{"id":196032,"date":"2026-06-27T22:09:28","date_gmt":"2026-06-28T06:09:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=196032"},"modified":"2026-06-27T15:14:16","modified_gmt":"2026-06-27T23:14:16","slug":"regime-change-and-the-misunderstanding-myth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=196032","title":{"rendered":"Regime Change and the Misunderstanding Myth"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mainstream intellectuals receive a book like Regime Change by Maggie Haberman<\/a> (b. 1973) and Jonathan Swan<\/a> (b. 1985) with predictable alarm. They read a narrative of institutional rot, cognitive bias, and political madness. Reviewers write long essays on the tribalism of the voters and the norm-breaking of the administration. They treat the political landscape as a broken machine. The implication runs underneath the praise: if the public grasped the danger, or if officials returned to historical standards, order would follow. The reception bears out David Pinsof’s argument in his essay A Big Misunderstanding. Intellectuals prefer to see the world through the lens of the misunderstanding myth.<\/p>\n

Run Pinsof’s first tool on the reception, the gap between a stated motive and an actual one. The book’s stated motive is a first draft of history, accountability, the preservation of democratic memory. Its function is a status good for the anti-Trump professional class and fresh ammunition for the next round of the fight. When reviewers call the book revelatory, few of them report that new information has moved their priors. They signal continued membership in the coalition that treats Trump and his voters as the out-group whose power must be delegitimized. The reception performs the same survival-and-status logic the book documents in its characters. The people describing the game are playing it.<\/p>\n

The accounts gathered in the book show no misunderstanding among the players. They operate with cold, calculated rationality to maximize status and power. Donald Trump<\/a> (b. 1946) turns federal law enforcement against his enemies. This is not a failure of democratic comprehension. It is a savvy operation to secure dominance and deter rivals. When Elon Musk<\/a> (b. 1971) demands weekly activity logs from federal workers and slashes foreign aid, he knows what government does. He acts on interest and status. The zero-sum contest over the coercive apparatus of the state rewards dirty fighting, and the players understand the stakes.<\/p>\n

The corporate and institutional response reflects Darwinian survival, not ignorance. White-shoe firms do not capitulate because they lack legal arguments. Brad Karp (b. 1959), the chairman of Paul Weiss, pledged the equivalent of forty million dollars in pro bono work to causes the administration favors, and in return Trump rescinded an order that had stripped the firm’s security clearances and barred its lawyers from federal buildings. Karp told his partners the firm faced an existential crisis and could not survive a long fight. He judged his move by survival, not by a high-minded mission statement. The sharper detail sits in his own past. Karp had bundled money for Democratic presidential campaigns, and his firm had sold itself as a bulwark against Trump. His surrender is coalition behavior by a man whose prior coalition was the other one. Tech executives offer their tributes on the same logic. They protect profit and position in a hostile environment. They make rational moves.<\/p>\n

Pinsof’s claim is that stupidity is strategic, and the men and women who review this book understand coalition and power as well as anyone alive. They cannot afford to name what they understand, because naming it would dissolve the role the myth assigns them. If the troubles in Regime Change flow from bad beliefs and simple ignorance, then intellectuals remain central. They correct the biases, fact-check the politicians, design the interventions, and save the republic one explanation at a time. If the troubles flow from bad motives and rational self-interest, the intellectual has no special cure to sell. So the myth gets manufactured, not suffered. Natural selection built humans to secure resources and dominate rivals. The system is not broken. It runs on the old logic of primates seizing the lever of state force. Intellectuals call this a crisis of democracy because they are losing the contest for it.<\/p>\n

What if the people the book indicts understand what they do all too well? What if Trump’s coalition wants the imperial presidency rather than misunderstands its cost? What if the reporters’ real product is alliance rather than insight? Then there is nothing the book can do, because there is no error to fix. The reviews present the book as the correction of a great misunderstanding about Trump. The misunderstanding is the belief that there was one.<\/p>\n

Regime Change and the Back Region<\/strong><\/p>\n

Erving Goffman (1922-1982) divides social life into two regions. The front region is where a performance is given, before an audience, to standards the performer works to keep up. The back region is where he drops the front, rehearses, repairs it, says the things the audience must not hear. The wall between them carries the whole weight of the performance. Regime Change by Maggie Haberman (b. 1973) and Jonathan Swan (b. 1985) is a book about that wall, and a book that breaches it, and a book that sells the breach.<\/p>\n

