Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump
Maggie Haberman & Jonathan Swan — Chapter-by-Chapter Summary
Published April 6, 2026. Covers the first year of Trump's second term in office.
Overview
Haberman and Swan's book is a granular, reported account of Trump's return to power — the machinery behind it, the people who made it possible, and the institutional wreckage it produced. The authors argue that Trump's second term was qualitatively different from his first: better prepared, more ruthless, staffed with loyalists rather than skeptics, and operating in an environment stripped of the institutional friction that had slowed him down before. The book is organized around four themes: the whirlwind of the first weeks and months; the retribution agenda against Trump's enemies; the use of government power against the domestic population Trump regarded as threats; and the financial plunder that accompanied the exercise of power.
Prologue
The prologue is set at Mar-a-Lago on New Year's Eve, the turn into 2026. The party is lavish even by Trump's standards — Benjamin Netanyahu is in attendance, Vanilla Ice performs, and a speed painter auctions a Jesus portrait for $2.75 million. Kristi Noem dances. The scene is deliberately curated as a display of triumphant normalcy. What the guests do not know is that a covert military operation to seize Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is hours from execution. Susie Wiles is quietly monitoring the operation from a home SCIF. The prologue ends with the crowd roaring at midnight — a party that is simultaneously a celebration and a cover. The juxtaposition of spectacle and secret power is announced from the book's opening pages.
Introduction
Haberman and Swan open with an argument about historical irony: if Trump had won in 2020, he would likely have been a weakened president, burdened by COVID's aftermath, inflation, the Afghanistan withdrawal, and a hostile press. Instead, Biden's victory transformed Trump into a martyr. His refusal to accept defeat — which his own advisors recognized as delusional — paradoxically became the engine of his comeback. The movement coalesced around his wound. By 2023, through sheer repetition, he had converted most Republicans to his version of events.
The introduction traces Trump's four years in exile: the social media bans, Murdoch's brief pivot away from him, the indictments that accumulated and were converted into political assets, the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania that became mythology. It profiles the core players who would dominate the second term: Susie Wiles, who imposed enough stability on Trump's operation to make a comeback possible; Stephen Miller, who spent the interregnum building legal infrastructure and preparing a governing blueprint; Russell Vought, who developed the administrative tools to execute it.
The authors describe what makes the second term structurally different from the first. Trump entered the White House in 2017 uncertain, deferring to generals and establishment figures who quietly constrained him. In 2025, he trusted only himself and the loyalists who had proven that trust by standing with him after January 6. The institutions of constraint — independent-minded cabinet officers, a skeptical party leadership, norms still observed by the DOJ — had been cleared away. The court gave him broad immunity. Congress bent to his will faster than any predecessor had managed. The book is, the authors say, their best attempt at a first draft of the remarkable history they are all living through.
PART I: WHIRLWIND
Chapter 1
The chapter opens eight days after the election with Trump's traditional Oval Office meeting with outgoing President Biden. Trump is unexpectedly warm — praising Biden's handling of Ukraine, expressing sympathy over the Democratic Party's treatment of him, even offering to help Hunter Biden if needed. Biden is disarmed. The book tracks the scene's meaning: Trump's warmth is a characteristic move, a tone shift deployed whenever he believed a different chord would serve him better. It is temporary. Within weeks, the civility evaporates and Biden watches the transition in disbelief.
The second thread is Mar-a-Lago during the transition period, where the world's tech billionaires make their pilgrimage. Trump orchestrates their submission with deliberate stagecraft — the national anthem played by the "J6 Prison Choir" of detained Capitol rioters before Zuckerberg's dinner; his own enthusiastic readings of ingratiating text messages from Bezos and Zuckerberg to other guests. "Think about where these guys were in 2016," Trump says to Musk while scrolling through Bezos's texts. "They hated me. They were doing everything they could to knock me down. And look at them now." Musk calls it "first-class groveling." Trump has already secured a $25 million settlement from Meta and a $10 million settlement from X, even as Musk is now his most powerful ally. Power is being performed as much as exercised.
