Tina Brown on Trump’s second term

As many as 30,000 English language books have been written about Donald Trump since he first eyed the White House in 2016, but only one has managed to weave together his maniacal haphazard decision-making with the vaunting stream of consciousness that inflates his indefatigable will to power. Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan is a flabbergasting feat of political reporting. There are times reading this book, out this week, when I wondered how the hell these two New York Times scribes got such amazing blow-by-blow dish, unless they were hiding under the Resolute desk in the Oval Office. Their introduction tells us that, aside from more than 1,000 interviews, their direct quotes from the highest-level confidential meetings derive from either the people in the room or from “contemporaneous notes, recordings, or transcripts”. Who the Judas was – vice-president JD Vance? Chief-of-staff Susie Wiles? Homeland security adviser Stephen Miller? – is an interesting parlour game.

The book brings the past 18 months back like a bad dream: the many bat-shit sideshows early in Trump’s second term – Liberation Day, Alligator Alcatraz, the painful bullying of the Smithsonian and National Portrait Gallery leadership to literally rewrite history – as well as the flood of noisier grotesqueries such as the gutting of USAID, the beat-down of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the pardoning of the Jan 6 rioters, and the decision to go to war against Iran.

The accretion of Haberman and Swan’s reporting shows that nearly every decision, consequential or otherwise, was triggered by limbic Trumpian impulses. Trivia question: do you remember that his deployment of the national guard in Washington, something he and his ideologically rabid consigliere Miller had seemingly long been agitating to do, was apparently prompted by Trump’s fury at the attempted carjacking in Dupont Circle of the 19-year-old Doge employee known as Big Balls? In his second term, the authors write, Trump “more than ever before [has been] operating on pure gut instinct” with no one who would dare challenge him. Even with the Iran war, “in essence, everyone [in his cabinet] had deferred to Trump’s instincts”.

One of the lessons of Regime Change is how disastrous it was that Biden won the 2020 election. In Trump’s first term, Trump was, in many ways, a blundering novice held down by a revolving cast of institutional professionals. His comeback, after beating 52 legal charges and surviving the Pennsylvania assassination attempt, proved to himself that he was invincible. I recall how the hulking sight of Trump sitting with his back to the camera in courtroom after courtroom made me ponder what dreadful payback the flayed former president – and his followers – would extract from the liberal establishment for these humiliations. Sure enough, in the four years of exile, his rage metastasised into a scorched-earth plan of action underpinned by bloodless enforcer wonk Miller, who would be ready to go on day one of the second term. Steve Bannon called what we are now seeing, “pure Trump”.

The 47th president’s preeminent test of who to hire would now be loyalty. The oath of fealty? Trump won the 2020 election. Period. In a delicious scene in the Mar-a-Lago tea room, Haberman and Swan describe Trump chomping on crab meat skewers as he casts his second-term cabinet from slides and head shots presented on multiple screens by the transition chair Howard Lutnick. When the Botoxed visage of the South Dakota governor Kristi Noem appears, as a candidate to lead homeland security, it evokes an explosion of disgust from Miller’s memories of Noem’s disastrous book interviews about shooting her own dog. Trump pushes back with the paternal response: “She’s been so good to me… Loyal, very loyal.” Noem was appointed – and fired 13 months later.

The unfettered Trump has become an all-access, gold-embossed tyrant who’s gratified to see himself in a confederacy with other crushers of human will. The authors quote him speaking admiringly of Deng Xiaoping’s bloody suppression of the Tiananmen Square uprising. “Alexander the Great, the Caesars, William the Conqueror,” Trump enthuses to the authors, regarding why this mighty trio fell short. “They didn’t have airplanes, right? They couldn’t travel around.” Who knows what psychic damage Trump suffered from growing up in the berating shadow of Fred Trump, from whom he learned not only how to cheat and stiff partners and competitors, but also how to use leverage to bully. Are there poignant clues as to what Trump’s school days were like in his response to Elon Musk, who blew up their friendship with an angry post about the “disgusting abomination” of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill? The authors recount that, after reading Musk’s post, Trump murmured: “They always leave me. They always do this. This is why I can’t have friends.”

Like other damaged tyrants since the dawn of history, Trump bestows and withdraws favour to create a climate of fear. When the oleaginous commerce secretary Lutnick tries to advise Trump during his tariff binge against putting US automakers at a disadvantage, Trump tells him: “You used to be a killer, Howard, now… you’re a pussy.” Trump is also claimed to have resented the Lutnick sons profiting from their father’s, and therefore his own, political influence, prompting the pussy to pony up $25m for Trump’s presidential library.

