Trump's Lonely First Year in Office: 'They All Leave Me'
There’s a telling scene in Regime Change, the devastating new chronicle from New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan about the first year of the second Trump administration. Elon Musk, erstwhile DOGE leader, had just split with the president over the Big Beautiful Bill, ranting on social media that the signature piece of legislation was an “abomination.” Swan and Haberman describe President Trump’s reaction when he sees the post: He looked at it for several beats, an expression close to pensive crossing his face. “They always leave me,” he finally said. “They always do this. This is why I can’t have friends.”
President Trump, the most powerful man in the world, maybe in history, comes off in these pages as among the most miserable of humans — surrounded by sycophants and toadies, living in a gilded palace, filled with rage and bile. It’s an unpleasant and chaotic portrait, one that could almost be satirical but for the fact that his wars, police-state tactics, and pettiest grievances have affected all of our lives.
Divided into four parts — “Whirlwind,” “Retribution,” “The Enemy Within,” and “Plunder” — each section covering just what their titles suggest, Regime Change starts in the Oval Office as Trump takes command from a dazed and polite Joe Biden, and ends with the launch of the Iran war. So much happened in that brief period of time, part of the book’s value is how it serves as a reminder of all that we just collectively went through in 2025. There’s the shakedown of white-shoe law firms like Paul Weiss; the endless lawsuits against the media; the revenge campaigns against former FBI Director James Comey and New York’s Attorney General Tish James. With Trump, it’s always one damn thing after another. Musk’s DOGE destruction of the federal work force already feels like another era, and that was barely a year ago.
We are light-years away from the man who ran for office in 2016. Too much has happened in those 10 years. Swan and Haberman show why Trump, and his Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, have returned to Washington with vengeance on the mind and a ruthless desire to wield and abuse power. In just his first months back in office, Trump’s ambitions reached farther abroad than he had ever dreamed in his first term: “We’ll just own Gaza,” he said. “It could be better than Monaco” — an idea one aide quoted in the book describes as “legitimately nutso. But very on brand.” It’s immediately clear in Trump 2.0 that all the safety checks that existed in Trump 1.0 are long gone. Turns out, the presidential Cabinet really matters — and if it’s staffed with the Pete Hegseths and Kristi Noems of the world, nothing good will come of it.
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As the year one barrels along, Swan and Haberman document the fallout. MAGA loyalists Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie and Tucker Carlson split with Trump over the mishandling of the Epstein files and the Iran war. The multiple divorces ugly and personal. Old GOP stalwarts like Mitch McConnell are nowhere to be found. Former allies, Mike Pompeo, Bill Barr, and Mike Pence are now hostile to the White House and John Bolton has been targeted by Trump for vengeance. Bad blood and feuds surround MAGA, a coalition only held together by the president’s will and fear of his wrath.
Insider accounts naturally lead the reader to speculate on who told the reporters what. Haberman and Swan are deeply sourced, and they put us right in the Cabinet room with the key players at the pivotal moments. It makes for grim reading. No president, perhaps no person in public life, has ever fully embodied the seven deadly sins the way Trump does. You see them all in him, even at 79, throughout these pages: lust, greed, pride, anger, envy, gluttony, and sloth. (The man can’t be bothered with boring details or descend into the particulars of complicated problems that demand solutions that don’t involve a bigger hammer.) Whatever wisdom we earn with age has completely bypassed him. His animal cunning and instincts are still there, but his worst tendencies only seem to have been magnified with this return to power.
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As Swan and Haberman put the extremist agenda of Trump 2.0 into focus, three figures emerge. A canny and shrewd Susie Wiles helped lead the greatest political comeback in American history. As Chief of Staff in the White House, she has somehow managed to keep the nest of vipers Trump has gathered around him from eating each other alive. The Trump loyalist Stephen Miller is at the center of almost every controversial action the administration has taken, from brutal ICE crackdowns and the killing of alleged drug dealers in the open seas of the Caribbean to deploying National Guard troops on city streets, and the shipping of migrants to gulags in El Salvador, to name just a few. And Vice President J.D. Vance brings the Tucker Carlson wing of the new GOP — very online, nativist, and always calculating his next move — into the Oval Office, especially when it comes to countering the threat of his rival, Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
These are experienced and canny in-fighters and at the center, at times manipulating and always watching the carnage, is Trump. Whatever criticisms one might bring of the results, these people went in with radical ambitions. “This time is about legacy,” Trump told one associate in the early days, according to the book. “We’re going to do big things. Even the people who don’t like me will like it.”
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Alas, a year and a half into Trump’s second term, his poll numbers are cratering into the thirties. It’s possible he doesn’t care. After all, his family has greatly profited through what can only be described as the most naked corruption we have ever seen from a White House. Hundreds of millions of dollars reaped through means that would make Warren G. Harding blush. But the war with Iran is a fiasco and deeply unpopular, America’s reputation abroad in shambles, inflation and gas prices are hurting everyone at home. The president is so obviously guilty of hubris and historic overreach that even his most loyal defenders are struggling to find excuses.
