Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump

“He has altered the very nature of the presidency and changed what people living in this country and all over the world think of when they picture the American President.”

The authors posit that Trump’s second term has fundamentally redefined the American presidency itself. This passage is a mission statement for the book, asserting that Trump’s actions went beyond policy changes to alter public and global perception of the office’s nature. His presidency is thus framed as a historical rupture, making it worthy of examination in comparison to other administrations.

“Looking good on television was extremely important—that would never change—but a senior role in the second Trump administration required something more. There was a new acid test: January 6.”

Haberman and Swan identify a new, explicit standard of personal fealty required for service in the second Trump administration. The authors pinpoint the Capitol attack on January 6 as the key loyalty test, demonstrating that policy expertise was now secondary. This criterion ensured a compliant cabinet willing to execute Trump’s agenda without question.

“Trump had set up a secret back channel with the Russians […] Richard Nixon had entrusted such delicate missions to Henry Kissinger, an expert steeped in diplomatic history and global strategy. Trump had someone quite different in mind. He had quietly assigned this high-stakes mission to Steve Witkoff, a New York real estate investor and an old friend of Trump’s who had helped out during the 2024 campaign.”

The authors illustrate how Trump’s second-term administration has prioritized personal relationships over diplomatic expertise. By contrasting the unqualified real-estate developer Steve Witkoff with the seasoned statesman Henry Kissinger, the authors highlight a core tenet of Trump’s governance. The selection shows a preference for loyal friends in high-stakes roles, regardless of their experience, rather than the traditional approach involving well-respected and experienced diplomats.

“Authorized by the President of the United States but overseen by no one, Musk would momentarily usurp the powers of Congress to control public spending, essentially impound billions of dollars in already-appropriated money, and trample the prerogatives of the President’s new cabinet secretaries. All in secrecy and often in the middle of the night.”

Haberman and Swan document how DOGE exemplifies the administration’s chaotic and unaccountable approach to governance. The authors portray Elon Musk’s role as a complete circumvention of constitutional checks and balances, where presidential authority was delegated to an unelected billionaire. By noting that DOGE’s work was often conducted in the middle of the night, the authors also indicate that the department was out of sync with Washington norms. This episode demonstrates the administration’s contempt for established processes, right down to the adherence to traditional office hours.

“But Trump thought the confrontation was great. ‘Better,’ he would tell an advisor, ‘than The Apprentice.’”

By including Trump’s private reaction to his public confrontation with Ukrainian President Zelensky, the authors argue that Trump views foreign policy as a form of entertainment. Featuring this quote shows that, for Trump, the meeting had little to do with successful diplomacy and more to do with the desire to a compelling television performance. It reveals his tendency to subordinate matters of state to the logic of spectacle, in which every public event is evaluated through the lens of television rather than the lens of politics.

“Like Roosevelt, Trump claimed emergency powers. But unlike the objective disaster of the Great Depression, Trump’s emergencies were far more debatable. […] Trump and Miller decided to redefine the very concept of an ‘emergency.’”

Haberman and Swan assert that the administration’s expansion of executive power has relied on a deliberate distortion of the concept of a national emergency. The authors use the historical comparison to Roosevelt to argue that Trump’s declared emergencies were political constructs, not objective crises. This strategy provided a legal pretext for unilateral actions that bypassed Congress but also created historical analogies to show how greatly Trump has, in the authors’ view, departed from tradition and expectation.

“The closest precedent to the scale of Trump’s tariffs—the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930—had taken eighteen months of fierce congressional debate…And yet on April 2, 2025, he would announce a tariff regime that would dwarf Smoot-Hawley—born not from hearings or expert consultation but from a handful of Oval Office meetings and his own instincts.”

The authors use historical context to frame Trump’s tariff policy as uniquely impulsive and devoid of institutional process. By contrasting the Liberation Day tariffs with the lengthy debate over the Smoot-Hawley Act, Haberman and Swan underscore the unprecedented nature of Trump’s decision-making. The policy emerged from personal instinct, rather than expert analysis, underlining the impulsive nature of major policy decisions.

“Retribution was no longer a relatively furtive mission. It was now a very public, driving force of the Trump presidency, and it wouldn’t stop with just individuals. The President and his team were determined to also neuter the institutions that had defied him.”

The authors define retribution as the Trump presidency’s core, public mission. By framing retribution as a “public, driving force,” the authors frame Trump’s actions as having their own momentum, a spectacle of revenge and payback which is difficult to stop. The administration thinks in such visceral terms, the authors imply, because the administration has little interest in traditional technocratic government, thus distinguishing it from the administrations of other presidents.