The book has fun with a favourite Trump torment target: the succession rivalry between his ambitious chameleon VP Vance and the open-faced Iago Marco Rubio, now secretary of state. Vance’s efforts to try to keep the Maga base from splitting by urging for the release of the Epstein files and voicing concern that a Middle East war broke Trump’s campaign pledge irritated the president. (The Maga base matters deeply to Vance, who needs to keep it together for a run in ’28.) In Regime Change, it’s clear that Rubio, who pushed hard for the successful Venezuela raid and has held his cards close on Iran, seems ascendent. The authors write: “During Trump’s redecorating spree in the Oval Office, someone had asked him about the near certainty that the next president would remove what he had done, the president had replied, without missing a beat: ‘Cubans love gold.’”

Surprising to me in these pages is how well the odd couple of global diplomacy, the ever-sunny real estate deal man Steve Witkoff, and Trump’s effete-looking son-in-law Jared Kushner, come across. After bringing home the Abraham accords in the first term and wrangling Netanyahu and Hamas to a Gaza ceasefire in the second, it’s time to acknowledge that Kushner is a skilled, pragmatic deal-closer and the garrulous Witkoff, dispatched round the world to end three wars at once, never stops trying.

There are news bombs on every page of Regime Change but what I relish most is Haberman and Swan’s reporting on the outer ring of what they describe as Trumpworld’s schemers, moochers and peddlers of media malignance. One of my faves is the Truth Social custodian Natalie Harp, Maga’s very own Unity Mitford (the delusional aristocrat sister of Jessica and Nancy who hung around Munich tea rooms to catch Hitler’s eye). Harp is said to leave Trump worshipful notes and feed him shit-stirring content and conspiracy theories for his nocturnal postings. Trump’s personal valet Walt Nauta stands on guard with hairspray, makeup, scissors for Trump to trim his own hair and a portable steamer to iron the creases of his suits when the president stands. (Trump offered Nauta’s steaming services to Keir Starmer when he visited. Alas, nothing can uncrease Sir Keir’s pants now.)

Regime Change’s breakout star is WH comms director Steven Cheung, author of profanity-laden rebukes to “sack of shit” journalists, and lawmakers who are “some of the dumbest retards ever to be in Congress”. He appears in the pages as “an astonishing sight roaming through the West Wing: physically enormous, with a low brow, a shaved head, great slablike hands, and an omnipresent sneer”. It is Cheung’s digital team who crank out vicious videos and memes, such as shackled migrants being marched on to planes. Trump calls him his Luca Brasi, Vito Corleone’s hitman in The Godfather, and “a more violent version of Kim Jong Un”.

There is a larger point to Cheung’s moral repellence. The authors remind us that, in Trump’s first term, only the president himself trolled and abused. The other government agencies operated with institutional propriety. Now that there’s no risk of being deplatformed by once vigilant social media companies which have been conquered and colonised, the language of debasement has invaded other government social channels. The hate algae has spread into the political culture beyond. Democrats loved it when California governor Gavin Newsom started punching back in the same vein as Trump, calling Stephen Miller a “cuck”. But in doing so, Newsom only showed that Trump has won the war on standards. Haberman and Swan report that Cheung later told White House colleagues he was glad to have successfully dragged Newsom in the gutter because in his mind, it would make Newsom “unelectable” in 2028.

In sum, Regime Change brings cool coherence to the inferno of our times. One realises with mounting panic that Trump’s degradation of every political norm, treasured alliance and human decency in public life shows that the founding fathers’ verities we celebrate on America’s 250th anniversary are in the rear-view mirror.

Haberman and Swan write that Trump’s “predecessors, even the most hawkish among them, had all worked within a web of treaties, institutions and norms – Nato, the United Nations, the World Trade Organization – that shaped and constrained how American power was exercised”. Trump has discarded it all. He has discovered that he could blow past the whole lot and govern on impulse, greed and revenge – and no one could stop him. Now that he’s demonstrated how it can be done, who believes this Pandora’s box can be closed? One has to agree with Trump in his closing interview with Regime Change’s authors that “there’s only one thing you can say about me that anybody believes, and you know what that is. Essentially, I won every fucking time.”

Photograph by Kenny Holston/The New York Times / AFP via Getty Images