Regime Change is essential reading to understand how, in just 18 months, Trump’s presidency reached this dreadful precipice, and why, in the end, everyone leaves him.
Kieu Chinh Returns to Vietnam for the First Time in Competition at Danang Film Fest With ‘Chrysalis,’ Daniel K. Winn’s Adaptation of His Memoir
Kieu Chinh has spent 68 years as an actor, and most of those years carried her further from the country where she began, through Hollywood, through “The Joy Luck Club,” through “The Sympathizer,” through a career built largely outside the borders of the country that shaped her.
This week, that arc bends back. “Chrysalis,” adapted from the memoir of Vietnamese-American artist Sir Daniel K. Winn and starring Kieu Chinh as his grandmother in 1972 Saigon, competes in the official selection of the Danang Asian Film Festival, marking the actor’s first time returning to Vietnamese soil in competition with a film of her own.
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“My life has carried me from Saigon to Hollywood and back again, but Vietnam has always remained in my heart,” Kieu Chinh tells Variety. “To return now with ‘Chrysalis,’ and to have this film welcomed in competition in Danang on Vietnamese soil, feels like coming home.”
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DANAFF IV runs through July 4, in Danang, organized by the Vietnam Film Development Association in partnership with the Danang People’s Committee. “Chrysalis” is one of the festival’s selections in this year’s edition, which also carries a “Focus on American Cinema” program, and its presence in competition lands as something closer to a homecoming than a premiere for nearly everyone connected to the project.
The film is adapted from “The Scarcity of Love,” Winn’s memoir, which traces his journey from a childhood in Vietnam through displacement and loss to his later career as an internationally recognized painter and sculptor working in a style he calls “Existential Surrealism,” using dreamlike compositions to examine the nature of existence. Directed by J. Robert Schulz from a screenplay by Andrew Creme, based on a story by Winn, Randall J. Slavin and Schulz, “Chrysalis” intercuts Winn’s present-day life as an artist, hammering at a mysterious metal apple in his studio, with his childhood in war-torn Saigon, where a boy nicknamed Cu Den navigates an absent mother working in a brothel, a stepfather who offers him neither love nor support, a stint in a Catholic orphanage where he is bullied and falls ill, and a sudden reunion with the father he believed dead.
At the center of all of it is his grandmother, Ba Noi, the role played by Kieu Chinh. It is Ba Noi’s act of selfless love in sending the boy to the orphanage, and her unwavering care in the years that follow, that allows his artistic spark to take hold as a means of self-expression amid the chaos around him. “I have known women like her all my life, and I have lived through the years this family lived through,” Kieu Chinh tells Variety. “I did not need to imagine her. To give voice to a Vietnamese grandmother in a Vietnamese story felt like something I was meant to do.”
According to the film’s producers, “Chrysalis” marks the first time the Vietnamese government has granted an American production permission to film a wartime narrative on location in the country, a distinction that shadows nearly every other claim made about the project. Shooting took place across Ho Chi Minh City and Orange County and Los Angeles, California, in April 2025, with the bulk of the wartime sequences captured on Vietnamese soil rather than recreated on a studio backlot abroad. Pre-production ran from January to April 2025, with post-production stretching from May 2025 through March 2026.
The cast surrounding Kieu Chinh draws heavily from Vietnam’s own industry. Nguyen Vu Uy Nhan, known for “Tiem An Cua Quy” and “Fly 2023,” plays child Daniel, while Le Anh Huy, of “Kieu” and the TV series “Luoi Troi,” plays a young adult version of the character reunited with his grandmother after more than a decade apart, a reunion the film’s character notes describe as devastating in its brevity: Ba Noi dies shortly after the two are reconciled, and the young adult Daniel is too consumed by denial to attend her funeral. Samuel An, who has appeared in “Thien Than Ho Menh” and “Em Va Trinh,” plays Daniel’s father, an interpreter who worked between the American and South Vietnamese militaries before later taking a position with the U.S. embassy, the job that ultimately allows him to bring his family, including Child Daniel, out of the country at the end of the war. Winn himself appears in the present-day timeline as the adult artist.
Behind the camera, the production paired Vietnam-based and U.S.-based producing teams. Tien Pham of Legend Artist Entertainment, whose credits include “The Sympathizer” and “NCIS-LA,” and Dang Thu Hien, a former Vietnam marketing director for Universal Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Walt Disney Studios, Marvel, 20th Century Studios and CJ E&M, serve as producer and co-producer, respectively, alongside David Hopwood of Group of Ferrets, whose credits include “Den of Thieves” and the Golden Globe-nominated “CAKE.” Steve Longi of Longitude Entertainment, whose credits include the Academy Award-winning “Hacksaw Ridge,” also produces. Winn and Slavin produce through their banner WS Productions, the entity behind Winn Slavin Fine Art, with prior film credits including “Creation” and “Ectropy.” The score comes from Czech-born composer Elia Cmiral, whose film credits include “Ronin,” “Stigmata” and “Wrong Turn,” and who also scored the video game “Spec Ops: The Line” and the television series “Nash Bridges.”