Chapter 2
The chapter turns to cabinet selection and inauguration. The J6 loyalty test now governs every hiring decision. Candidates' social media accounts are combed for any post-January 6 criticism of Trump. The chapter traces how this test works in practice — how Robert O'Brien's praise of Pence after the Capitol attack ended his prospects, how the phrase "he's a Milley guy" was enough to end Ryan McCarthy's candidacy for deputy defense secretary. Trump's paranoia about "traitors" from the first term shapes every appointment.
Matt Gaetz is named attorney general on a whim, an act Trump himself treats as a test of what he can get away with. Gaetz withdraws after eight days of negative coverage. Pam Bondi takes the role, along with Todd Blanche as deputy — both former Trump lawyers, effectively turning the DOJ leadership into his personal law firm from day one.
The inauguration address echoes the "American Carnage" speech of 2017, only darker. Trump announces multiple national emergencies. He is talked out of announcing J6 pardons in the Rotunda itself — an advisor warns him it will be remembered as the most divisive inauguration speech in history, and Trump agrees to remove it from the speech. The authors note it as one of his last concessions to decorum. That night, Trump grants clemency to more than 1,500 January 6 defendants, including those who attacked police officers — the threshold his own advisors had said would be crossed only for peaceful protesters. Steve Bannon hears the news and says simply: "You're getting pure Trump now."
Chapter 3
Chapter 3 is the Stephen Miller portrait. Miller enters the second term with two formal titles — deputy chief of staff for policy, and homeland security advisor — that together give him a reach across government unlike anything in modern White House history. The chapter traces his background: the Santa Monica teenager absorbing Rush Limbaugh, the Capitol Hill years as an anti-immigration ideologue, his recognition of Trump in 2015 as the force of personality finally capable of driving immigration restrictionism to the center of American politics.
The chapter documents Miller's preparation during the interregnum. He launched the America First Legal nonprofit, built alliances with GOP state attorneys general, identified the lawyers he would recruit for the second term — specifically those with, in his phrase, "the stiffest spines." He built an Excel spreadsheet tracking over one hundred executive orders, each linked to a campaign promise. He created a "fake OLC" — a group of MAGA-aligned lawyers to replace the real Office of Legal Counsel, whose independence he did not trust. Every order was tracked to overwhelm the opposition "with sheer force and volume."
The chapter also traces the first major stumble: an OMB memo freezing federal grants and loans that was poorly drafted and caused widespread panic, including the accidental freezing of Medicaid systems. Miller distances himself from the fiasco even though his team had driven it. The administration pivots by announcing Guantánamo detention camps for migrants — a deliberate outrage to change the subject. One official's observation: "There was no better counter for a screwup than an outrage."
Chapter 4
Chapter 4 is the Kellogg defenestration — an early demonstration of how the second term would operate. General Keith Kellogg, Trump's special envoy to the Russia-Ukraine conflict, arrives for what he expects to be a policy briefing, only to discover he has been cut out of his own portfolio. Trump tells him he is not to talk to the Russians. "Nobody on your team can talk to these people, because we're working a deal." What deal? With whom? Kellogg has no idea.
Trump has secretly assigned the Russia-Ukraine diplomacy to Steve Witkoff, a New York real estate investor and old friend with no foreign policy experience but total personal loyalty. Witkoff has already opened a back channel through Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia's sovereign wealth fund, with endorsements from Mohammed bin Salman and the UAE's Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan. The chapter introduces the core operating principle of the second term: Trump runs multiple lines in parallel, tells different people different things, and keeps even his closest aides in the dark about the full picture. "Only Trump had the full picture — no one else could know for sure what he'd told the others, or how it differed from what they had been told themselves."
Chapter 5
The chapter traces the origins of the Musk-Trump political alliance, which began not in shared ideology but in a September 2023 Silicon Valley fundraiser for Vivek Ramaswamy — a dinner where Musk compared dismantling the federal bureaucracy to his Twitter acquisition. "Just give me the passwords," he said, half-jokingly, "and I would cut the government down to size." The line captured what would become DOGE's operating logic.