Donald Trump governs in the front region. He performs command. The setting does the work Goffman assigns to scenery and stage props: the gilded Oval Office, the curlicues the president glues to the walls himself, the decor he lifts from his wife’s quarters to dress his own. The personal front does as much work as the policy. Haberman and Swan report that Trump picks his officials on two questions, whether the man is loyal and whether he looks the part. That is casting. A performance team assembled for appearance and for discipline, dramatis personae chosen to hold the front.<\/p>\n

The administration advertises openness while it narrows the back region to a handful. Swan reports that the men around Trump keep calling theirs the most transparent White House in history. They run the war with Iran out of a room of six. The treasury and energy secretaries, the two men who would manage a global oil shock, sit outside the door because the room fears leaks. Goffman calls this mystification, the control of access that holds the audience at a distance and preserves its awe. The front says transparency. The back region shrinks to a closet.<\/p>\n

The book’s pitch is access to that closet. A thousand interviews, deep background, the reporters in the room or close enough to hear what was said in it. The leaked recordings of the Situation Room are backstage exposure in its purest form, the back region pierced and carried out. Goffman has a name for the figure who makes this possible. The informer poses as a member of the team, shares the back region, then sells its secrets to the audience. The leakers are the informers. The reporters are the go-betweens who buy the secret and resell it. The book is the resale.<\/p>\n

There is a back region behind the back region. Haberman and Swan describe the crisis team meeting in the Situation Room over the Epstein files with the president absent, the staff working out how to hold the front on his behalf. Goffman calls this staging talk, the team rehearsing the performance out of the audience’s sight, and out of the star’s sight too. The leak of those meetings exposes the team building the performance rather than the president giving it. That is the more intimate breach.<\/p>\n

A reader can forget that the reporters keep a front of their own. The book performs neutrality, authority, the cool distance of the chronicler who has seen everything and reports it without heat. The access is the personal front. A thousand interviews and the Oval Office sit-down stand in for the credential, the proof that the performers earned their place near power. Goffman does not ask whether the front is sincere. He notes that it works the same either way. The prose holds its front with the same care Trump gives his.<\/p>\n

The reviewers complete the performance. Goffman says audiences protect a performance with tact, looking past the rough edges so the show can go on. The rapturous notices treat the book as pure window onto the back region and say little about the book as a staged thing with a rollout, a publisher, a market, and a front to keep. The audience extends the courtesy the performer needs. The book is received as revelation because its readers agree not to see it as a performance.<\/p>\n

This is what the reader buys. To be let backstage, in Goffman’s account, is to be treated as a member of the team or a trusted confidant, admitted to what the audience outside does not get to see. The book sells that admission. The reader closes it knowing the supergluing, the six-man room, the talk in the Situation Room, and carries the knowledge the way the insider carries it. He has been backstage. The feeling of having seen behind the curtain is the product, and it confers the small standing Goffman attaches to back-region access, the standing of the man who knows how the trick is done.<\/p>\n

Goffman writes that the impression of reality a performance fosters is a fragile thing, broken by small mishaps, a slip, a wrong word, an open door. Regime Change is built from broken fronts, from the slips and the open doors and the men who carried the back region out. It is a catalog of the performance failing to seal itself. Here the frame marks its own edge. Goffman describes the wall between the regions and the traffic across it. He does not tell us that crossing the wall changes the show. The president performs command tomorrow on the same stage, before the same audience, and the book that carried his back region into the front region takes its place on the shelf as one more front to keep.<\/p>\n

Regime Change and the Journalistic Field<\/strong><\/p>\n

Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) treats journalism as a field, a structured arena where players hold different amounts and kinds of capital and compete for the stakes the field makes its own. In On Television he names its capital. The scoop, the exclusive, the byline that arrives first and from inside, these are the field’s hard currency. Regime Change by Maggie Haberman (b. 1973) and Jonathan Swan (b. 1985) is the conversion of one kind of capital into another, run to its end and bound between covers.<\/p>\n

