The date that defines Donald Trump's second presidency is 20 January 2025. On that first morning back in the Oval Office, he sat down at the Resolute desk and immediately signed a series of executive orders designed to reshape the United States from its foundations. The most explosive: a blanket pardon for hundreds of supporters who had stormed the Capitol on 6 January 2021 — one of the darkest episodes in American democratic history. "That," said Steve Bannon, the ideological architect of the MAGA movement, watching from the sidelines, "is pure Trump.

" That scene opens *Regime Change: Inside Donald Trump's Imperial Presidency*, a new book by New York Times journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. Built on interviews with more than a thousand White House sources — named and anonymous — plus a rare face-to-face conversation with Trump himself, the book has become a cultural phenomenon across the United States. Television studios from coast to coast are competing for the authors' time. "We were covering the most consequential year of an American presidency in our lifetimes," Haberman told an audience in Washington, "and we were watching presidential power being used in ways we had never seen before.

" What Haberman and Swan describe is not the brash, improvising billionaire who stumbled into the White House in 2017. The Trump of 2025 arrived with his lessons learned. He is more isolated, more suspicious, and visibly driven by a hunger for revenge after the criminal prosecutions that shadowed his first term. His circle of advisers has been cut to the bone.

Loyalty is the only currency that counts — and the price of admission, the authors reveal, is agreeing that the 2020 election was stolen.