The chapter reconstructs the factors that radicalized Musk politically: the Biden administration's exclusion of him from an EV policy summit due to his hostility to unions; his estrangement from a transgender daughter; escalating regulatory battles; the anti-immigrant content he consumed obsessively on X. After Trump's felony conviction in New York in May 2024, Musk endorsed him, and the alliance was forged. At Ramaswamy's dinner, Musk had previously called Trump "just another bullshit artist" who should "sail into the sunset." Within a year he was his most powerful and visible supporter.
Chapter 6
Marco Rubio visits El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele at his presidential retreat overlooking a lake on the Santa Ana Volcano — a deliberate contrast to DOGE-consumed Washington. The setting is serene and opulent. The meeting is about the architecture of mass deportation. Bukele's model — constructing a vast mega-prison called CECOT to house gang members swept off the streets, driving El Salvador's incarceration rate to the highest in the world — had become a template the Trump administration was actively studying. The chapter documents the history of Trump's deportation deals with Central American countries in the first term, the Biden administration's unwinding of them, and the political consequences. It frames the El Salvador relationship as central to the administration's immigration enforcement strategy.
Chapter 7
A profile of Steve Witkoff — the man who became Trump's most consequential diplomat without any traditional diplomatic credentials. The chapter traces his background: a self-made New York real estate developer from the Bronx who watched Trump rise in the 1980s and decided to become like him. His biography is marked by a personal catastrophe: the 2011 OxyContin overdose death of his twenty-two-year-old son Andrew, a loss Witkoff speaks about constantly. He is universally described as warm and affable — a sharp contrast to the sharp-elbowed culture of the Trump orbit.
The chapter traces his emergence as a diplomat: his role helping Biden administration negotiators push through an initial Gaza ceasefire and hostage deal, his conversations with Brett McGurk, and the endorsement he received from Middle East veterans as someone who "brought no baggage" and could build personal relationships across lines. His appointment as special envoy to the Middle East preceded his Russia-Ukraine role.
Chapter 8
Chapter 8 documents the complex and combustible Trump-Netanyahu relationship. The core grievance: immediately after the 2020 election, Netanyahu congratulated Biden on his victory — one of the first world leaders to do so. Trump never forgot. He stewed over it for three years. Netanyahu spent the 2024 campaign aggressively making amends, paying court at Mar-a-Lago.
The chapter covers Netanyahu's February 4, 2025 visit to the second-term White House — a meeting shaped by both the Gaza ceasefire Witkoff had helped negotiate and Netanyahu's urgent briefing on Iran's nuclear program. Netanyahu presented Trump with detailed intelligence on Iran's enrichment progress and a presentation on the mountain fortifications housing nuclear infrastructure. The chapter also describes the Hezbollah pager operation — a Mossad-engineered attack in which thousands of pagers distributed to Hezbeth operatives exploded simultaneously, killing dozens and severely degrading Hezbollah. Netanyahu reportedly gave Trump a gold-plated pager as a souvenir of the operation.
Chapter 9
The chapter opens in late February 2025 with Elon Musk's most consequential unilateral act: an email sent from the government's HR department to hundreds of thousands of federal workers demanding they list five things they had accomplished the previous week, warning that non-response would be taken as a resignation. The email — "What did you do last week?" — triggered a government-wide crisis. Cabinet secretaries flooded Susie Wiles with calls. Wiles tried repeatedly to reach Musk directly; getting no response, she called Stephen Miller's wife Katie, who was working at DOGE.
The chapter documents the Air Force One confrontation that followed, with Musk beginning to attack senior staff including Wiles herself. It also covers the parallel crisis of the Ukraine minerals deal, where Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick were competing furiously to control the terms. When Ukrainian President Zelensky visited the White House, Lutnick presented Trump with a version of the deal, claiming to have made it "binding" and better than what Bessent had proposed. The physical tableau of officials sliding away from Bessent across the table illustrated the administration's fractured internal structure.
