Regime Change, the blockbuster book of the first 14 months of Trump 2.0 published on Tuesday, joining a long library detailing the era with all sorts of bombshells.
One element that stands out about Regime Change, from Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan of The New York Times, is its breadth of material, as they report on conversations everywhere from the Oval Office to the Situation Room to a Smithsonian Board of Regents meeting.
Some of the scenes, excerpted in the Times or reported on elsewhere, have already drawn headlines, including the White House’s emergency scramble to respond to the Jeffrey Epstein backlash, and the secret conversations that led to the war with Iran.
Other aspects of the book detail Trump’s efforts to tame the media, whether through lawsuits and settlements, and to change the culture, with a takeover of the Kennedy Center and an effort to de-woke the Smithsonian museums. They may not have the newsiness of national security, but they are still revelatory for the book’s overall theme: A president unshackled in his second term.
Here are some of the media and cultural highlights that stood out:
As Skydance sought to buy Paramount, Trump groused about David Ellison, who supported Joe Biden’s reelection. Ellison, the CEO of Paramount, recently attended the UFC event at the White House, and in the spring hosted a dinner for the Trump White House and CBS News.
But Haberman and Swan wrote that while Trump liked Larry Ellison, David Ellison’s father and one of his political donors, “he would grouse about the son, who had donated nearly $1 million to support Joe Biden’s reelection.”
That apparently has changed. After Skydance secured Trump administration approval to buy Paramount last year, Trump has praised the Ellisons, saying last October that they are “big supporters of mine. And they’ll do the right thing.”
Paramount recently received Justice Department approval of a much larger merger prize, Warner Bros. Discovery.
Haberman and Swan also detailed some of the legal wrangling that led to CBS’s settlement of Trump’s lawsuit over the way that 60 Minutes edited an interview with Kamala Harris.
The lawsuit, which the authors called “a preposterous claim,” was nevertheless seen as impediment to Shari Redstone’s sale of Paramount to Skydance. So Trump and Paramount Global legal teams entered into settlement talks.
While “someone in the president’s orbit initially floated $100 million for the settlement,” the authors wrote, the figure agreed to was $16 million, the sum that ABC paid to resolve another Trump lawsuit in late 2024. The settlement did not include an apology, but Trump later claimed that it included an additional $20 million in advertising on CBS, something that pre-Skydance Paramount has denied.
The authors wrote, “CBS had helped to shape the protocols, along with scores of other media companies from newspapers to radio and TV, of what courageous journalism meant. And now it had been brought to its knees.”
Trump blew up a “framework” for a much smaller settlement with ABC and George Stephanopoulos. “The retribution campaign that produced the quickest results for Trump was the crusade against the news media,” the authors wrote.
That started just before Trump returned to office, in December, 2024, when ABC settled his defamation lawsuit against the network over comments that George Stephanopoulos had made the previous March. The This Week host had said that Trump had been found liable by a jury for rape of author E. Jean Carroll, when in fact he was found liable for sexual abuse.
ABC settled the case for $16 million — $15 million to the Trump Presidential Library, and another $1 million in legal fees.
The authors wrote that in the weeks prior to the settlement, there was a “framework” for a much smaller sum, $3 million, expected to go to a charity for military veterans. Stephanopoulos did not apologize, but he did have a meeting with Trump at Trump Tower, and “the situation seemed to have been resolved.” Then, the Trump team wanted to change the terms, with Boris Epshteyn, personal lawyer to Trump, pointing to a much larger sum, $60 million, “if not more,” the authors wrote. They reported that Trump eventually agreed to the $15 million then “changed his mind again.” Disney balked at the efforts to raise the price and were concerned “by some on the Trump team to steer the money to an advocacy group” aligned with Trump. At the end of a mediation session, Trump finally agreed, and the settlement was filed with the court.
The White House ordered “Donald J. Trump” letters even before the Kennedy Center board voted to add his name. At least for now, Donald Trump‘s name is off the facade of the Kennedy Center, per a court order.
