---
title: Regime Change- Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan
description: Haberman and Swan report that in the summer of 2025 the White House Situation Room, the secure complex from which a president once watched the raid that kill...
author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief)
date: 2026-07-07T17:00:00.000Z
updated: 2026-07-07T17:53:48.106Z
canonical: https://richbooksmagazine.com/article/regime-change-inside-the-imperial-presidency-of-donald-trump-by-maggie-haberman-and-jonathan-swan
image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/9781668067246_p1.webp
categories: Non-Fiction
content_type: Book Review
region: United States
publication: Rich Books
access: members
schema_type: Article
---

Most of us will never set foot in the White House Situation Room. We will never sit in on a secret Oval Office deliberation or hear what a president says to his closest aides when the doors are shut and the cameras are off. And yet what happens in those rooms shapes our lives, the wars that start, the borders that close, the markets that rise and fall. A free country depends on a small number of people being able to find out what went on in there, check it, and write it down for the rest of us. That is the whole reason a book like Regime Change matters.

Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump was published by Simon and Schuster in June 2026 and went straight to number one on the New York Times bestseller list and to the top of the Sunday Times list in Britain. Its authors are Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, two White House correspondents for the New York Times who have covered their subject more closely than almost anyone alive. The book is their account of the first year of Donald Trump's second term, and they built it the slow, honest way, through around a thousand interviews conducted over two years.

The credentials behind it are worth knowing, because they are the reason the reporting carries weight. Haberman won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 as part of a team at the Times, and she is the author of an earlier book on Trump, Confidence Man. Swan, originally from Sydney, has reported on the same figure since 2015, across three campaigns and two terms. These are not opinion writers reaching for a headline. They are career reporters whose work lives or dies on whether it holds up, and Haberman has described the painstaking heart of the method plainly, the effort to check and recheck every scene until they were confident it was real.

---

*This article is only available to registered readers. Visit the article URL to read the full piece.*