New book details Trump's push to expand presidential power

Inside the White House Situation Room, Donald Trump’s aides held multiple damage-control meetings over the Jeffrey Epstein files, a sign of how quickly a scandal became a test of presidential control. The episode is one of several detailed in Regime Change, the new book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan that portrays Trump as pressing hard against the limits of executive power.

Simon & Schuster says the book covers the first year of Trump’s second presidency and draws on hundreds of interviews and reporting from deep inside the administration’s most closely guarded rooms. The publisher describes Trump as an “imperial President,” saying his administration flouted court orders, claimed powers once checked by Congress and turned the Justice Department into an agent of retribution against his enemies. In the authors’ telling, the indictments, convictions, assassination attempts and four years of exile left Trump more powerful, more vengeful and more willing to gamble than any president in modern history.

The Epstein material shows how that pressure played out behind closed doors. A June 10 excerpt said aides feared leaks so intensely that they met in the Situation Room, and Axios reported that Vice President JD Vance and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles were part of those discussions last summer. Kirkus Reviews said Vance also wanted the files released quickly and suggested that Tucker Carlson interview Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking and conspiracy, in an effort to help clear Trump’s name.

Taken together, the book frames Trump’s White House as something more aggressive than a conventional West Wing. It is a portrait of a presidency that treats the machinery of government, from the Justice Department to the Situation Room, as a tool for personal defense and political counterattack, while putting courts, Congress and senior aides under constant strain. Simon & Schuster is set to publish Regime Change on June 23, and public appearances begin June 25 in New York, Washington, DC, Boston and California, including at 92nd Street Y, Sidwell Friends School, WBUR CitySpace and the Commonwealth Club of California.