REGIME CHANGE

Of malevolence, chaos, and vengeance as national policy.

New York Times political reporters Haberman and Swan examine the profound differences between the first and second Trump presidencies, suggesting that present excesses might have been avoided “if he had served a consecutive second term”—for, absent his years in the wilderness plotting retribution, “he would never have accumulated the power he now wielded.” President Trump now surrounds himself with heavily vetted loyalists; even before he took office anew, “officials on the Trump transition team had already searched candidates’ social media accounts for any criticisms of Trump after the riot at the Capitol.” And the authors argue that competence comes second to appearance, as with his choice of a onetime Texas lawmaker to head the CIA: “He’s straight out of central casting.” Thus Kristi Noem, Pete Hegseth, Karoline Leavitt, and others, with some quickly discarded when the optics go bad—“I don’t know why I picked her,” Trump says of former Attorney General Pam Bondi. The news in this newsworthy book, based on more than 1,000 interviews with people “close to President Trump” (including one with Trump himself), is sometimes trivial—Trump leaves a mess wherever he eats, for one tidbit, and staff have to check the trash to make sure he hasn’t thrown out sterling silver utensils. More often, it speaks to Trump’s driving obsessions, among them how best to play to the camera, as when he and JD Vance tag-team to upbraid Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a confrontation that Trump characteristically called “better than The Apprentice.” Interestingly, the authors note several instances in which Trump treats Vance dismissively, with the hint that Marco Rubio might well emerge as Trump’s anointed successor in 2028. All in all, they write, Trump “lived in a bubble, shuttling between his private clubs and the White House, and he was rarely shown anything but good news,” even as he regularly—and apparently willfully—creates bad news all on his own.

A powerful chronicle of uninhibited, solipsistic power exercised with few positive results.