Amid the tumult and the bluster and the noise, what exactly makes our singular president tick? After revisiting in minute detail the innumerable outrages and atrocities of Donald Trump’s second term we come upon, in the epilogue to Regime Change, the purported answer. The New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, having mostly completed their epic chronicle, arrive at the now-gilded Oval Office for their “fact-checking” interview. The president, in an expansive mood, greets them and guides them to their seats in front of the Resolute Desk. “No other president,” he had recently declared with his customary eloquence, “could do some of the shit I’m doing.”

Exactly what shit might he have had in mind? Sending masked ICE agents to seize and deport hundreds of thousands of largely law-abiding people and imprison 60,000 more? Overturning the eighty-year-old world trade system by imposing arbitrary tariffs? Launching a war of choice against Iran with nary a word to Congress or the American people? Firing hundreds of thousands of government workers and gutting USAID, PBS, and the Kennedy Center? Attacking law firms and universities and television networks?

One could go on, but the president wishes to make a broader point. A loyal-unto-death aide, Natalie Harp—known to her colleagues as “the human printer”—is dispatched to fetch a document, and the president begins to read from it,

reciting the names of some of history’s most powerful figures, explaining how each fell short of his own power as US President. Alexander the Great, the Caesars, William the Conqueror—“They didn’t have airplanes, right? You couldn’t travel around.” Genghis Khan. Attila the Hun. Tamerlane. “Napoleon,” he said with relish. “Hitler. Mao. Stalin.”

These leaders “maintained power through fear,” he said. “Who would ever do a thing like that? Right?”

Trump lingered on the document’s central argument: that each leader, however fearsome in his day, had no global reach. Their power was local. But his was not.

“I never thought of it in terms of that,” Trump said. “It’s very interesting, the power.” Then he added: “But when I read it, I said, ‘He’s right.’”

And the “he” in question? The “historian” whose name had slipped the president’s mind, Harp later texts them, was actually the golfer Gary Player’s longtime caddy. No matter. “What was revealing,” they write,

was not really that Trump agreed with the thesis but the way he inhabited it: the evident pleasure he took in the company of Mao, Hitler, and Stalin, masters of state control through murder, torture, and detention, and Napoleon—and the untroubled ease with which he accepted a place among men who had reshaped the world through conquest and fear. He drew no distinction between those who built and those who destroyed.

The scene is irresistible: the president of the United States sitting at the Resolute Desk and comparing himself blithely to Mao, Hitler, and Stalin. Still, what does it tell us? That a tireless and amoral will to power is deeply embedded in Donald Trump’s narcissism and vanity is not exactly a revelation: anyone who has watched him perform a ninety-minute stand-up routine before a crowd of supporters—drinking in, with almost erotic delight, the fervent worship of thousands—cannot have failed to notice. And after the undermining of NATO, the destruction of USAID, and the calamity of the Iran war, Trump’s name is more likely to appear on lists of leaders who have diminished their country’s power than lists of those who have increased it. But that he has become one of the most powerful American presidents—that he has since his second inauguration “put on a demonstration of raw executive power the country had not seen since the presidency of FDR”—is well-nigh indisputable. One could go further and say that not only has Trump, like Roosevelt and Lincoln, successfully imposed on the world’s first modern democracy a “constitutional dictatorship,”¹ he is the only president to have done so in the absence of a true emergency.

How did he do it? Aggressively, brutally, relentlessly—weren’t we all watching him? The more specific answer is that he did it by exploiting the chief executive’s myriad emergency powers or, as Haberman and Swan rather politely phrase it, by “redefin[ing] the very concept of an ‘emergency.’” Another way to put it is that Trump did what Trump does as easily as he breathes: he lied. Is the trade deficit, in uninterrupted existence for half a century, an emergency? Can a country leading the world in energy production be said to be undergoing an “energy emergency”? Can we consider that the southern border, where crossings dropped 77 percent after Joe Biden’s executive order limiting entry, remains in the grip of a “border emergency”? The answer is no. But it doesn’t matter. In issuing more than 140 executive orders in his first hundred days in office—Roosevelt issued ninety-nine—Trump declared that the country was beset by no fewer than ten separate emergencies.² And in the face of this supposedly unprecedented onslaught the president must have unprecedented powers to confront them.

