happened in that brief period of time, part of the book’s value is how it serves as a reminder of all that we just collectively went through in 2025. There’s the shakedown of white-shoe law firms like Paul Weiss; the endless lawsuits against the media; the revenge campaigns against former FBI Director James Comey and New York’s Attorney General Tish James. With Trump, it’s always one damn thing after another. Musk’s DOGE destruction of the federal work force already feels like another era, and that was barely a year ago.
We are light-years away from the man who ran for office in 2016. Too much has happened in those 10 years. Swan and Haberman show why Trump, and his Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, have returned to Washington with vengeance on the mind and a ruthless desire to wield and abuse power. In just his first months back in office, Trump’s ambitions reached farther abroad than he had ever dreamed in his first term: “We’ll just own Gaza,” he said. “It could be better than Monaco” — an idea one aide quoted in the book describes as “legitimately nutso. But very on brand.” It’s immediately clear in Trump 2.0 that all the safety checks that existed in Trump 1.0 are long gone. Turns out, the presidential Cabinet really matters — and if it’s staffed with the Pete Hegseths and Kristi Noems of the world, nothing good will come of it.
As the year one barrels along, Swan and Haberman document the fallout. MAGA loyalists Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie and Tucker Carlson split with Trump over the mishandling of the Epstein files and the Iran war. The multiple divorces ugly and personal. Old GOP stalwarts like Mitch McConnell are nowhere to be found. Former allies, Mike Pompeo, Bill Barr, and Mike Pence are now hostile to the White House and John Bolton has been targeted by Trump for vengeance. Bad blood and feuds surround MAGA, a coalition only held together by the president’s will and fear of his wrath.
Insider accounts naturally lead the reader to speculate on who told the reporters what. Haberman and Swan are deeply sourced, and they put us right in the Cabinet room with the key players at the pivotal moments. It makes for grim reading. No president, perhaps no person in public life, has ever fully embodied the seven deadly sins the way Trump does. You see them all in him, even at 79, throughout these pages: lust, greed, pride, anger, envy, gluttony, and sloth. (The man can’t be bothered with boring details or descend into the particulars of complicated problems that demand solutions that don’t involve a bigger hammer.) Whatever wisdom we earn with age has completely bypassed him. His animal cunning and instincts are still there, but his worst tendencies only seem to have been magnified with this return to power.
As Swan and Haberman put the extremist agenda of Trump 2.0 into focus, three figures emerge. A canny and shrewd Susie Wiles helped lead the greatest political comeback in American history. As Chief of Staff in the White House, she has somehow managed to keep the nest of vipers Trump has gathered around him from eating each other alive. The Trump loyalist Stephen Miller is at the center of almost every controversial action the administration has taken, from brutal ICE crackdowns and the killing of alleged drug dealers in the open seas of the Caribbean to deploying National Guard troops on city streets, and the shipping of migrants to gulags in El Salvador, to name just a few. And Vice President J.D. Vance brings the Tucker Carlson wing of the new GOP — very online, nativist, and always calculating his next move — into the Oval Office, especially when it comes to countering the threat of his rival, Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
These are experienced and canny in-fighters and at the center, at times manipulating and always watching the carnage, is Trump. Whatever criticisms one might bring of the results, these people went in with radical ambitions. “This time is about legacy,” Trump told one associate in the early days, according to the book. “We’re going to do big things. Even the people who don’t like me will like it.”
Alas, a year and a half into Trump’s second term, his poll numbers are cratering into the thirties. It’s possible he doesn’t care. After all, his family has greatly profited through what can only be described as the most naked corruption we have ever seen from a White House. Hundreds of millions of dollars reaped through means that would make Warren G. Harding blush. But the war with Iran is a fiasco and deeply unpopular, America’s reputation abroad in shambles, inflation and gas prices are hurting everyone at home. The president is so obviously guilty of hubris and historic overreach that even his most loyal defenders are struggling to find excuses.
Regime Change is essential reading to understand how, in just 18 months, Trump’s presidency reached this dreadful precipice, and why, in the end, everyone leaves him.
