Commonwealth Club: Jonathan Swan: Regime Change

Is this the most definitive portrait of Donald Trump as president? Two reporters who have covered him more closely than perhaps anyone else over the past decade have teamed up to produce an insider’s examination of the first year of Trump’s second term. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan went behind the scenes of a presidency that has transformed the culture, turned the Justice Department into an agent of retribution against the president’s enemies and the office itself into what critics say has become a profit-making venture. They reveal a second term propelled by a historical irony that Trump himself has come to understand: that the indictments, the convictions, the assassination attempts, and four years of exile made him not weaker but far more powerful, more vengeful, and more willing to gamble than any president in modern history. Join us to hear Swan reveal what they learned about the most consequential presidency of our time. The generals who once told him “no” are gone, and the lawyers who remain have learned to pick their battles. His administration has flouted court orders, and he has claimed powers that Congress once checked. They say that what remains is a president willing to take enormous risks that have upended global markets and toppled heads of state—an imperial president operating almost entirely on instinct alone. They lay out what they discovered in their new book Regime Change. Based on hundreds of interviews and unprecedented reporting from deep within the administration’s most closely guarded rooms, including the Situation Room and secret Oval Office deliberations that launched a new war in the Middle East and seen Trump seal the border, surge National Guard troops into cities, and send immigration agents into deadly clashes with protestors.  This is a story about power, how Trump has used it, who tried to stop him—and why nearly all of them have failed. It is also the story of something American journalists are more accustomed to chronicling in distant capitals than in their own: a president who has fundamentally altered the nature of the office he holds—and, with it, how the rest of the world understands American power.