This is what would-be autocrats do: declare an emergency and rule by decree. (“Sovereign is he who decides the exception,” in the celebrated words of the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt.) For a president thirsting for more power, this is the obvious path. But surely the Framers in their wisdom anticipated this danger? Of course they did, which is why Trump’s true innovation as an American authoritarian is not the profligate abuse of emergency powers but the full-on castration of a Congress that allowed him to do it. As we all learned in school, Congress, cantankerous and jealous of its powers, particularly the power of the purse, was meant to be the immediate bulwark against an unbound executive. But during his decade of dominance, Trump has wielded his charisma and his fury and his unquenchable taste for vengeance to systematically destroy any Republicans who would dare raise a voice against him. Though these days a few so-called YOLO—“You only live once”—Republicans, who are retiring or have lost primaries thanks to Trump, are nervously raising their heads from under a rock, since his reelection senators and congressmen have been only too happy to remain silent as he relentlessly increases his power by suborning theirs.

For anyone who has spent Trump’s second term ranting about spineless Republicans and their lack of fealty to the country’s founding principles, Haberman and Swan offer a useful course in the iron laws of Republican self-preservation. The president wields sticks, yes—we have all seen how the insufficiently “loyal” are wiped out by Trump-backed primary challengers—but even more he offers carrots, aggressively seducing those who show the least reluctance to comply. Power in Congress, having increasingly in recent years flowed upward to the leadership, now “flowed out of the Speaker’s office directly into the Oval Office.” And it was not just that Speaker Mike Johnson owed his job to Trump:

Johnson understood the fear Trump inspired…. But it was not just about the threats. He knew also, as did his colleagues, that Trump had a more powerful connection with Republican voters than any of them. And he knew that his own members were seduced by Trump.

Trump exploited those emotions. He understood that many Republican lawmakers related to him like starry-eyed fans rather than as elected representatives of a coequal branch of government. He offered more access than any modern president. Since 2017, he had handed out his cell phone number freely—even to the most junior members of Congress, who would never have dreamed of texting or calling the President. He invited them to play golf with him at his clubs, for dinner at Mar-a-Lago, and for flights on his private jet.

With these lavish perquisites on offer, unusual was the young congressman or senator who needed to be shown the stick. Trump had long since rooted out of Congress most of the Republicans who had voted to impeach him, but his memory is long and his vindictiveness unflagging. (Senator Bill Cassidy, who voted to convict him in 2021, was finally crushed in a primary in May.) So why risk it? Take the presidential phone calls and the plane rides—and the money.

And the money in the post–Citizens United age is staggering. By the day after the 2024 election, Haberman and Swan report, “Trump was already receiving phone calls from Fortune 500 CEOs, many of whom had criticized him in the past.” They wanted to get back into the president-elect’s good graces, but the cost

would be high…. Trump would dictate the number—the exact dollar figure—he wanted [his fundraiser] to extract from each CEO. Within days, millions of dollars, and then tens and hundreds of millions, were pouring into Trump’s various fundraising accounts.

The sums are truly fantastical: $1.9 billion raised from corporate donors. Trump’s political apparatus, much more organized and efficient than it had been during his first term, made full “use [of these] outside groups as weapons to enforce compliance” with his agenda. Next to corporate resources, mere politicians are cheap: a couple billion buys a lot of compliance. And should the campaign cash and the phone calls fall short, there was always the social media army, a bevy of MAGA influencers “who had massive audiences and threatened any Republican who would consider voting against Trump’s nominees.” Senator Joni Ernst, a combat veteran who expressed doubts about Pete Hegseth’s nomination as secretary of defense (for his part Hegseth, one of the dimmer of the dim bulbs among Trump’s appointees, had doubts about whether women should even be in combat), found herself beset with a full-on social media campaign that included nasty details of her divorce. She voted for Hegseth.

