Sources describe a White House in crisis as advisers struggle to contain the president’s dark moods.
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.
Bob Woodward’s New Book Presents Trump Staffers as Our Last Line of Defense. We’re Doomed.
Fear is full of stories of administration officials thwarting Trump in instances that don’t matter at all.
Opinion | The White Rebellion (Published 2018)
Trump’s ability to project the petrifying fear young white men feel is a large part of the reason he is president today.
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...
On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear
From a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and a former White House senior advisor, a deeply reported manual for how individuals can resist America's slide away from democracy, based on original interviews with more than 100 dissidents, activists, and theorists across the world. The United States has crossed into a new and unfamiliar realm--one in which daring to challenge the state carries real danger. Ordinary Americans now face a government that feels more like foreign autocracies, with a White House stretching the powers of the presidency beyond recognition. The sitting president wields fear as a weapon, punishes political enemies, intimidates sitting members of Congress, bends private businesses to his will, and disappears student protesters off the streets. Based on their acclaimed The New Yorker essay "So You Want to Be a Dissident: A Practical Guide to Courage in Trump's Age of Fear," Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Julia Angwin and former White House senior advisor Ami Fields-Meyer deliver a guide to courage in America's age of fear. On Courage is a captivating collection of stories and lessons from the front lines of the fight for the future of the free world that invite action and rouse hope. Step into the room where the world's new dissidents--ordinary people, in the U.S. and around the world, who never aspired to be activists--are writing the playbook for courage, risk, and resistance in the age of authoritarianism and unprecedented digital surveillance. On Courage simplifies the calculus of activism by making more accessible than ever the fundamentals of taking political risk. It's a handbook that is equal parts practical and spiritual, a valuable resource and a powerful message for anyone, anywhere, who feels the walls of history closing in on them.
The Emergency We Cannot Feel: On the Psychological Unreadiness for American Collapse
Why the most dangerous political crisis in modern American history is met with emotional denial, moral distortion, and cultural distraction.
Rubio and Miller warn of the ‘mortal threat’ of ‘far-left terror’ in speech to 67 countries | CNN Politics
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and top White House adviser Stephen Miller on Thursday sought to paint a dark picture of the threat of “far-left terror” to the United States as they urged diplomats from around the world to “defend” their civilizations against the “scourge.”
A Unified Theory of the Trumps’ Creepy Aesthetic
The bloodless exorbitance of the White House's Christmas stagecraft reveals a deeper truth about the presidential couple.
Opinion | The Policies of White Resentment (Published 2017)
Trump won on the politics of racial backlash. Now he’s following through with an agenda meant to stoke it further.
Trump Comments on Race Open Breach With C.E.O.s, Military and G.O.P. (Published 2017)
President Trump was abandoned by executives, contradicted by military leaders and shunned by Republicans outraged by his defense of white nationalists.
Peters Report Finds Trump Administration Has Dismantled Critical Counterterrorism Infrastructure and Weaponized What Remains Against Political Opponents, Leaving Americans Vulnerable to Terror Threats - Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs
Senator Gary Peters released a new report detailing how the Trump Administration has systematically dismantled key elements of the nation’s post-9/11 counterterrorism infrastructure, diverting personnel and resources away from preventing terrorist attacks, and increasingly weaponizing other counterterrorism authorities for political purposes.
Andrew McCabe’s firing and Trump’s anti-Mueller tirade, explained
“The president of the United States is unhinged.”
Opinion | I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration (Published 2018)
I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.
Trump has been dismantling post-9/11 counterterrorism protections, Senate report says
Democratic senators are accusing the White House of weakening U.S. defenses that were developed and refined in the 25 years since the 9/11 attacks.
Alex Berenson: I Didn’t Fall for Covid Fearmongering. But AI Terrifies Me.
At first, Alex Berenson was skeptical that AI posed a grave danger to humanity. He now believes the White House, the U.S., and the world must move forcefully to reduce the risks of AI. Here’s what changed.