Start with what the authors hold. Haberman and Swan have covered Donald Trump since 2015. A decade of proximity is social capital, a network of sources and a standing inside the rooms other reporters cannot enter. Haberman’s reputation as the reporter who reads Trump is embodied capital, the feel for the game Bourdieu calls habitus, built up over years and recognized by the field as a rare possession. The book objectifies that accumulation. A thousand interviews, deep background, an Oval Office sit-down, the leaked recordings from the Situation Room, all of it gathered into a single object of high value.<\/p>\n

Watch the conversions. Proximity to power yields the scoop, the field’s own capital. The scoop yields symbolic capital, the prestige of the authoritative byline. Symbolic capital yields economic capital, the advance and the bestseller, and it bids for the field’s highest institutional prize. Haberman already holds a share of a Pulitzer from 2018, and her Confidence Man already carries the field’s recognition. The new book moves for more. Bourdieu’s word is exact. Consecration is the act by which the field’s authorities declare a work legitimate and lift its maker up the hierarchy.<\/p>\n

The rapturous reviews are that act. David Remnick (b. 1958) says the book transcends its genre. Read the phrase as a field operation. Remnick lifts the work off the heteronomous pole, the commercial ground of reportage and the bestseller list, toward the autonomous pole where literature and history sit and where symbolic capital runs richest. Tina Brown (b. 1953) and Fintan O’Toole (b. 1958) make the same move. The reviewers sit inside the same field. They are senior players in journalism and letters, consecrating one of their own. The field recognizes itself and confers its honor.<\/p>\n

The book pulls off the rare double. It sells like a commercial product and it earns the prestige reserved for the pure. Bourdieu sets the two poles against each other, the large-scale production that chases the audience and the small-scale production that chases peer esteem. Most works win at one pole and lose at the other. Regime Change takes the market and the consecration at once, the trajectory every player in the field wants and few reach.<\/p>\n

Here the frame explains the strange pairing at the center of the book. The reporters write Trump as a danger. The relationship that produced the book is a trade. Trump grants access, the scoop, the sit-down, the proximity the reporters convert into capital. The reporters grant Trump the chronicle, the presence in the paper of record, the standing of a man important enough to be studied at length by his closest watchers. Both trade in recognition. Both want what the field deals in, attention and the mark of significance. The adversarial surface sits on top of a structural symbiosis, and the symbiosis holds because the source and the chronicler need each other to accumulate.<\/p>\n

Bourdieu warns that the field censors without a censor. No one issues an order. The access model carries its own quiet constraint. Proximity is capital, and proximity survives only if the source is not burned past use. The habitus of the access reporter knows, without instruction, what can be written and what would close the door. The book lands hard on Trump and lands soft on the conditions of access that made it possible. No one lies. The field shapes the writing through the position the writer occupies.<\/p>\n

The alarm in the reviews has a field address too. The journalistic field, the literary field, and the academic field belong to the field of power, and they hold their value through their autonomy, their right to set their own stakes and confer their own honors. Trump’s pressure on the press, the firms, and the universities is pressure on that autonomy. The book defends the field. The reviewers consecrate it because it defends the ground they stand on. The position-taking matches the position.<\/p>\n

One belief goes without saying through all of it, the doxa of access journalism, that being in the room delivers the truth and that proximity is the highest evidence. Bourdieu presses on that belief. Proximity delivers the scoop and binds the reporter in the same motion. Here the field marks its edge. Field theory explains the book’s value and the warmth of its welcome through capital and position. It does not reach the question of whether the reporting is accurate. The book might be true in every line, and the field would consecrate it on the same terms, because the field rewards the conversion, not the correspondence. That a work wins the field’s honors tells us the trade went well. It does not tell us the book is right.<\/p>\n

Regime Change and the Pictures in Our Heads<\/strong><\/p>\n

Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) opens Public Opinion with a claim that has held for a century. The world is too large and too quick for any of us to know at first hand. We carry pictures of it instead, and we act on the pictures. Between a man and the world he lives in stands a pseudo-environment, a representation he treats as the thing itself. His conduct answers to the picture, and the conduct then takes effect out in the real world he never saw. Regime Change by Maggie Haberman (b. 1973) and Jonathan Swan (b. 1985) is a machine for making one of those pictures.<\/p>\n

The second term of Donald Trum is an unseen environment of the kind Lippmann had in mind. A war with Iran decided in a room of six. The treasury and energy secretaries left outside the door. The Situation Room sealed, the decisions made fast, the record buried in classification and loyalty. No citizen watches this. The scene of action sits beyond the reach of the public that must form an opinion about it. The presidency is the unmanageable reality Lippmann said the ordinary man cannot see for himself.<\/p>\n

