Maggie Haberman is no stranger to covering President Donald Trump. She’s the White House correspondent for the New York Times and has authored two books about his presidencies, the latest of which was published in June and covers the first 14 months of the second Trump administration.

But after President Trump’s inauguration in 2025, it struck Ms. Haberman that this second term was going to look very different.

“Within the first few months of this presidency...it became clear that we were covering just a fundamentally different type of presidency than we had ever seen in this country before,” said Ms. Haberman.

Ms. Haberman new book is called Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, which she co-wrote with Jonathan Swan, a White House reporter for the New York Times who also covers President Trump. She spoke at the Martha’s Vineyard Author Series on Sunday in conversation with Mark Leibovich, an author and staff writer at the Atlantic.

At the event, Ms. Haberman discussed reporting for the book, the singularity of President Trump’s second administration, his mortality and affinity for interior decorating.

Ms. Haberman was joined by Mark Leibovich, an author and staff writer at the Atlantic.

“I can think of presidents who have expanded executive power, I can think of presidents who have engaged in self-dealing,” said Ms. Haberman. “I can think of presidents who have hated the media. I can think of presidents who have directed the DOJs against their perceived enemies.”

But not on this scale, Ms. Haberman continued. Not with so little blowback, and not with so little reaction from voters.

The title of the book, Regime Change, came months before the conflict in Iran and Washington’s intervention in Venezuela’s government. The term really refers to the type of presidency that America is seeing, and how the federal government is functioning, said Ms. Haberman.

“This is a government that’s run by a half dozen people,” she said.

Reporting on the presidency is more difficult than it has ever been, she noted. Even senior officials at important agencies don’t know what’s going on because they are not among the small group making decisions in the Oval Office, navigating the President’s volatility and tendency to change his mind.

“We’re not used to covering [regime change], really, in our own country,” she said. “We were not covering a Democrat to a Republic transition.”

What is also different in this presidency are the preoccupations with interior decorating — beyond his ballroom replacing the East Wing of the White House and the 250-foot “Arc de Trump” by the Potomac River.

“It’s a real sensorial assault,” said Ms. Haberman, reflecting on being inside the Oval Office for the fact-checking interview she and Mr. Swan conducted with the president.

One morning, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt found the President with a bottle of superglue, fixing gold challenge coins to the mantel, according to the book.

“He’s still spending an inordinate amount of time on this stuff,” said Ms. Haberman. “But some of these projects are meeting with a reality that causes him a fair amount of anger, right? The ballroom, and his inability to just do what he wants with it. The courts raising questions about it.”

“Iran is not going well, and he would like it to just be done,” she continued.

Mr. Leibovich asked how the litany of mortalities surrounding President Trump — Sen. Lindsey Graham, Charlie Kirk and multiple assassination attempts on the president himself — was affecting the 80-year-old president.

President Trump seemed particularly impacted by Senator Graham’s death, said Ms. Haberman. After the senator’s funeral, she received a flurry of text messages not about the eulogy that the president delivered, but about how he tapped the coffin, “as if he was tapping someone’s back.”

“He keeps talking about…[Graham],” said Ms. Haberman. “He sees it from the perspective of, he is 80 and he doesn’t know how many more years he will have left.”

Despite the President’s age and visible symptoms of medical conditions on his ankles and hands, his health is “a black box,” said Ms. Haberman.

“His health is…an area of our deepest failure in this book,” she said.

That’s due to the lack of information from the administration itself, she noted.

“We don’t know what is going on beyond what you know, and the public does have a right to know,” she said.

When one audience member asked Ms. Haberman what hope she had for the government’s future, Ms. Haberman brought up her 20-year-old son — who is on the “political left of Bernie Sanders,” she said. He and many of his friends canvassed for Zohran Mamdani in 2025.

“It was the first time for my son…that he had felt like any engagement he had mattered,” she said.

The country is a new republic, but has also withstood many challenges in its short history, Ms. Haberman continued.

“This country goes through convulsions,” she said. But people will realize that “legal, peaceful civic participation matters. I think that’s what matters for the future, and I think it’s iterative and it takes time.”