Regime Change Quotes

“Noem had come to exemplify something central to the Trump presidency: the idea that governing was, above all, a spectacle—a show of strength staged for an audience of one.”
― Maggie Haberman, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump

“In February 2026, Reuters found that federal judges had ruled on more than 4,400 occasions that ICE was illegally detaining migrants.”
― Maggie Haberman, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump

“I don’t think there’s ever been an American President as powerful as I am,” Trump said later in the conversation. Struck by this hubris”
― Maggie Haberman, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump

“Carlson had previously criticized Trump for refusing to knock Netanyahu over the Gaza carnage; now he would make clear to the President that a broader war would be his ruin. “They want you to go to war with Iran,” Carlson said. “We’re not doing that,” Trump answered. “Good”
― Maggie Haberman, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump

“fields.”
― Maggie Haberman, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump

“During job interviews at the transition headquarters in West Palm Beach, several candidates for senior positions were asked what they thought of the events of January 6 and who had won the 2020 election. In fact, officials on the Trump transition team had already searched candidates’ social media accounts for any criticisms of Trump after the riot at the Capitol. Former aides who testified in the congressional investigation into January 6 would be divided between those who had shown loyalty to Trump and those who hadn’t.”
― Maggie Haberman, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump

“Trump was incensed. He had long been paranoid about a “deep state” within his own government. For months he had carried around in the breast pocket of his jacket a note card with the names of White House staffers he had been told were “snakes.” But now here on the television were the deep staters, finally showing their faces. When the Senate voted to acquit him in early 2020, Trump’s advisors smiled and high-fived. But the President did not join them. He sat still and scowling, arms folded, at his small dining table beside the Oval Office. “Never should have fucking happened,” he said.”
― Maggie Haberman, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump

“Whether it was his decades-long adherence to the “power of positive thinking”—a habit, born from the bestselling book of the clergyman Norman Vincent Peale, in whose church the Trump family worshipped for years—or whether it was something beyond that, something that seemed to his closest aides to be a form of mental disorder, Trump refused to accept the title of “loser.”
― Maggie Haberman, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump

“number!”
― Maggie Haberman, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump

“On the morning of June 12, the day the Israeli assault began, JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and Susie Wiles gathered in the vice president’s office for a Catholic Mass with Communion. Vance’s priest conducted the service. “To pray for the people,” Wiles would later tell others.”
― Maggie Haberman, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump

“He would repeat his mantra throughout the campaign. The conflict shouldn’t have happened; it would never have started had he been President—Vladimir Putin would not have dared. Trump promised he would end the war within twenty-four hours.”
― Maggie Haberman, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump

“In his second term, President Trump has bent and even broken institutions. No modern President has so quickly reduced his party in Congress to such thorough compliance as Trump did in 2025. And no President in modern memory has so openly used the powers of the office to pressure into alignment the major pillars of civil society and the private sector, from the largest tech companies to the most venerable news organizations to Big Law and the Ivy League universities.”
― Maggie Haberman, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump

“He wanted an enforcer at the Justice Department—somebody who wouldn’t hesitate to prosecute his enemies: the “scumbags” like James Comey and Hillary Clinton and Barack Hussein Obama. He wanted, he would say over and over again, another Roy Cohn—his lawyer and mentor whose motto was “Don’t tell me what the law is; tell me who the judge is.”
― Maggie Haberman, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump