What Haberman and Swan’s New Trump Book Gets Right

Rev. Steve Edington

[Text of this op-ed as it ran in the July 17, 2026, issue of the New Hamshire Union Leader]

I tried to purchase a copy of Maggie Haberman’s and Jonathan Swan’s Regime Change at my local Barnes & Noble the day after it was released. It was sold out. I got one a few days later via special order. According to the book’s publisher, Simon and Schuster, 300,000 copies were sold in its first week out.

“Regime Change” is an incredibly well researched and documented work that roughly covers the time from Donald Trump’s re-election up through March of this year. It includes some face time the authors got with Trump.

There is no way I can realistically delve into all the minutia of the book’s 400-plus pages. What I’ll do is offer a few takeaways that jumped out at me.

Takeaway 1: I found, for openers, no evidence that Donald Trump felt that taking on the Presidential Office means answering to a higher calling. By “higher calling” I mean an awareness that to become President is to be summoned to think and act well beyond the bounds of the self. Indeed, this goes for any public office and is all the more crucial for a US President. What one gets in Regime Change is a description of a President whose use of the Office is primarily, if not entirely, to serve his own ends, needs, and desires.

This comes through most pointedly in the largest section of the book titled “Retribution.” It is about a third of the entire work and describes incident after incident in which Trump uses the powers of his office to settle scores with perceived enemies. None of his efforts had anything to do with attending to the greater good of the country he is supposedly serving.

Just one example. In expressing his displeasure with then Attorney General Pam Bondi, Trump said to an aide, “I don’t know why I picked her…she doesn’t want to do the job.” As the authors point out, “’The job,’ in Trump’s mind, was to bring cases against his targets.” Not cases, mind you, the served the greater interests of the United States, but cases against Trump’s targets.

Takeaway 2: Related to the above, another thing that came through with my reading was Trump’s lack of any kind of a North Star. By “North Star” I mean some anchored-in-place set of beliefs, values, principles, and moral precepts that guide our lives and our decision making. The contents of our North Star may vary over the course of our lives (I know mine have), but most of us, in one way or another, look beyond ourselves to some higher sources of guidance and meaning in our lives. These sources are often of a religious or philosophical nature and, at their best, they serve to call us to our better selves and to provide guardrails for us when we act from our less than better selves.

In reading “Regime Change” the only North Star I could detect for Donald Trump was, and is, Donald Trump. He is his own North Star and feels that that is all he needs. The book’s cover has a quote from Trump’s first term where he invokes Article 2 of the Constitution in this way: “I have an Article 2 where I have the right to do whatever I want as President.” That, in a nutshell, is Trump’s North Star: A President who can do anything he wants. Of course, the Constitution grants no such Presidential authority, but why should that be a hindrance to Trump’s personal North Star?

Takeaway 3: One of the more intriguing parts of the book I found was the authors’ ability to reconstruct some of the conversations Trump had when it came to his making certain crucial decisions. He would listen (or act like he was listening) to a variety of opinions, but his technique was to eventually wear everyone down to the point that they no longer had the will or desire to challenge him, and he got what he’d wanted to begin with. In the end, no one wanted to cross him and become yet another target of his retribution.

Just before I bought this book, I came across a passage from a novella titled “Hadjii Murad” by Leo Tolstoy. In it, Tolstoy offers a description of the Russian Emperor, Nicholas 1, who ruled from 1825 to 1855. Tolstoy’s words fit right in with this takeaway:

“Continual brazen flattery from everyone around him in the teeth of obvious facts brought him to such a state (that he) was quite convinced that all his orders, however senseless they might be, became reasonable, just, and mutually accordant simply because he gave them.”

A final takeaway: Never in our country’s history has there been a greater need for regime change than right now.

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Rev. Steve Edington is the Minister Emeritus of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua. He is also a past President and current Treasurer of Lowell Celebrates Kerouac and the author of three Kerouac themed books, including his latest one, The Gospel According to Jack—Tracking Kerouac in My Life.