Donald Trump is no ordinary con man. He's way above average — and the American political system is his easiest mark ever.
Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump
INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “Regime Change is exceptional. It transcends its genre...the book is packed with news that will stay news...This is reporting of consequence.” —David Remnick, The New Yorker “A flabbergasting feat of political reporting.” —Tina Brown “Riveting and richly textured...What the authors add is the vivid detail that makes these events feel actual. They wrest reality itself back from the distorted world of entertainment, illusion, fantasy, and denial that Trump has generated around himself. It is this flood of provocation, atrocity, self-dealing, and fabrication that makes Haberman and Swan’s counternarrative so vital.” —Fintan O’Toole, The New York Times A riveting, intimate, and revelatory account of the most radical and consequential presidency of our time.From the two reporters who have covered him more closely than perhaps anyone else over the past decade comes this definitive portrait of Donald Trump in the White House. Regime Change covers the first year of Trump’s second presidency—a term liberated from every constraint that defined his first. 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. 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. Based on hundreds of interviews and unprecedented reporting from deep within the administration’s most closely guarded rooms, Regime Change takes the reader inside the Situation Room and into the secret Oval Office deliberations that have 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. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan bring us 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 a brazen vehicle for profit. 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. This is the story of how Trump has used that power, who has 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. It is an account of Regime Change right here in America—a landmark real-time history of a modern presidency like no other.
Pluralistic: Preparing for a post-Trump internet (03 Sep 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
I know, it's tempting to think of Trump as a cause, rather than an effect – as an aberration who dragged America into fascism. Trump is exceptional, but the thing that makes him exceptional isn't his corruption, recklessness or cruelty. What makes Trump exceptional is his ability to cajole, intimidate and flatter America's most corrupt, reckless and cruel people into a coalition.
How Trump Won, What Happens Next, and How Disconnects Drove Democracy
How Trump Won Through The Lens of Data, Trust, Media, and the Vibecession
Donald Trump: A Critical Theory-Perspective on Authoritarian Capitalism
This paper analyses economic power, state power and ideological power in the age of Donald Trump with the help of critical theory. It applies the critical theory approaches of thinkers such as Franz Neumann, Theodor W. Adorno and Erich Fromm. It analyses changes of US capitalism that have together with political anxiety and demagoguery brought about the rise of Donald Trump. This article draws attention to the importance of state theory for understanding Trump and the changes of politics that his rule may bring about. It is in this context important to see the complexity of the state, including the dynamic relationship between the state and the economy, the state and citizens, intra-state relations, inter-state relations, semiotic representations of and by the state, and ideology. Trumpism and its potential impacts are theorised along these dimensions. The ideology of Trump (Trumpology) has played an important role not just in his business and brand strategies, but also in his political rise. The (pseudo-)critical mainstream media have helped making Trump and Trumpology by providing platforms for populist spectacles that sell as news and attract audiences. By Trump making news in the media, the media make Trump. An empirical analysis of Trump’s rhetoric and the elimination discourses in his NBC show The Apprentice underpins the analysis of Trumpology. The combination of Trump’s actual power and Trump as spectacle, showman and brand makes his government’s concrete policies fairly unpredictable. An important question that arises is what social scientists’ role should be in the conjuncture that the world is experiencing.See also the related blog post "How The Frankfurt School Helps Us To Understand Donald Trump’s Twitter Populism"http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/christian-fuchs1/how-the-frankfurt-school-_b_14156190.html?utm_hp_ref=uk-donald-trumpThe German translation of this shorter piece was published in Der Falter 5/2017: 21-23.
Trump Told Supporters To “Cheat Like Hell.” The NY Times Went With “A Bit Tired Of Politics.”
By now it’s old hat to point out that the mainstream media bends over backwards to pretend that Donald Trump is a “normal” president. The number of times you could point to the co…
Opinion | Where Trump Is Vulnerable and How to Act on It
People and institutions of civil society must coordinate against him.
Matthew Sheffield (@mattsheffield@mastodon.social)
🧵 As a former Republican consultant who left in 2015, I'm often asked why Trump and his minions are willingly destroying science, K12 education, universities, international organizations, public broadcasting, and social welfare institutions. There are many reasons, but the main ones are psychological rather than ideological. They struggle with abstract thinking and are afraid of the world...
The rise of American authoritarianism
A niche group of political scientists may have uncovered what’s driving Donald Trump’s ascent. What they found has implications that go well beyond 2016.
What Trump Sells Is Impunity
Trump stands out in the GOP not for his racism, but his vision of emancipatory irresponsibility.
How Trump Is Dismantling America’s Scientific Research Machine
The system that has driven life-altering discoveries and helped make the United States a superpower is now under intense strain.
The Predatory Hegemon
Ever since Donald Trump first became U.S. president, in 2017, commentators have searched for an adequate label to describe his approach to U.S. foreign relations. Writing in these pages, the political scientist Barry Posen suggested in 2018 that Trump’s grand strategy was “illiberal hegemony,” and the analyst Oren Cass argued last fall that its defining essence was a demand for “reciprocity.” Trump has been called a realist, a nationalist, an old-fashioned mercantilist, an imperialist, and an isolationist.
Pluralistic: Trump fought the law and Trump won (16 Apr 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
The saving grace of the first Trump administration was its administrative incompetence: for every terrible thing Trump I and his henchmen pulled off, ten more awful plots were thwarted because they were so bad at being evil.
The Weaponized World Economy
When Washington announced a “framework deal” with China in June, it marked a silent shifting of gears in the global political economy. This was not the beginning of U.S. President Donald Trump’s imagined epoch of “liberation” under unilateral American greatness or a return to the Biden administration’s dream of managed great-power rivalry. Instead, it was the true opening of the age of weaponized interdependence, in which the United States is discovering what it is like to have others do unto it as it has eagerly done unto others.
An Open Letter To Members Of The United States Congress
I think we can all agree that nobody seems to be taking the business of governing ourselves terribly seriously. I say we can all agree on this because I think we all know that Donald Trump is a der…
Elon Musk: The Normalizer of Fascism
The world's richest man needs you to believe fascist parties are part of the democratic spectrum
Donald Trump just blew up the electoral map
Trump's Rust Belt surge caught everyone by surprise, and it's why he's likely to be the next president.