The book renders the unseen. Haberman and Swan have the access the public lacks, a decade of proximity, a thousand interviews, the leaked recordings, the Oval Office hour. They convert the sealed room into a report a reader can hold. Lippmann saw this work coming and called for it. The public cannot know the unseen world on its own, so it needs men stationed close to the scene who gather the facts and send back an account. The book is that account. The insider renders reality for a public that cannot enter the room.<\/p>\n

Lippmann drew a line the book walks right up to. News signals that an event has occurred. It is the searchlight, restless, swinging from one episode to the next, a firing, a strike, a posted threat. Truth does the slower work, bringing the hidden facts to light and setting them in relation until they make a picture a man can act on. The daily coverage of Trump is news, the beam moving on before the eye can focus. The book claims to be the other thing, the steady picture, and it calls itself a first draft of history to say so. Whether it reaches truth or only gathers a great deal of news between covers is the question the praise leaves unasked.<\/p>\n

The reader does not come to the book empty. He carries a picture of Trump already, formed before he opens it, economical and firm. Lippmann called these pictures stereotypes and made the unwelcome point that we define first and see second. The man who already pictures Trump as the imperial danger opens the book and finds the imperial danger. The phrase imperial presidency is itself a stereotype in Lippmann’s sense, a compact image that organizes the confusion of a thousand events into one shape the mind can carry. The shape is useful. It is also a defense of the position of the man who holds it.<\/p>\n

Here Lippmann turns hard on the reporter. The man on the spot sees the scene through the pictures already in his own head, and the account he sends back carries those pictures into the reader’s head. Haberman and Swan stand close to the room, closer than anyone, and they render it through their own stereotypes of the man they have watched for ten years. The reader receives a picture of a picture. The access does not remove the patterning, only relocate it, from the reader’s eye to the correspondent’s, and the correspondent’s is the one the book installs.<\/p>\n

Lippmann gave the process a name that has outlived his hope for it. The common business of a modern state, he wrote, escapes the public almost entirely and falls to a specialized class to manage. The manufacture of consent, he called it, and he meant it as description before anyone used it as accusation. The reception of the book is that class at work. The insiders tell the public what it cannot see, the reviewers affirm the rendering, and the public receives the picture it is meant to hold. The book does the job Lippmann assigned to the expert, supplying the image the citizen has no way to gather alone.<\/p>\n

Lippmann set the whole problem as a triangle. There is the scene of action, there is the picture a man forms of the scene, and there is his response to the picture, which then loops back and works itself out on the scene he could not see. Follow the triangle through the book and it breaks at the last turn. The reader forms a sharper picture of the presidency. His response, his alarm, his attention, his vote, returns to a scene still sealed in a room of six that no picture lets him enter. A better rendering does not hand him the lever. This was Lippmann’s own pessimism. He doubted the public could govern the unseen even when the insiders rendered it well, and he turned to the expert rather than the better-read citizen for that reason.<\/p>\n

Regime Change and Charismatic Authority<\/strong><\/p>\n

Max Weber (1864-1920) named three pure grounds on which men obey a ruler. They obey the law, the impersonal rule that binds the office and the man who fills it. They obey tradition, the sanctity of what has always been. Or they obey a person, drawn by a gift they take to set him above ordinary men, and this third ground Weber called charisma. Regime Change by Maggie Haberman (b. 1973) and Jonathan Swan (b. 1985) reports a presidency moving off the first ground and onto the third. The book calls the change imperial. Weber names it a change in the type of legitimate domination, and the title the authors chose, regime change, sits closer to the truth than they may intend.<\/p>\n

The American presidency had run, for the most part, on legal-rational lines. Authority sat in the office, not the man. Rules fixed the jurisdictions. Competent department heads ran their departments. Lawyers, generals, and career officials carried the impersonal apparatus Weber prized for its calculability, its justice administered without regard to persons. The book describes that apparatus tamed. The generals who said no are gone. The lawyers who remain have learned to pick their battles. The process that once checked the man no longer checks him.<\/p>\n

