Riveting and richly textured ... Coldly devastating ... What the authors add is the vivid detail that makes these events feel actual. They wrest reality itself back from the distorted world of entertainment, illusion, fantasy and denial that Trump has generated around himself.
A vivid, rigorous, and unavoidably depressing chronicle of the first year of Trump’s second term in the White House ... Part of the high-wire act of such books is that the authors and their publishers work at unaccustomed speed to provide the end product with a history-as-it-is-happening varnish. The results are usually as perishable as week-old bananas ... Regime Change is exceptional. It transcends its genre. Although some of the material is familiar from the Times and other sources and from Trump’s relentless self-exposure, the book is packed with news that will stay news.
For anyone who has spent Trump’s second term ranting about spineless Republicans and their lack of fealty to the country’s founding principles, Haberman and Swan offer a useful course in the iron laws of Republican self-preservation ... An entertaining account ... As Haberman and Swan show, Trump in his second term has built a government that, but for a few important exceptions (Susie Wiles, Stephen Miller, Russell Vought), is made up of incompetent toadies who are wholly responsive to his wishes.
Devastating ... Trump, the most powerful man in the world, maybe in history, comes off in these pages as among the most miserable of humans ... Haberman and Swan are deeply sourced, and they put us right in the Cabinet room with the key players at the pivotal moments. It makes for grim reading ... Essential reading to understand how, in just 18 months, Trump’s presidency reached this dreadful precipice, and why, in the end, everyone leaves him.
Sprawling and polychrome, Regime Change is offered to us as definitive proof that the Trump presidency is a threat to the Republic. Their case is, of course, only as strong as their sources, most of whom speak from behind the arras to corroborate an alarmist story of the World Under Trump ... The authors have captured Mr. Trump’s world-class bluster. But they’ve also bought into it, and have thus failed to grasp that his whole is less—much less—than the sum of his parts.
If you followed the news during 2025, there’s not much in Regime Change that you won’t already know. Reading it is like reading a recap of 2025 ... Not all will have the stomach for it. Haberman and Swan make a valiant attempt to hack through the rumors and rage bait and misinformation ... Still, they can’t really make sense of it.
Much of what this book recounts will be familiar to American politics obsessives (and who isn’t these days?), but the compendium is a reminder of the breakneck pace set by an impatient president touching 80 with an agenda as long as his elephantine memory for personal slights, and a corresponding urge for retribution against his enemies real and invented ... Haberman and Swan provide a bird’s-eye view of a unique presidency, with chaotic meetings that roamed from topic to topic, aspirants for high office judged by their appearance, and infighting within the governing circle.