“When a senior Trump aide was told that Paul Weiss’s capitulation had made everyone afraid of the President, the aide replied: ‘Good. They should be afraid.’”

The authors feature this aide’s comment to argue that the administration’s strategy relies on the deliberate cultivation of fear. By quoting the aide’s simple affirmation—“Good. They should be afraid”—the authors illustrate that creating a climate of fear is a desired and strategic outcome. Far more than just Trump, the authors suggest, the entire administration delights in taking retribution of Trump’s enemies.

“For such a mighty news organization […] this was a destructive moment […] And now it had been brought to its knees. Trump had sued CBS over an edited interview—a nuisance suit that no President before him would have dared file, let alone win. But Trump didn’t need to win in court. He had something better: The power to block Paramount’s merger.”

The authors argue that Trump’s power in his second term transcends formal legal victories, allowing him to subdue powerful institutions through leverage. They detail how Trump brought CBS “to its knees” with the implied threat of blocking its parent company’s merger. The sprawling nature of the government, in this respect, provides the administration with many tools with which it can influence its perceived enemies, such as the corporate merger of a parent company being used to dictate the content of a broadcaster.

“But without any inquiry, and solely on the word of an internet provocateur, six of the officials on Loomer’s list would be fired in short order. The National Security Council would be thinned out, and the agency that handled critical foreign signals intelligence and cybersecurity, the National Security Agency, would lose its leader. Loomer had been the judge and jury. Trump, the executioner.”

The authors use this episode involving Laura Loomer to illustrate the complete collapse of professional governance in favor of personal loyalty and whim. The authors’ concluding sentences—“Loomer had been the judge and jury. Trump, the executioner”—are a direct analytical claim. In this claim, the traditional legal frameworks are inverted in such a manner that the notions of justice or due process are consolidated into a key figure, Trump, who delivers a verdict based on an emotional whim rather than following traditional processes for dismissal.

“A small group inside the administration worked quietly to steer the President away from moves that would inevitably be tied up or overturned by the courts. Their efforts grew more difficult as the year wore on.”

The authors identify a small, internal resistance that attempts to moderate Trump’s most extreme impulses, but they argue that this check is failing. This passage reveals that, even within the loyalist administration, there are limits to what some officials will support. Rather than making governance easier, the authors argue, the nature of the administration ironically makes achieving their goals all the more difficult.

“This pattern would repeat all day long. […] But in his second term, Trump had made the White House more fully his home—not just fixing it in accordance with his aesthetic, but fundamentally changing the rhythms and structures and operations of the place.”

The authors assert that Trump’s second-term presidency is a direct extension of his personal, chaotic style. By contrasting his “unstructured and improvisational” method with traditional presidential operations, the authors contend that Trump has remade the office itself. This plays into anecdotes elsewhere in the book detailing how Trump personally redecorated the rooms of the White House, suggesting that he has literally and figuratively made the presidency into something new.

“The government would attempt to impose a new standard of art and scholarship, though in reality this was an amorphous notion, dependent on the whims of one man. The scene was now set for an extraordinary pitched battle […] on the lookout for violations of the new aesthetic.”

The authors frame the administration’s culture war as an attempt to impose the president’s personal aesthetic as a national standard, extending executive power into art and scholarship. The phrase “amorphous notion, dependent on the whims of one man” defines this new standard as arbitrary and personal, not ideological. Rather than the president serving as a political figurehead for the country, the Trump administration, the authors contest, seeks to remodel art and culture in such a way that they reflect Trump.

“Now, in Trump’s second term, there was a new twist: Power flowed out of the Speaker’s office directly into the Oval Office. In a reflection of just how utterly subservient Johnson was to Trump, congressional reporters in Washington would begin to refer to President Donald Trump also as ‘Speaker Donald Trump,’ a pithy take on the rapidly dissolving separation of powers.”

The authors make the explicit claim that the separation of powers has effectively dissolved under Trump, with the speaker of the House functioning as a subordinate. The authors use the journalistic moniker “Speaker Donald Trump” to crystallize this argument. Their use of such monikers is a wry play on Trump’s own political rhetoric, in which the use of comic nicknames is key to his messaging.

“These theatrics were not incidental to the policy; they were the policy. But a formula was now emerging for clashes with cities run by Democrats. And after what had happened in Los Angeles, administration officials were thinking hard about what they would do if governors refused to call up the Guard.”