What replaces it is personal rule. Swan puts it in a sentence. Trump is just acting, he says, and the system is trying to catch up. Weber recognizes the description at once. Charisma is the enemy of routine. It knows no fixed rules and no settled jurisdictions, and it treats the bureaucratic order as an obstacle to be broken by the leader’s will. The man acts and the apparatus scrambles behind him. The scramble is the signature of a different authority.<\/p>\n

The clearest sign is the room. The war with Iran is decided by six people. The treasury and energy secretaries, the men whose offices govern the economy and the oil, wait outside the door. Weber drew the line here. The bureaucratic state staffs itself by qualification and jurisdiction. The charismatic leader staffs himself by devotion. His administrative body is no corps of officials with careers and competences. It is a personal following, an entourage of disciples chosen for loyalty and held by his favor. Weber found the same shape in the patrimonial household, where the lord governs through his servants and the line between his private house and the public office disappears. The circle of six is that household. The institutional cabinet stands outside it.<\/p>\n

Loyalty becomes the coin because the staff holds nothing else. Haberman and Swan report that Trump chooses his officials by loyalty and by whether they look the part, and that loyalty itself carries a fungible definition. Weber explained why. Under charismatic rule there is no appointment by rule and no dismissal by rule, no tenure, no career, no claim on the office the leader cannot revoke. There is only the call of the leader and the devotion of the called. The official owes his obedience to the person of the ruler, not to an impersonal duty, and his place lasts as long as the ruler’s grace.<\/p>\n

Turn the Justice Department into an instrument of the leader’s vengeance and you have crossed the same line. Weber’s bureaucracy administers sine ira et studio, without anger and without favor, the law applied to all alike. Patrimonial rule knows no such separation. The lord’s justice is the lord’s, an extension of his person, turned on his enemies and withheld from his friends. A prosecutor who serves the man rather than the office becomes the faithful servant of a different order. The old order calls him corrupt. The new one calls him loyal.<\/p>\n

The same logic runs through the money. The book describes the office turned into a vehicle for profit and the tech chiefs and the law firms bringing their tributes to the leader. Weber knew this arrangement. Where the ruler’s house and the public office merge, the line between the treasury and the lord’s purse thins, and the powerful pay homage in gifts rather than in taxes lawfully assessed. The tribute is how rule works once the office becomes the man. In a bureaucracy it would read as scandal. In a patrimonial house it reads as homage.<\/p>\n

Charisma carries a debt bureaucracy does not. The official keeps his place whether or not he shines. The charismatic leader keeps his only by proving the gift, by victories that confirm to the followers that the grace is real. Weber wrote that a charismatic claim lives on success and withers when the proof runs out. Read the book’s central irony through this. The indictments, the convictions, the years of exile did not break Trump. His followers read the persecution as confirmation, the leader tried and risen, the gift proven by what he survived. Charisma feeds on the ordeal that would end an ordinary career.<\/p>\n

Weber had a name for charisma in a mass democracy. The plebiscitary leader draws his legitimacy straight from the acclamation of the people and turns it against the parties, the courts, and the officials who claim to speak for the law. He rules over the heads of the institutions by appeal to the crowd. This is the regime the book describes without the word, a personal authority that grounds itself in the people and treats every check between the leader and the people as usurpation.<\/p>\n

Here Weber sets the problem the second term cannot escape. Pure charisma cannot hold still. It belongs to one man and answers to no rule, which makes it the least stable of the three grounds. The leader’s people feel the instability and work against it. His chief of staff, Susie Wiles (b. 1957), narrowed the entourage to a settled core, and the settled core wants to keep what it holds. Weber called this the routinization of charisma, the moment the followers try to turn a personal gift into a lasting possession with offices and incomes they can keep. The effort changes the thing it preserves. A charisma made routine starts to harden back into the bureaucracy it broke, or into a tradition that outlives the man.<\/p>\n

There the frame names its edge and its sharpest question at once. Weber’s three types are ideal constructions, and no real rule is ever only one of them. The American presidency still sits inside a legal-rational shell of elections and courts and written law, and the charismatic power works within that shell as much as against it. The deeper trouble belongs to charisma itself. It cannot be inherited, and it cannot be proceduralized without ceasing to be charisma. An imperial presidency built on one man’s gift faces the problem every charismatic order has faced, the problem of what comes after the man. The book records the gift at its height. Weber tells us the reckoning waits at the succession.<\/p>\n