And so even before his second term had commenced, Trump and his minions, who make up in loyalty and obedience what they lack in competence, were able very quickly to reduce the United States’ three branches of government to two. Except for isolated cases like the Epstein files—Haberman and Swan offer an entertaining account of the full-on panic caused by that political scandal, including the president’s alleged “nipple fetish,” treated with great seriousness in the Situation Room—the conflict has been between the executive and the courts, which apart from the ideological deformations of the Supreme Court have generally performed ably, though they have not always been obeyed. But is anyone thinking of Tamerlane yet? Or Hitler? Stalin perhaps?

The comparisons seem absurd because although Trump as a politician certainly has elements of genius—his aggression and energy, his uncanny instinct for finding weakness in adversaries, his mastery in dominating the news cycle, his endlessly creative shaping and projecting of his own grievances, his sheer shameless willfulness in making his reality our own—he also remains an ignorant blowhard. He lies so much that he often forgets what the truth is. He doesn’t read. He knows little or no history. And he is so captivated by the sound of his own voice that he almost entirely lacks the ability to listen. Finally, he is wholly in the grip of a decades-old set of beliefs—imposing tariffs will make the United States rich with other countries’ money, American cities are so ravaged by criminal immigrants that only the military can restore order, alliances are simply the means by which freeloader countries “take advantage” of the United States, climate change is nothing more than a fallacious “green new scam”—that are demonstrably false.

What remains astonishing is that Trump, through his indefatigable showmanship, was able to ride his reality show fame to such power in the world’s strongest country that he has been able to impose these aberrant views on nearly 350 million people, with consequences for billions more. As Haberman and Swan show, Trump in his second term has built a government that, but for a few important exceptions (Susie Wiles, Stephen Miller, Russell Vought), is made up of incompetent toadies who are wholly responsive to his wishes—a government that, forced to choose between his fantasies and reality, will choose the fantasies every time. The result is that our politics have seemed to turn the world on its head. Thousands are dying in unprecedented heat waves and the American government is firing rafts of climate scientists, paying multinational corporations not to put up windmills that have already been paid for, and scrubbing the words “climate change” from government websites. Trump’s patrimonialist administration has become a stark embodiment of his own ignorance and irrationality.

One result is that parts of Haberman and Swan’s meticulously reported chronicle read like science fiction. Their account of the meetings about the president’s vaunted Liberation Day, on the other hand, a week before the United States unilaterally dismantled the international trade system, sounds like something out of the Marx Brothers:

“Nobody has fucking given me any numbers,” Trump fumed. “Hard facts of how much China tariffs us, how much India tariffs us. You give me bullshit numbers.”

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick pulled out a folder, saying, “Here are the numbers….”

But Trump was convinced that the real numbers for India and China were much higher than Lutnick’s printouts. “No, these are bullshit numbers,” he said, giving Lutnick a hard look. “These are fucking bullshit.”

Harp, despite her best efforts, was not finding the numbers that didn’t exist.

“No, these are the real numbers!” Lutnick insisted…. Turning to the President’s trade representative, Jamieson Greer, Lutnick pleaded, “Right, Jamieson? Jamieson, say these numbers are real. Jamieson, speak up.”

Greer, a trade lawyer who was not inclined to get into a spat with the President, just looked at Lutnick and said nothing.

The President’s global tariff program, set to launch on “Liberation Day,” was just a week away, but the rates were still undecided. Trump wanted to set the rates using a formula he had been devising in his mind. No one was sure precisely how it was being calculated, and it would vary by the day, sometimes by the hour. But how could he make his calculations with these bullshit numbers from Lutnick?

A handful of very wealthy people who are way out of their depth are playing with the world’s trade system, which was developed under the leadership of the United States in delicate negotiations by hundreds of experts over many decades, and they are about to shatter it with a single announcement, all because the president fervently and irrationally believes that the country has “been treated very unfairly” by its trading partners and that tariffs will make the country rich with their money.

In the event, Trump’s announcement crashed the markets, with the S&P 500 losing $2 trillion in one day, and soon the bond market began to plunge as well. Finally, faced with financial Armageddon, Trump backed down, “pausing the tariffs” for ninety days:

That afternoon, the markets surged nearly 10 percent on the news, and Trump surrogates rushed to the cameras to clean up the mess, claiming that pausing the tariffs was the plan all along. This was, they said, a genius negotiating strategy from the dealmaker of dealmakers…. The world had just witnessed a master class in economic brinkmanship, they would all say.

But in fact, Trump had blinked. The collapsing bond markets left him no choice. Investors were losing faith that the United States would be able to make good on its debt.

One lived through these events, of course, but in reliving them through this inside account one feels a kind of terrible awe at the blithe incompetence and sheer irresponsibility on display. In service to his obsessions, the president is willing to take the country right up to the edge of catastrophe, and no one is willing to incur his ire by trying to stop him. Only the reality of the consequences of what he had done—the collapsing bond markets—persuaded him to reverse course. Perhaps it is not too much to hope that as this divergence between Trump’s fantasyland and reality grows, reality increasingly will triumph. The trouble with this lunge for optimism is not only that thus far—with tariffs and the Iran war, for example—we have needed a catastrophe to mark the dividing line but that it fails to account for the damage already done, which is unquestionably very great indeed.

The catastrophe of Iran may mark this country’s decline no less than the Suez Crisis marked Great Britain’s. There is the same stunned realization abroad of having seen the limits of the late imperial mind. Haberman and Swan’s account of the decision to attack Iran—a decision presidents have resisted for very good reasons since 1979—is a bravura piece of reporting and, for those who retain any faith in American power in the world, deeply saddening to read. As he has with previous presidents, the Israeli prime minister comes to the White House Situation Room with a war to sell, and he promises that regime change will follow and the nuclear threat will be removed forever. Trump will be a hero, doing what presidents before him have lacked the audacity to attempt. And although US intelligence analysts call the Israeli scenarios “farcical”—“In other words, it’s bullshit,” helpfully translates Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Marco Rubio—Trump decides to buy in anyway. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs mentions something about Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz—one of the principal reasons presidents have resisted similar Israeli importunings for decades—but Trump in his vast ignorance says not to worry, it’ll all be over in a few days. And anyway what do we have to lose?

The account put me in mind of a phrase from an essay published early in this administration: “The Dumbest Imperial Collapse in History.”³ Today, because of Trump’s blithe decision, nearly four thousand Iranians are dead, more than four thousand Lebanese are dead, and eighteen Americans are dead. The Strait of Hormuz, a critical economic choke point, is firmly in the hands of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the aircraft carriers of the mighty US Fifth Fleet have been unable to keep it open in the face of Iran’s speedboats, mines, and drones. “It’s very interesting,” as Trump mused to these reporters, “the power.” It would be reassuring if those anodyne words bespoke some knowledge or wisdom instead of its simulacrum. In truth, military power—the power to blow things up—is less important than military authority: the ability to dictate terms without blowing things up. And Trump, for all his musings on Tamerlane and Stalin, has managed to reduce the United States’ authority immeasurably, thanks to his own shallowness, vanity, and inability to listen.

The mummers’ play of negotiations that led to the memorandum of understanding and the restart of the war that followed fall outside the ambit of Haberman and Swan’s account. Had they not, the authors might have said that when it came to the absurd memorandum—in which the Americans agreed to pay the Iranians billions of dollars to restore the status quo ante—the rising inflation caused by the closing of the strait along with the rapidly approaching midterm elections “left him no choice” but to kowtow to the Iranians. But this is the weakness and danger of Trump’s transactionalism: he has no enduring scale, beyond his own vanity, to judge what’s important or what’s right. And if some in his tiny circle of decision makers do, they lack the courage to tell him. In fact he himself set up an eventual war when he rashly tore up Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran in 2018. Now, like some woeful tragic hero, he finds himself doomed by his own unknowing decisions and struggling to negotiate an agreement that can never be as good as his predecessor’s. As drama, there is something right and satisfying about this. But we are all along for the ride as the Iran war and its aftermath turn into a terrible, decadent sham.

