Three weeks ago, conventional wisdom held that readers were bored by books about Donald Trump. What more was there to say about the man who has dominated American public life for a decade? Then Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan published Regime Change.
Written by two reporters with unrivaled access to the White House, the book sold more than 300,000 copies in its first week—making it the fastest-selling nonfiction hardcover of the year so far. It argues that Trump’s return to office marks a fundamental transformation of the presidency, defined by an unprecedented expansion of executive power. Is that a convincing argument? We asked the conservative writer Christopher Caldwell to read the book and let us know what he thought. One of the sharpest observers of the rise of Trump, and the big-picture trends that brought him to power, Caldwell offers his view not just of Regime Change but of the meaning of Trump’s second term in today’s Big Read. —The Editors
“Essentially I won every fucking time,” Donald Trump told Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan in March, in a profanity-laced valedictory interview for their new book, Regime Change. “And I’m tired of winning and winning and winning and just getting bad fucking press.”
What citizen of any nation would wish such a vulgarian at its head? And yet who can doubt that he’s right, at least sometimes? This is the paradox: Understanding the crudest man ever to occupy the White House requires delicacy. If deep access to White House secrets has made this book a bestseller since its June release, what has turned it into a bestseller of warehouse-emptying proportions is its nuance.
Nuance has lately been in short supply. The president has suffered a humiliating defeat in a Middle Eastern war he launched against the wiser counsel of most of his advisers. The middle class is discontented, and the clamor for economic redistribution is louder than it has been since the 1930s. Many of Trump’s detractors claim to have told us so. Elect a barbarian and you’ll get a barbarian. Simple as that. What did you expect?
