My Review of Maggie Haberman's and Jonathan Swan's "Regime Change"

 A Man in Full*

Much has already been written about “Regime Change.” New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan have chronicled the first year of the second Trump administration which they rightly characterized as the start of an imperial presidency. Thus, I don't have much to add. It is an administration loaded with sycophants who are willing to enforce Trump’s retribution agenda. Indeed, Trump is presiding over an historic expansion of executive power that has no parallel in peacetime and has engaged in a pattern of self-enrichment that is without precedent.

 

There are more than a few nuggets in the book such as the use of the situation room, hitherto focused on national security events, to discuss the Epstein affair which for a while, paralyzed the administration. We also learn that Trump aide, Natlie Harper is with him constantly as she runs his Truth Social account and caters to his every whim.

 

Nevertheless, I expected much more from the book, especially from Maggie Haberman who has followed Trump since her days at the New York Post in the early 2000’s. ( See: Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Maggie Haberman's "Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America")  In many respects the book reads like a long New York Times article, except most of the sources are on deep background. The authors put you in the room where it happened with direct quotes of the participants without attribution.  Unlike Trump’s first administration, the current one does not leak out of a real fear of retribution.

 

So, we are left with question, who talked to the authors?  Who benefits from the book? I can only guess, but those officials most interested in running for office in 2028 and in protecting their future reputation from the investigations that are sure to come can give us a clue as to who spoke to the authors.

 

My candidates are Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and son-in-law Jared Kushner. These folks talked to Haberman and Swan on a situation-by-situation basis. They only spoke when it served their individual interests, par for the course.

 

What Haberman and Swan have done is to give us a good summary of Trump’s first year and it demonstrates his primary motivation is to avenge those who he perceived wronged him in his first term and the investigations that followed. Policy is secondary to vengeance, the accretion of power and self-enrichment.

 

*-With apologies to Tom Wolfe.

My Review of Josh Dawsey's, Tyler Pager's. and Isaac Arnsdorf's "2024: How Trump......."

Slow Motion Train Wreck

Washington journalists Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnsdorf have written a personality-driven account of the 2024 presidential election. Starting in 2022 they take us behind the scenes of the Trump, Biden, and later Harris campaigns for the presidency. There is an inevitability to it all, but after all the book is an after the fact accounting of the election.

What the book lacks is a review of the structural backdrop to the election. There should have been tables of polling data on the relative popularity of the candidates along with the electorate’s view on whether the country was on the “right track” or the “wrong track.”

Much of the ground here was discussed in “Original Sin,” but that book ended with Biden dropping out of the race. (See: https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2025/06/my-review-of-jake-tappers-and-alex.html) Both books are consistent in the view that Hunter Biden’s legal problems weighed greatly on Biden. The authors are sympathetic to Harris, but they do note her many unforced errors, specifically her failure to fully rebut her 2020 positions on hot button social issues, her failure to separate herself from Biden and picking the lackluster Tim Walz as her VP selection.

 

I learned much about the Trump campaign and how Suzie Wiles brought a modicum of discipline. She was instrumental in neutering Ron DeSantis, her former boss and the real rival to Trump. I also didn’t realize how important Steve Witkoff and Laura Loomer were to Trump. Witkoff was his consistent consigliere and is now a special ambassador to the Russia/Ukraine and the middle east. Loomer, despite being somewhat of an unguided missile, rallied support for Trump before and during the campaign.

 

The book also reinforced my view of Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff and campaign honcho. Klain instinct was always to seek support on the Left. This was true post-debate and well before, when he was in charge of policy. In my opinion it is was his predilections that kept Biden tacking Left while in office which, in my view, doomed his presidency.

 

This authors give us a real fly on the wall perspective to both campaigns, but I said at the outset, a full review of the structural parameters of the race would have been helpful.