Tim Chan
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There’s lots to celebrate this weekend, as America marks its 250th anniversary, with parades, fireworks and patriotic performances across the country. But the U.S. is also at a crossroads of sorts, as a fraught economy and increasing political tensions threaten to upend the very freedoms Americans are celebrating. At the center of it all: Donald Trump, the nation’s current and 47th president, who has bulldozed his way to power, no matter who — or what — he leaves in his wake.
That’s the premise behind a new book from New York Times White House correspondents Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. Titled Regime Change, the book chronicles the first year of Trump’s second presidency, where the authors say the Commander-in-Chief executed unprecedented — and unthinkable — maneuvers in a bid to claim the constitutional crown.
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Both Haberman and Swan have spent time with the President and followed him closely over the past decade, and the two authors drew from their interviews with Trump and with members of his own administration to put the book together.
What they reveal is the portrait of a man obsessed with his own doctrine and a leader who’s convinced that his way is the only way. As a book description teases, “The generals who once told him ‘no’ are gone, and the lawyers who remain have learned to pick their battles. His administration has flouted court orders and he has claimed powers that Congress once checked. What remains is a President willing to take enormous risks that have upended global markets and toppled heads of state; an imperial President operating almost entirely on instinct alone.”
Events covered in the book include the President’s decision to send ICE agents into cities across the country; the increasingly concerning use of the National Guard; and Trump’s recent war in the Middle East, with Haberman and Swan promising insight into the “secret Oval Office deliberations” that led to the President’s order to attack Iran.
The authors also address the declining reputation of the U.S. on the global stage, while outlining President Trump’s brazen tactics that have “turned the Justice Department into an agent of retribution against the President’s enemies and the office itself into a brazen vehicle for profit.”