The authors argue that the Trump administration’s approach to governance has fused policy with public spectacle. This passage asserts that high-profile stunts, like handing out pizza to police officers, are the central method of asserting dominance. This theatrical approach was key to establishing a pretext for escalating federal intervention in Democratic-run cities, inviting criticism of the spectacle itself while deflecting from the actual content of the policies.

“As shocking as Trump’s immigration program was, no less shocking was its marketing.”

With this direct thesis statement, the authors frame the administration’s communications strategy as a radical policy initiative in itself. They argue that the deliberately cruel and provocative social-media output was a core component of the administration’s agenda. The marketing was designed to be as extreme and norm-breaking as the actions it promoted, adding to the sense of chaos and change that the administration sought to enact.

“Eight months into Trump’s second term, Miller had become one of the most powerful White House officials in modern history. ‘We will do it in Charlie’s name,’ he had promised. Now he had the tools and the permission structure to try.”

The authors identify the assassination of Charlie Kirk as the key event that consolidated Stephen Miller’s power and unleashed his long-planned agenda against the institutional Left. This passage argues that the tragedy provided the final justification for a campaign that had been prepared well in advance, giving Miller the authority to weaponize the government against political enemies. The effect is to paint the administration as opportunistic rather than meticulous in its planning, showing how even a political assassination can be coopted into a useful vehicle for existing policy goals.

“But to justify blowing up speedboats in the Caribbean as self-defense—boats that were by no plausible definition ‘armed combatants’ threatening the United States—the Trump team would need to redefine words and phrases like ‘terrorist’ and ‘weapons of mass destruction.’”

The authors argue that the administration’s actions required a fundamental corruption of legal language. This passage shows how Trump’s team laid the semantic groundwork for extrajudicial violence, demonstrating that their disregard for norms extended to the very definitions that constrain executive power. The authors, in effect, suggest that the Trump administration has challenged the language itself in pursuit of its goals.

“Deals could only be accomplished if there was a willingness to forgo traditional American postures on refusing to negotiate with terrorists, or by rejecting the premise that perceived conflicts of interest were a problem as opposed to a negotiating asset. That posture, so discomfiting and even infuriating to Kushner’s colleagues in Trump’s first term, was not only accepted but broadly admired in the new Trump world.”

Haberman and Swan identify a core ideological shift in Trump’s second term where ethical liabilities have been rebranded as strategic advantages. This passage argues that the administration has done more than just tolerate conflicts of interest, suggesting that the administration actively embraced them as a legitimate tool of statecraft, a posture “broadly admired” by the new inner circle. This escalation is one of many outlined by the authors in the book, indicating the rhetorical way in which they construct their argument.

“The overlap of business relationships and government work, once a source of consternation for first-term Trump officials, was now an accepted part of Trump’s new administration. White House officials generally shrugged off news accounts of conflicts of interest. There was little risk of any real consequences in Trump’s first year back in Washington; Republican lawmakers feared him and he held a tight grip on the Justice Department.”

The authors argue that the rampant self-enrichment marking the second term is a feature, not a bug, of the new administration. This passage contrasts the first term’s “consternation” with the second term’s casual acceptance of corruption, showing how ethical norms have eroded to the point of irrelevance within the White House. The juxtaposition between the two administration is emphasized by the disinterest of second-term officials in reflecting on their behavior, illustrating how much attitudes changed between the two terms.

“By the norms of history, the naming rights for monuments belonged to subsequent generations, and those honors were conferred by Congress, by historians and commissions, and by public acclaim. It was the American way. But Donald Trump had long since demonstrated that he could adore himself far more, and in greater detail, than anyone else might. Why wait?”

The authors use Trump’s monument-naming spree to illustrate his “imperial” mindset and his conscious break with American political tradition. This passage frames his actions as a deliberate rejection of the “American way,” where legacy is conferred by history rather than seized by the powerful individual. More than mere egotism, the authors use naming conventions to suggest the extent to which Trump’s break from convention has fundamentally altered the operations of the American political apparatus.

“What was revealing was not really that Trump agreed with the thesis but the way he inhabited it: The evident pleasure he took in the company of Mao, Hitler, and Stalin, masters of state control through murder, torture, and detention, and Napoleon—and the untroubled ease with which he accepted a place among men who had reshaped the world through conquest and fear.”

Here, the authors offer a direct psychological and political analysis of Trump’s worldview, crystallizing his affinity for unchecked power. The passage argues that Trump’s comfort in the “company of Mao, Hitler, and Stalin” reveals his ultimate value system, where the sheer magnitude of power matters more than any moral distinction. By linking Trump with such figures, the authors seek to condemn Trump through association.