“The cooperative nature of its production, uniting talent from multiple continents, is an example of the collaboration and acceptance that is so needed in the world today,” Slavin tells Variety. “It speaks to vital issues regarding refugee displacement, immigration, and personal resilience. The film features talented cast members from four countries and employed highly skilled crew members from both Vietnam and the U.S. We are honored to be included in the 4th Danang Asian Film Festival and hope that ‘Chrysalis’ will stand as a template for future international co-productions between Vietnam and the global film community.”
The VFDA’s president and DANAFF’s founding director, Dr. Ngo Phuong Lan, echoed that framing in a statement. “‘Chrysalis’ stands out as a notable example of collaboration between international filmmakers and Vietnam’s talented actors, creative professionals, and production teams,” she said. “The film’s selection for the competition program at DANAFF IV reflects the growing momentum of cross-border film productions across Asia and around the world.” She added that the VFDA hopes Vietnam will keep building its reputation with American and international filmmakers “not only because of its diverse landscapes and increasingly skilled film workforce, but also because of its welcoming collaborative environment and rich creative potential for telling cinematic stories with global resonance.”
“Vietnam isn’t just the backdrop of ‘Chrysalis.’ It’s woven into every part of it, the people, the culture, the landscapes, the memories,” Schulz tells Variety. “As an outsider, I never wanted to impose my perspective on that. I wanted to listen, learn, and work alongside the incredible Vietnamese cast and crew who helped bring the story to life. Their insight and craftsmanship gave the film a level of authenticity that simply couldn’t have been recreated anywhere else.”
“Awards and recognition are wonderful, but what means the most to me is seeing ‘Chrysalis’ embraced and become part of a larger conversation about family, identity, and search for home between two worlds,” he adds. “To be included at DANAFF is a tremendous honor, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to bring the film back to the country that inspired it.”
Winn, who serves as both the film’s subject and an executive producer, wrote separately about the film’s origins in an artist’s statement. “The pain demanded more,” he wrote. “Something beyond an item on a wall to be contemplated in silence. Something that clutched the soul and refused to release. That is why I made ‘Chrysalis.'”
“I left Vietnam as a child. I carried that departure with me for decades,” Winn tells Variety. “And now to return with this film, to have Vietnam embrace it, feels like a completion I did not know I was searching for. It is the chrysalis finally opening.”
“‘Chrysalis’ is not a film about an artist,” Winn adds. “It is a film about all of us, the human condition, the human emotion, the adversity we all carry and the ways we find to overcome it. Without pain, we would not understand what happiness is. Without dark, there is no understanding what light is.”
“Chrysalis” arrives in Danang having already traveled through several other rooms this year. The film made its market debut at the 2026 Cannes Film Market with two market screenings, where Winn, Slavin, Schulz and Kieu Chinh walked the Cannes red carpet together, and it picked up a handful of honors on the festival and summit circuit, including a best actress recognition for Kieu Chinh and a best director nod for Schulz from the I Success International Awards, along with a best autobiographical work prize for Winn at the Global Traveler Awards. Schulz also won best director at the Munich Film Awards in 2025 for the project, as well as best experimental film prizes from the LA Indie Shorts Awards and the Experimental, Dance & Music Film Festival.
The film’s chronology stretches well beyond its DANAFF stop: after Cannes in May and Danang in June, “Chrysalis” is scheduled to screen in Ho Chi Minh City in September, followed by a stop in Beverly Hills in October ahead of a planned worldwide release in November.
“I hope they feel their story is being told with love and with truth,” Kieu Chinh says. “‘Chrysalis’ is about a Vietnamese family and a Vietnamese heart. I want our audiences at home to feel seen, and to feel proud. And to know that no matter how far life carries any of us, the love for Vietnam is always in our heart.”
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Dad and daughter shot at McDonald's in broad daylight, caught in middle of ambush: Police
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Inset: McDonald's employee Ralph N-Kosi Blue III (Broward County Sheriff's Office). Background: The McDonald's in Hallandale Beach, Fla., where a dad and his daughter were shot (WFOR/YouTube).
A father and his 11-year-old daughter were both shot in broad daylight at a Florida McDonald's after being caught in the middle of an ambush involving an employee at the fast-food joint, cops say.
"We have two innocent bystanders involved in a situation that had nothing to do with them," Hallandale Beach Police Capt. