On Sunday night, in a packed auditorium at the Performing Arts Center, Mark Leibovich turned to Maggie Haberman and quipped, “Maggie, look out at this crowd. Trump couldn’t draw a crowd like this.” Leibovich and Haberman are both veteran journalists and best-selling authors who have written extensively about Donald Trump’s presidencies. They were on the Vineyard to speak at the MV Author Series about Habermen’s new book, co-authored with Jonathan Swan, “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.”
“Regime Change,” which was published on June 23, is the breakout best-selling book of the summer. It is such a phenomenon that a recent headline in the Atlantic proclaimed, “Even Trump Can’t Believe How Well This Book Has Sold.” Haberman, who is a Pulitzer Prize-winning White House correspondent for the New York Times, said she and Swan signed the deal with Simon & Schuster to write the book in 2023, and had to throw out the first few months of research they did after realizing, ”We were covering a fundamentally different type of presidency than we had ever seen in this country before.”
“Regime Change” is a deeply researched account of the first 14 months of the second Trump presidency. “This is a form of regime change in our country,” Haberman said. “The title is really about our own country and what we’re experiencing right now.”
Haberman noted the difficulty of getting sources to talk during this current administration, and recalled that during the first Trump presidency, reporters “walked around with a bucket and the leaks just fell in.” She said that President Trump granted them only one fact-checking interview for the book.
During a question-and-answer session, someone asked, “What’s the nature of your relationship to the president?” To which Haberman replied, “I don’t have a relationship with the president.”
