Overview
- The New York Times book Regime Change, published Tuesday, draws on hundreds to more than a thousand interviews to argue that President Trump is exercising unprecedented, loyalty-driven unilateral power in his second term.
- Authors Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan report internal discussions of extreme options, including suspending habeas corpus and invoking the Insurrection Act, that alarmed some senior officials.
- The book says the Situation Room was repurposed for crisis meetings about the Jeffrey Epstein files, raising questions about use of secure national-security spaces for political damage control.
- Reporting also details intimate White House and residence habits and claims that Elon Musk acted as an informal senior adviser early in the term, and those personal revelations have reportedly infuriated the president and led to a White House ban on staff commenting about the book.
- News outlets say the administration has opened a leak hunt to identify sources, a move that has intensified scrutiny of national-security protocols and could trigger legal inquiries while some reports note limits to corroboration of Situation Room sourcing.