Trump, quickly bored, has moved on. He is presiding over other scandals—the algae-filled Reflecting Pool, among others—and other projects, like his splendid ballroom, larger than the White House itself, and his “Arc de Trump,” which is to be nearly one hundred feet taller than its Napoleon-conceived model in Paris. Even as he muses on his power, his approval numbers have stabilized in the mid-thirties: two Americans in three disapprove of the job he is doing. He has long since lost the support of many of the independents, Latinos, and younger voters who brought him back to office. As the midterms approach he struggles to manipulate them through redistricting, rantings about voter fraud, and proposals to suppress voting. But in California and other states the Democrats have matched Republican gerrymandering, and the president’s much-hyped SAVE America Act, which would impose burdensome identification requirements on voters, will not pass the Senate.

The signs are everywhere that the failed assault on Iran marked the high tide of his power. The Supreme Court ruled that he lacked the authority to impose his tariffs or to end birthright citizenship. Lower courts in dozens of decisions have blocked his more presumptuous emergency actions. His high-profile campaign of deportations in “blue cities” crashed on the shoals of Minneapolis’s civic resistance, including that of the two protesters ICE agents shot and killed there. Confronted with a wave of bad press and plunging poll numbers, the administration backed down, ignoring the urgings of some within it (including Stephen Miller and, as Haberman and Swan reveal, Vice President J.D. Vance) that the president invoke the Insurrection Act and send troops into the city. Here, as with the tariffs and the war, faced with darkening reality he retreated, though his administration, working more quietly now, continues to deport tens of thousands.

What truly matters to Trump beyond his ballrooms and his reflecting pools and his arches? Does he lose sleep over immigrants “invading” the country? No doubt he has thrown into high relief the weaknesses of our governing system on its 250th birthday, beginning with his own coming to power after winning nearly three million fewer votes than his opponent. But he will bequeath no doctrine or philosophy. The norms he has shattered with his systematic corruption remain to be made into laws that will be stronger and more lasting. The nihilism he has exposed among voters disgusted by their powerlessness amid ever-rising inequality remains to be addressed by future leaders, but none seems likely to replace him as a ubiquitous social media troll. For two years more and counting, the incessant cacophony—the twenty-four-hour dominance of the news cycle with tweets and insults and scandals—will go on. He is a huckster, an Internet-age buffoon with endless resources to entertain and outrage us. However much we long to banish him from our consciousness, he will not be banished.

He will leave us having succeeded in putting an end to the country’s imperial dominance and in closing borders that were once more welcoming to outsiders. He will have helped ensure that the rich grow ever richer and that millions with less will not have insurance when they get sick. He will have made the government weaker and less responsive and the society around it starkly more corrupt. He will have politicized many parts of the country’s public life that were not politicized before.

But his pretended reflection on what he longed to acquire—“It’s very interesting, the power”—is inert. He has a vast appetite for power only insofar as it satisfies his greed and directs the spotlight upon himself. But it is power merely as self-aggrandizement, and it ends with the sterile farce of his name plastered on arches and monuments. As I write, the courts have ordered that name removed from the Kennedy Center, and that humiliating operation, shaded from the eyes of the public behind a nondescript tarp, also marks a turning point. Would Tamerlane or Stalin have stood for such a disgrace? He has on occasion sent in the troops, but when the courts have pushed back he has loudly complained and quietly complied. For all his bluster about emergencies, he has not invoked the Insurrection Act, fearing that the political damage would far outweigh the gain. Unless he succeeds in blatantly subverting the coming elections—by sending troops into polling places, say, to seize ballots and thereby “protect” the vote, a fateful step that plainly tempts him—his power, however proudly he flaunts it, will continue inexorably to ebb.

—July 22, 2026