By Lillian Curthoys
In May 2026, Jill Lepore asked readers of the New Yorker, “How do you bring an American-history textbook up to date when the country’s past has become a political battleground?”. Self-tasked with chronicling a history in the age of Donald Trump, Lepore detailed how she felt it incorrect to conclude her book, These Truths: A History of the United States with Barack Obama’s 2009 Inauguration. She wrote, “after Trump’s election Obama’s Inauguration no longer made sense as an ending to a history of the United States.”
However, as she continued to compile history from only a few years since its unfolding, she found herself confronting a unique struggle. “It is nearly impossible to write a history of the very recent past. There’s no way to get a proper perspective” she writes. This is especially true in the era of Donald Trump’s second administration, where impulse, reactivity, groupthink and stream-of-consciousness social media posting have assumed the backbone of America’s highest office.
Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, attempts to future-proof its analysis by staying decisively “on-the-pulse”. Unlike other political commentary books, which cast a critical eye backwards to a time that is concluded, recorded and ripe for unpicking, Regime Change seeks to stay abreast of its political subjects, narrowing its focus to an epochal era of American politics and simply striving to retell it accurately.
In this way, the book transcends the genre, full of writing that gives the reader access to the proverbial sausage and how it’s being made. Every page feels like a VIP pass to a White House that has become paranoid, litigiously, about information leaks. It is excellent, if not exceedingly depressing, astonishing, bewildering and tragic. It makes for a rapturous read, especially for those of us who, as is the human condition, seek to understand, predict or pathologise the direction of the President of the United States of America.
Trump has always been of “immutable character”, Haberman wrote in her 2022 book Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America. The way this character is elucidated in Regime Change is biting; Trump is insolent, petulant, self-aggrandising and self-important. He is also cunning, ruthless, strategic even when it belies his original intention, and often humorous, simply for how he approaches the prestige of the office he holds. But more than that, Haberman and Swan present Trump as threadbare, like a specimen, using hard-won journalistic sources who often speak on the condition of anonymity. This enables the reader to engage in an activity currently erring towards total unavailability in the US’s burgeoning autocracy; to make their mind up themselves.
Haberman and Swan arrange the book linearly; they start with Trump’s re-election, then his cabinet selection, the courtship of Elon Musk and his eventual DOGE embarrassment, the slashing of federal funding, the brown-nosing of law firms, universities and millionaires/billionaires to get ahead of a retributive and vengeful President, all the way through to the decision to bomb Iran. It paints a dire picture of the last 12-ish months but organises itself with clarity.
The constant self-exposure of Trump means Haberman and Swan rarely have to dig deep for his thoughts and feelings on subjects. Trump often impulsively chimes into conversations against the advice of his advisors (“Fire them. Just get rid of them. I want these people fucking fired now”), hints at strategic decisions (“The next day, prodded by a reporter, Trump alluded to the habeus corpus discussions for the first time publicly”) or makes sensational claims seemingly because he feels like it (“I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things”).
Haberman and Swan organise these outbursts into distinct, coherent stories within the book that make you feel less like a late night scroller on X, and more like a parochial fly on the wall. Their retellings, couched in the “culmination of [their] combined decades of covering Trump, the product of hundreds of interviews with his closest advisors, officials throughout his government, every ring of his networks, past and present”, evoke a sense of morbid curiosity underpinned by journalistic integrity. This is how it is, the book says, incredulously but knowingly. Sure, Marco Rubio, at some stage in the second administration, amasses four titles, but you know, China had a 145% tariff that even made Trump himself say “holy shit”.
With over 16 pages of references, it’s hard to doubt the accuracy of the recounts and it’s unfortunately refreshing to see a book, and its authors, acknowledge limitations (as opposed to a grandiose declaration of perfection). It creates a type of trust only possible with humility.
As the late Donella Meadows, a professor at Dartmouth and the author of Thinking in Systems, once observed, “Power over the rules is real power.” It seems this is what Donald Trump and his tight inner circle are going for. But when books like Regime Change are published, it becomes increasingly clear that the rules still apply to Mr Trump—he is not above the rule of free press, fully fledged and expertly trained, and its teeth can still bite down, hard.
