If there was ever any doubt that journalism is the first rough draft of history, a recent book on the first year of US President Donald Trump’s second term should dispel it for good. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump describes, in nail-biting detail, the authoritarian, corrupt and morally degraded workings of the Trump administration since his re-election.Spanning more than 450 pages, the book is a treasure trove of evidence and information that, decades from now, will be an invaluable record of how American democracy, in the year of its 250th birthday, was tested, and how the institutions of the world’s most powerful country were bent to the will of one man.The book is hardly an easy read; its pages are dense with reporting. But Regime Change excels at what it sets out to do: reveal, with almost breathtaking access, what happens behind the closed doors of the Trump administration. Haberman and Swan have got themselves deep inside the president’s world — government, advisers, friends and his inner circle. From the opening chapter, which recounts what Elon Musk referred to as “first-class grovelling” text messages sent by Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, to the final chapter, which takes readers into the Situation Room on February 11, when Benjamin Netanyahu persuaded Trump to launch an attack on Iran, the book offers a fly-on-the-wall account of power.What sets Regime Change apart from the daily torrent of Trump coverage is that their reporting goes beyond what happened in public: Conversations in the Oval Office, the Situation Room and private meetings are pieced together, often cross-checked against multiple accounts. The result is a granular portrait of how decisions are made. The book is also very much about Trump himself: His obsessions, tantrums, transactional instincts and greed. Much of this inevitably rests on anonymous sourcing.The book’s structure is straightforward, divided into four sections: “Whirlwind,” “Retribution,” “The Enemy Within,” and “Plunder.”“Whirlwind” captures Trump’s “flood the zone” strategy — the deliberate unleashing of a relentless stream of news, announcements and executive actions, leaving the media and his opponents scrambling to keep up. The authors show how that impulse translated into action: Hundreds of executive orders and sweeping decisions on immigration, DOGE, tariffs, Gaza, Ukraine and USAID, among much else. The point was not simply to govern at speed, but to move faster than the institutions meant to check the president could respond. The consequences of that whirlwind are still unfolding.It is the second section, “Retribution”, however, that strikes most directly at the heart of Trump’s personality: What does the person occupying the most powerful office in the world do with that power? In Haberman and Swan’s telling, he turns personal grievance into institutional policy. That is the essence of the longest of the book’s four sections, and naturally so, given Trump’s rather overt campaign against those he believed had wronged him. As the two reporters write, “by publicly marking individuals or entities for retribution by decree, and having his targets crumble in anticipation of such attacks, Trump had effectively opened up a new front for the second term, terrorising his foes.” Prosecutors, political opponents, media figures, law firms and others who had crossed Trump in one way or another in the past all found themselves in his sights. Also reported on is Trump’s suspicious relationship with the late convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein files, and the deepening divisions within the MAGA coalition.Story continues below this ad“The Enemy Within” is the most politically consequential section. The authors make it clear that Trump does not conceive of foreign powers such as China, Russia or Iran as his primary rivals, but Americans inside the United States — particularly the Left and institutions associated with it — as his enemies. After the murder of Charlie Kirk, Trump reportedly told reporters that “we just have to beat the hell” out of “radical Left lunatics.” For Trump, political opposition became an internal security problem.The final section, aptly titled “Plunder”, is all about the monetisation of Trump’s presidency — because, as the authors make clear, “throughout his life, Donald Trump had monetised everything he could.” Although the section opens with the world of crypto, it moves through land deals in the Middle East, the FIFA Peace Prize and oil in Venezuela. It ends, however, with some of the book’s most important reporting: The account of Netanyahu in the Situation Room two weeks before Operation Epic Fury, when Vice-President J D Vance, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine all expressed scepticism about going to war with Iran. The course of events has proven them right.India doesn’t get many mentions in the book, and when it does, there is a tone of sneering condescension, particularly over money and tariffs — a tone that sits alongside the continuing difficulties in reaching a trade deal.. And during a discussion of the possibility of deploying international peacekeepers in Ukraine, Trump says, “The Indians won’t do that, they won’t pay for something like that,” adding, “The Indians don’t ever pay for anything.” India, in fact, has a long and respected record of contributing troops to United Nations peacekeeping missions. But for a president who has confused Albania with Armenia, expecting him to keep track of peacekeeping, perhaps, is asking too much.Overall, Regime Change is an essential read for anyone seeking to understand the first year of Trump 2.0 — and, perhaps more importantly, a book worth keeping on the shelf for the next two and a half years. For all that has happened, and for all that Haberman and Swan document in extraordinary detail, remember that we are not even halfway through Trump’s presidency.Story continues below this adRegime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump by Maggie Haberman, Jonathan SwanSimon and Schuster UK496 pagesPrice: Rs 999