The Trump-Era Regime Change

EVERY OTHER BOOK TOLD YOU WHAT TRUMP DECIDED.This is the first book to tell you how — and what happened when the how was broken. The Trump-Era Regime Change is the operational account of the most consequential governance experiment in modern American history. Rebecca J. Ainsworth goes inside the processes, the meetings, the coordination mechanisms, and the information flows that constitute the operating reality of the American presidency — and shows you, with granular precision, what happens when the world's most complex management system is run without the structure it requires. What was at stake was not the policy positions. It was the government's capacity to govern. Four chiefs of staff in four years. Three national security advisors. A decision-making process that bypassed the interagency review that every major policy required — producing the travel ban chaos, the family separation operational disaster, the Syria withdrawal that Mattis resigned over, the pandemic coordination collapse whose costs are still being counted. A paper trail managed in ways that made accountability impossible. An intelligence relationship shaped by the president's distrust of the analysis that contradicted his instincts. And running through all of it, the career professionals — the analysts, the scientists, the attorneys — who maintained their institutional obligations against the pressure to abandon them, and whose professional fidelity was the mechanism by which the machinery held when it otherwise might have broken. The most operationally rigorous account of the Trump years ever assembled. This book includes the full governance chronology — the operational timeline of every major departure, coordination failure, and institutional stress event — and the key officials table that…