Six months ago, the Trump-controlled board of the center voted to add the president’s name to th arts institution, even though Congress designated it as a memorial to John F. Kennedy in 1964, a year after his assassination.
At the time of the renaming, Trump “feigned surprise and humility that the board—which he had personally selected just a few weeks after his second inauguration and of which he was now the chairman—would bestow such an honor,” the authors wrote.
In fact, the White House “quietly ordered” the letters to Trump’s name even before the board’s vote, per the authors. His name was installed on the facade the day after the board vote.
Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH), an ex officio member of the board, later sued, seeking to remove Trump’s name and to halt the plans to close the center. Last month, a federal judge largely sided with her, ordering the removal of Trump’s name in connection with references to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
The center has filed a court declaration that the president’s name has been removed, although that part of the facade is still covered with a tarp. The Kennedy Center says that the tarp is up to make additional repairs to the marble and soffit panels; Beatty told CNN on Tuesday, “We are certainly standing up against this tarp to have it also come down.”
Jeff Bezos told Trump The Washington Post was his worst financial investment: The drive by tech billionaires to ingratiate themselves with Donald Trump as he returned to the White House was hardly subtle: At the inauguration, figures including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai were there, standing behind Trump as he was sworn in in the Capitol Rotunda.
Haberman and Swan write that Trump relished the spectacle of the tech titans “kissing my ass.”
The authors also wrote that, at a dinner with Trump after the 2024 election, Bezos characterized the Post as his worst financial investment. The authors also quoted Bezos as saying of the business side of the Post, “The people there are terrible. They don’t listen. My other companies, they listen.”
Last year, a month into Trump’s term, Bezos overhauled the Post’s opinion pages, so that they would focus “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.”
In February, the Post laid off 1/3 of its staff, while its CEO Will Lewis stepped down several days later.
Per the Regime Change authors, Trump came around to believing Bezos’ insistence that he did not have control over the Post’s coverage, and that the reporters would write negative stories about him, too. Trump said, “I didn’t believe him the first time, first term. And I hated him for it. And then I believed him.”
After Trump sued Rupert Murdoch, he hosted a lavish dinner for the mogul that put him on the spot: JD or Rubio for 2028? After The Wall Street Journal published a story on an alleged Trump “birthday letter” to Jeffrey Epstein, the president sued, naming not just the publication, its reporters and publisher as defendants, but its owner, Rupert Murdoch.
Soon after filing, Trump’s legal team sought to depose Murdoch early, citing his advanced age. Haberman and Swan wrote, “Privately, Trump had told an advisor that Murdoch’s faculties were slipping and that he would never want to take the stand in court against him. But Trump wanted to humiliate Murdoch as payback—black eye to black eye.”
Three months later, though, Murdoch and other News Corp. editors and columnists were hosted by Trump at the White House for a lavish dinner, raising some concerns that the lawsuit would be settled. But instead, the dinner was far from an adversarial legal negotiation, they wrote. Trump “was strikingly deferential,” the authors wrote, and moved through topics “like a talk show host interviewing Murdoch on the news of the day.”
Among the president’s questions to Murdoch: “What do you think of JD?” The vice president, along with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, were at the table, too.
Per the authors, Murdoch said, “Well, I think JD has the potential to be great.” Murdoch had reportedly tried to talk Trump out of choosing Vance as his running mate. By contrast, when the question turned to Rubio, Murdoch said he was “brilliant.” At the dinner, they wrote, Murdoch tried to steer Trump to be “more attentive to domestic economic issues.”
As for the lawsuit, it is still on. After a judge dismissed the litigation in the spring, Trump filed revised litigation.
A spokesperson for Murdoch and Fox Corp. declined comment. White House spokesman Kush Desai did not address the specifics of the book’s reporting, but said in a statement, “President Trump is committed to working with every American business and business leader to cement America’s innovative dominance, reshore critical manufacturing, and accelerate economic growth for everyday American workers. Industry leaders in sectors ranging from autos to pharmaceuticals to technology have committed to investing trillions in the United States because they know they have a friend and ally in the White House.”
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