The Trump's Regime Change Goal Deleted

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swift, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump (Simon & Schuster, 2026)

No other president could do the shit I’m doing

- Donald Trump, speaking to US House Republicans, March 9, 2026

Trump Unleashed

Who doesn’t like stories?[1] New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swift are good at collecting and writing up real-life tales about the second horrific presidency of Donald Trump through the onset of his disastrous war on Iran. Their instantly heralded book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump strings together one story after another that contradict the Trump47 regime’s (good on the authors for using that word) self-glorifying narrative claiming that Trump is a great savior of US-American greatness.

Haberman and Swift expertly puncture that myth with carefully constructed narratives about:

* The cruelty and excess of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency

* Trump’s wild tariff mayhem.

* Trump’s sloppy obstruction of the release of the Epstein Files.

* Trump’s lethal unleashing of ICE and Border Patrol agents on Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis and other US cities.

* Trump’s brazen defiance of federal judicial decisions.

* Trump’s weaponization of the federal justice system to punish his perceived domestic enemies.

* Trump’s attack on the independence of Congress and federal agencies including the US Federal Reserve.

* Trump’s war on the independence of top news outlets.

* Trump’s determination to put his personal authoritarian stamp on government functions and buildings, and on national and world history

* Trump’s sickening wars on science, public health, accurate historical memory, and basic human decency.

* Trump’s arch-criminal extrajudicial executions (boat strikes) in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific.

* Trump’s criminal seizure of Venezuela’s head of state and wild threats to the national sovereignty of Canada and Greenland.

*Trump’s epically corrupt transformation of the White House into a vehicle of massive personal and family self-enrichment.

* Trump’s reckless and criminal stagger into his disastrous war on Iran, which predictably led to the closing of oil and gas shipments through the Strait of Hormuz and a resulting boost to inflation, helping crater Trump’s public approval --- all in defiance of warnings he received from Tucker Carlson, Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine, and others.

* Much more terrible to contemplate from the dystopian Trump regime…

Haberman and Swift skillfully portray Trump wielding power without restraint, shattering longstanding norms in seemingly arbitrary and haphazard ways far less constrained than during his first administration. “In his second presidency,” write the authors:

“Trump has bent and even broken institutions. No modern President has so quicky reduced his party in Congress to such thorough compliance as Trump did in 2025. And no President in modern memory has so openly used the powers of the office to pressure into alignment the major pillars of civil society and the private sector, from the largest tech companies to the most venerable news organizations, to Big Law and the Ivy League universities.”

Straight from the Tyrant’s Mouth

Haberman and Swift developed their all-too non-fictional stories from a remarkable research undertaking that included more than 1000 interviews. They attempt to give readers an “inside” fly-on-the-wall take on the Trump regime – no easy task since “the second Trump White House,” Haberman and Swift write, “spent its first twelve months guarding information far more carefully than the first, where leaks out of the Oval Office and Situation Room were near-daily occurrences. This time, rarely have news stories penetrated these rooms. We have made our best efforts to take you inside.”

For all they have learned from others besides Trump, nothing is more extraordinary (and chilling) than what Haberman and Swift report from their own and Times colleagues’ personal interviews with the nation’s deranged, debased, depraved, degenerate, destructive, demented, and disgusting wannabe dictator-for-life. When they sat down with El Maligno for a final fact check last March, CNN accurately reports:

“he showed them a document arguing he was more powerful than some of the most feared and treacherous leaders in history — including Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler. Trump had been asked by Haberman and Swan about the power he wielded as president in his second term and his place in history, which prompted him to tell the story of a two-page document he had received from ‘a historian’ during an event honoring the hall of fame golfer, Gary Player. Trump proudly asked an aide to fetch a copy of the document, which argued that each of the other leaders, ‘however fearsome in his day, had no global reach. Their power was local. But (Trump’s) was not.’… Trump proudly showed them the letter, Haberman and Swan write, ‘reciting the names of some of history’s most powerful figures, explaining how each fell short of his own power as US president.’.. But when Swan and Haberman tried to find the author, it turned out, he was not a historian, but actually Player’s longtime caddy and personal confidant. The caddy told Haberman and Swan that he ‘had first shared his assessment of Trump’s power with Player and later explained it directly to Trump over golf in Florida.’ Trump [soon] posted the document on Truth Social…an interesting coincidence that one source told CNN may have been an attempt to get out in front of the book. Trump wrote that the author was a ‘presidential historian.’” (See Regime Change, pp. 411-412)

It was four Times reporters to whom Trump infamously said the following during a long interview, reported in real time on page one of the Times last January, when asked if there were any limits on his global powers: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me. I don’t need international law.” Later in the same interview, duly reported in Regime Change, the following remarkable exchange transpired:

‘David Sanger, New York Times: You can send as many troops as you want [to seize Greenland].

Trump: That’s right.

Sanger: And you haven’t done it. How come?

Trump: Because I want to do it properly.

Sanger: And properly means own it?

Trump: Really it is, to me, it’s ownership. Ownership is very important.

Sanger: Why is ownership important here?

