REGIME CHANGE

Regime Change is a book-length journalism account of Donald Trump's first year back in office, built from more than 1,000 interviews. Haberman and Swan argue the second term looks nothing like the first. The inner circle is smaller and more loyal. Norms that people mistook for laws have collapsed. Decisions get made on gut rather than data. The lessons that transfer concern how to report and navigate places where power is concentrated, information is filtered, and flattering or alarming claims go unverified.

Navigate power

1. Before interviewing an evasive or powerful person, prepare heavily and decide in advance which moments to press. You can't fact-check every false claim in real time, so pick the points that matter most, and ask what an ordinary person would want answered. (source)
2. Treat the gap between an enforceable law and a mere norm as a real risk surface. Constraints everyone assumes are solid may be only conventions, and a determined actor can walk past what looks like a safeguard. Audit which protections you rely on are actual rules, not habits. (source)
3. To judge an important decision accurately, cross-check every scene with multiple independent sources and push for inside-the-room detail. Haberman and Swan checked and rechecked scenes with people who took risks to correct the record, and that's how they earned confidence in their account. No single account was trusted on its own. (source, source)
4. Deliberately engineer your information intake so bad or uncomfortable news reaches you. When a gatekeeper filters what a leader sees down to mostly positive news, that leader loses touch with reality and decides in a bubble. Welcoming bad news is the guard against this. (source, source)
5. Check the credentials of anyone offering a flattering expert judgment, especially one that tells you what you want to hear. The book's 'historian' who ranked the president the most powerful leader ever turned out to be a golfer's caddy. A conclusion that feels authoritative deserves a check on the authority. (source, source, source)
6. Refuse to make consequential decisions on gut feeling or an unexplained formula. The book describes a major tariff decision made while the president dismissed accurate figures as fabricated and leaned on a calculation no one could explain. Markets then crashed. Insist on hard, checkable data before acting. (source)
7. Distinguish authority from raw power. Authority is the ability to dictate outcomes without using force; raw power is the ability to destroy. The book's lesson is that authority outlasts force. An actor who only threatens or strikes without building consent ends up weaker even while looking powerful. (source)
8. Read strategic access and favors as a compliance system, not generosity. Private jet rides, golf invitations, a freely shared phone number, campaign money: these are how influence is bought. Recognizing that makes you harder to co-opt. (source)
9. Map who is actually in the room when decisions get made, not who is nominally responsible. The second term's major choices came from a handful of people while agencies and even cabinet secretaries were cut out. Power sits with the small group in the room, not the org chart. (source, source)
10. Judge transparency by the substance of what's revealed, not the volume of access. A source can hold frequent press conferences, answer nothing of value, and use the appearance of openness as a screen. Measure disclosure by whether claims can be verified, not by how often they speak. (source)