Regime Change and the Interaction Ritual<\/strong><\/p>\n

Randall Collins (b. 1941), in Interaction Ritual Chains, builds society out of a single repeated event, the interaction ritual. People assemble in one place, mark a boundary that says who belongs and who does not, fix their attention on a common object, and fall into a shared mood. When the focus and the mood feed each other and rise together, the encounter throws off three things. It binds the group in solidarity. It charges the individual with what Collins calls emotional energy, the confidence and drive a man carries out of a good encounter and the flatness he carries out of a bad one. And it leaves behind sacred symbols, the emblems the group will defend. Men move through life chasing the encounters that pay the most emotional energy. Regime Change by Maggie Haberman (b. 1973) and Jonathan Swan (b. 1985) gives Collins two rituals to read, the room where the war is decided and the launch that carries the book into the world.<\/p>\n

Start with the room. Six people decide the war with Iran, and Donald Trump sits at the center of the gathering, the one who gives the order and draws the most energy of all. Collins points first at the shape. Bodies in one place, a hard boundary at the door, the whole attention bent on a single grave choice, and a mood that gathers as the talk goes on. This ritual is built to run hot. The book catches its outcome in a line. By the last meeting the positions had set, everyone knew where everyone stood, and they would back the president’s decision. Even Vance (b. 1984), whose doubt about the war was known, states his reservation and then backs the man. Collins has the word for what happened to him. The ritual entrained him. The shared mood pulled the dissenter into the solidarity of the group, and the solidarity, not the argument, carried the room.<\/p>\n

Now read who waits outside the door. The treasury secretary, Scott Bessent (b. 1962), and the energy secretary, Chris Wright (b. 1965), the two men whose work would meet the oil shock a war in the Gulf was sure to bring, sit out the meetings. The stated reason is leaks, the control of information. Collins reads it the other way. To sit in the room is to draw the emotional energy the ritual pumps and to wear the membership it confers. To wait outside is to be drained and marked as marginal. The men with the most to say about the consequences are kept from the encounter that decides them. The exclusion is a status ritual. The room is organized to charge its members and to keep the charge undiluted.<\/p>\n

The information bubble the authors describe follows from this. A tight room of the devoted runs hot because it is tight. Bring in the expert who lowers the mood with a hard forecast and you cool the ritual and bleed its energy. So the room stays small. A high-solidarity ritual protects its own heat, and the bubble is what the chain of these encounters produces. It feels good from inside, which is the point, and it is the reason the inputs reaching the president stay few.<\/p>\n

Turn to the second ritual. The book arrives with a launch, the morning shows, the prime-time sit-downs, the chorus of reviews. Collins treats the whole event as an interaction ritual run across a class of readers. A boundary divides those in the know from the masses who will not read it. The attention of the reviewer world bends onto one object. The mood is alarm mixed with the pleasure of being right. The ritual binds the readership in solidarity, charges the people who take part with emotional energy, and lifts the book into a sacred object, an emblem the group will praise and defend against anyone who slights it. The reader closes the book and carries the charge. He feels graver and braver, the energy the ritual paid him.<\/p>\n

Collins gives the reviewers a structure of their own. In The Sociology of Philosophies he found a law of small numbers. At any moment only a few names, a few works, can hold the center of attention, because attention is scarce and the space for it is narrow. The senior critics anoint this book together. The convergence looks like many minds agreeing. Collins sees the attention space concentrating, as it must, on a small number of objects, the energy running along the network ties that bind the reviewer class, who read each other, appear with each other, and pass the charge from one notice to the next. The book becomes the book of the moment because the attention space holds room for one or two at a time, and the network filled the slot.<\/p>\n

Set the two rituals side by side. They are the same kind of event. Each assembles a body of people behind a boundary, fixes them on a sacred object, raises a shared mood, and pays out solidarity and emotional energy to those inside. Each runs on membership rather than on information. The book describes one ritual and is made sacred by another. The men in the room feel the energy of the inner circle. The readers feel the energy of the righteous class. The same engine turns in both.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mainstream intellectuals receive a book like Regime Change by Maggie Haberman (b. 1973) and Jonathan Swan (b. 1985) with predictable alarm. They read a narrative of institutional rot, cognitive bias, and political madness. Reviewers write long essays on the tribalism … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21791],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-196032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-america"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t