Chapter 10
An extended meditation on Trump's aesthetic and the Oval Office as a statement of power. The chapter opens with Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt walking in one morning to find Trump applying superglue to gold decorations on the marble fireplace mantel. The image captures something essential: Trump's preference for his own handiwork over anyone else's, and his compulsive gilding of everything around him.
The chapter traces the gold obsession back to Ivana, who first encouraged the aesthetic, and forward to the New York skyline — Trump Tower's gold letters, the gold silk bedroom walls on his private plane. In his first term, Trump largely honored the tradition of an understated Oval Office as a symbol of republican restraint. In his second, he resolved to "unleash his inner Louis XIV." The gold cherubs, the antique golden urns, the golden presidential seal on the rug — all of it expressed his understanding of power as display. The chapter connects this aesthetic to his campaign's economic vision: the Gilded Age tariff system, in which American wealth was built on protectionism and vast industrial concentration, became both the historical period Trump was invoking and the economic model he was consciously trying to replicate.
Chapter 11
Chapter 11 is the executive order blitz. Trump issued more than 140 executive orders in his first hundred days, surpassing the modern record Franklin Roosevelt set during the Great Depression while signing only five bills into law. The chapter documents the ideological architecture behind this: Miller and Trump had learned from the first term that emergencies unlocked power — a lesson from the pandemic's use of Title 42 to seal the border. In the second term, they simply redefined what counted as an emergency. Trump declared a national energy emergency despite the United States producing oil at record levels; a "fentanyl tariff" emergency; and a trade deficit emergency. Senior staff privately called this the "fentanyl tariff" playbook.
The chapter also tracks the ICE deportation machinery accelerating across the country, with people swept into detention facilities without notice, sometimes separated from families in ways unknown even to the detainees' lawyers. A pivotal case: Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident and pro-Palestinian student organizer, arrested in March 2025. Trump said publicly that "freedom of speech has limits." The deportation infrastructure, the chapter argues, was redefining what it meant to be legally present on American soil.
Chapter 12
The cabinet showdown. On the night of March 5, cabinet officers were told an emergency meeting was being called for the following morning. Tensions between DOGE and the rest of the administration had reached a breaking point. The opening question was Trump's: "Why isn't Elon letting these people manage their own departments?" He seemed genuinely puzzled by the chaos he had set in motion. Wiles encouraged cabinet secretaries to speak up.
What followed was one of the most dramatic confrontations of the early administration. Marco Rubio, seated beside the President and seething over DOGE's wholesale destruction of State Department staff through USAID, confronted Musk directly. Musk accused Rubio of not having fired anyone; Rubio accused Musk of lying and threatened to rehire everyone DOGE had terminated. The exchange turned contemptuous. A parallel confrontation between Musk and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy over DOGE's attempts to eliminate air traffic controllers exploded across the same meeting. Trump's resolution was characteristically ambiguous: Musk was doing a "great job" but needed to work together with others. The chapter's verdict: there was room for Elon Musk or for a functioning executive branch, but not both. Musk's position was already weakening.
Chapter 13
March 26, a tense Oval Office meeting on tariff strategy. Trump was furious that no one had given him concrete numbers on how much foreign countries were charging the United States in tariffs. "Nobody has given me any fucking numbers," he told aides. "Hard facts of how much China tariffs us, how much India tariffs us. You give me bullshit numbers." Natalie Harp was frantically Googling on her laptop from a chair against the wall, trying to find "real numbers" in real time. Howard Lutnick produced a folder; Trump was convinced the actual rates were far higher than Lutnick's printouts showed. Lutnick turned to Peter Navarro, demanding he back him up. "Don't talk to me like that," Navarro bristled. The chapter is a window into how tariff policy — a defining feature of Trump's economic program — was actually being developed: in chaotic, angry meetings with competing aides, driven by Trump's intuitions, with no systematic analytical process and no agreed-upon data.