Trump: Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success…Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document, that you can have a base.

Sanger: So you’re going to ask them to buy it?

Katie Rogers, New York Times: Psychologically important to you or to the United States?

Trump: Psychologically important for me. Now, maybe another president would feel differently, but so far I’ve been right about everything.’

Later in the same interview, Trump told the Times that he decided to use the White House to increase his wealth because “I found out that nobody cared.”

An Attempted Regime Change That Goes Without Mention

Haberman and Swift deserve praise for the proficiency and diligence with which they have pulled together these and other stories about “mad King” Trump’s” boundless imperial chutzpah, narcissism, and recklessness, and about the abject failure of anyone in his administration, his party, and the broader national establishment to seriously check his destructive power. Regime Change fails, however, when it comes to what it’s all about – fascism – and where this fascism comes from: US capitalism-imperialism hitting its limits. It’s great on details and useful on patterns, but purposefully silent on the core nature of what it describes and clueless on causation. The problem with Regime Change isn’t just that it flunks the historical and political science typology question (even as the stories it tells are richly consistent with an understanding of Trump, Trumpism, and the Trump47 regime as fascist) but that it refuses to even consider giving president and his regime a politico-ideological label of any kind. “Since his first term,” Haberman and Swift write in their introduction:

“Trump has tempted many, from his most devoted supporters to his fiercest critics, to seek out the deeper motivations and ideological underpinnings of his presidency and character. Time and again, this has proven to be a fool’s errand. Trump will often do whatever he feels like in the moment, frequently giving into shockingly impulsive behavior. We have therefore tried to avoid such sweeping generalizations. There are, however, frequent patterns that recur in his life, advisors that keep returning, impulses that are predictable, tricks from his playbook that he consistently displays….”(emphasis added).

Later in their text, the authors mock “those who put [Trump] in ideological boxes and fit his actions into a coherent world view.”

This is the “big baby Trump” school of “analysis,” according to which understanding the regime is about tracking the unhinged and incoherent impetuosity of a childlike malignantly narcissist sociopath.

This is a massive fail. As I have shown at length on The Paul Street Report and as many others have also demonstrated and reflected upon at length (consult the extraordinary weekly podcasts of Refuse Fascism), Trump is the fascist leader of a fascist regime headed by a fascist section of the US ruling class that is bidding quite seriously to make over American government and society on fascist – genocidally white supremacist, militantly patriarchal, xenophobically nationalist, crudely imperialist, and dictatorial – lines.

“Regime change”? Oh, Hell yes, that’s the aim: from previously normative bourgeois democracy and rule of law to a new form of governance, a new way of cohering the nation around brazen and unapologetic white supremacism, nativism, patriarchy, lawless imperial adventurism, and dictatorship. Contrary to Haberman and Swift’s portrayal of the current administration as random and haphazard and his allies as “conservative,” the Trump47 regime has consistently demonstrated a fierce commitment to radical right – fascist – goals. This has been evident from Trump’s day one pardoning of more than 1600 January 6 putschists and executive order purporting to eradicate constitutional birthright citizenship through his military occupation of cities to his mass murderous war on Iran.

What do Haberman and Swift think Trump and his open Christian white nationalist “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth’s speeches to 800-plus military commanders they called to Quantico last September 30^th were all about? There Hegseth called for the end of any US concern for civil rights, racial and gender equity, and international rules of military engagement and human rights. Herr Trump told the brass that the nation’s top adversary is “the enemy within,” by which he meant his domestic political opponents concentrated in majority nonwhite Democratic Party-run cities he portrayed as “war” zones requiring military occupation.

Time and again, fools have refused to identify and acknowledge the clearly fascist content[2] of Trump’s motivations, ideological underpinnings (nonwhite immigrants are “poisoning the blood of the nation,” for example), character, presidency, impulses, advisers, and appointees (e.g. Stephen “We are the Storm” Miller), appointees (Miller, Russel Vought, JD “Haitians are Eating Your Pets” Vance, and Pete Hegseth, for example), tricks, and playbook (e.g. the recent wild Trump labeling of the capitalist-imperialist Democrats as “communists”).

“We are the Storm and Rule in Real World Governed by Force”

The role of advisers and appointees is key. Haberman and Swift’s criticism of “ideological” analyses of the regime seems over-focused on Trump himself. While the wildly corrupt and debased Malignant One can sometimes seem difficult to pin down in precise ideological terms, the same cannot be said about, for example, his most durable (across both Trump governments) and powerful policy and political adviser, the open fascist Stephen Miller and other deeply committed Amerikaner Republifascists around the regime and in MAGA.

Surely Haberman and Swift are familiar with Miller’s speech after the assassination of the fascist youth leader Charlie Kirk last September. MAGA “patriots,” Miller intoned, have embody a great Western (white and Christian) civilizing mission to save humanity by annihilating “the forces of darkness,” their “radical Left” opponents. Miller said that Kirk’s widow, Erika, reminded him of a “famous expression”:

“The storm whispers to the warrior that, ‘You cannot withstand my strength.’ And the warrior whispers back, ‘I am the storm.’ Erika is the storm,” [Miller declared]. “We are the storm. And our enemies cannot comprehend our strength, our determination, our resolve, our passion. Our lineage and our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello. Our ancestors built the cities. They produced the art and architecture. They built the industry, [Miller] said, pulling “us out of the caves and the darkness into the light. We built the world that we inhabit now, generation by generation, and we will defend this world.”

Miller than lectured “the forces of wickedness and evil,” bellowing the following:

“You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness, you are jealousy, you are envy, you are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing. We are the ones who build. We are the ones who create. We are the ones who lift up humanity. You have no idea the dragon you have awakened,” he warned, as MAGA struggles “to save this civilization, to save the West, to save this republic, because our children are strong, and our grandchildren will be strong, and our children’s children’s children will be strong. And what will you leave behind? Nothing, nothing.”

Or how about this from Mein Trumpf’s mass deportation kommandant Miller after the regime kidnapped Venezuela’s president last January:

“You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world, Jake [Tapper of CNN], that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world… Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.”

Why This Omission?

It is too much to expect leading Times reporters to take their understanding deeper into the capitalist-imperialist system that has produced a fascist section of the ruling class, a fascist (MAGA) base, and a fascist regime atop the US[3]. But why the reluctance to at least identify the president and regime for what they are, that is, fascist? Because doing so would mean acknowledging the need for a kind of deep domestic civil and political struggle that the mainstream US ruling class, whose longstanding top newspaper of record is The New York Times, does not wish to see since such an internal conflict would pose a serious threat to American power in the world and to mainstream elites’ safety as well. As the revolutionary communist leader Bob Avakian explains in his recent reflection on “Why There Is ‘No Lincoln’ Now, and What That Has to Do With the Possibility of Emancipation”:

‘This is not the time of Lincoln, in the mid-19th century. At that point, this country was continuing its expansion, particularly to the West, with the ongoing genocidal devastation of the native peoples (as well as the theft of a huge territory from Mexico), but the “United States” was not then a major world power in the way it has been for more than a century now. Specifically, at the time of the Civil War, in the 1860s, the U.S. was not the dominant imperialist power in the world, in the way it has been since the end of World War 2. Today, there is a lot more to lose for the imperialists if their “home country,” the foundation of their empire, becomes embroiled in, and seriously weakened by, an actual civil war.

To put in another way: For Lincoln, not to wage civil war, to prevent the southern Confederacy from breaking away and forming a separate country, would have resulted in a greatly weakened “United States.” In the present time, for the “mainstream” section of the ruling class to engage in a new civil war, in order to decisively defeat fascism in this country, would involve the great risk of unraveling the country as a whole—and, in any case, reducing what was left of the country to, at most, a “second rate” power, incapable of imposing its dictates on the rest of the world. The “cohesion” of the USA, as any kind of unified country, would be very hard to maintain, under those circumstances.

This is the crucial background for why the “mainstream” section of the ruling class is essentially afraid of, and determined to avoid, a new civil war—even if that means allowing fascist rule to become fully consolidated, with the truly terrible consequences of that. That is why there is “no Lincoln” now—no leading figure among the “mainstream” section of the ruling class who is willing, as Lincoln was, to risk everything in order to defeat a reactionary force (in that case, the slavery-based Confederacy) that was directly moving to destroy what had been the basis of unity of the country.’

So it is left to masses of non-ruling class Americans to wage an actual and serious struggle against Trumpism-fascism – a struggle that The New York Times obviously will not and cannot advocate and that could require an actual revolution to succeed.

Endnotes

+1. I certainly do. The novels, plays, and short stories by Ray Bradbury, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Albert Camus, Emily Bronte, Ernest Hemingway, Eugene O’Neil, Tennessee Williams, Ernest Hemingway, and others are what first introduced me to “the life of the mind.” I recall being riveted to my chair as a teenager and young adult by the rich, real-life stories told in brilliant memoirs, including Pat Jordan’s A False Spring (a poignant of failed baseball dreams), The Autobiography of Malcolm X, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, George Orwell’s Down and Out in London and Paris, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Phillip Caputo’s A Rumor of War, and Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire. The nonfiction stories told in young Richard Hofstader’s The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It, a New Left-anticipating reflection (ironically enough in Hofstader’s case) on the shared capitalist and nationalist values of leading United States political figures from the Founders through Franklin Roosevelt, is the book that first put me on the path (for better and worse) to a doctorate in American history. My favorite history professors were story tellers, engaging narrators of the Boston Tea Party, the storming of the Bastille, Lincoln’s failed attempt to the keep the Union intact, the Haymarket Bomb, the Pullman Strike, the Bolsheviks taking power, Mao’s Long March, Stalingrad, Truman’s sickening atom-bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and more.

+2. Please see the fourth chapter, titled “The Anatomy of Fascism Denial,” in my 2021 study of Trump’s first fascist presidency, This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (New York: Routledge, 2021).

3. Essential reading on this topic: Bob Avakian, Humanity on the Brink: A Forced March Into the Abyss or Forging a War Forward Out of the Madness (March 2, 2026).

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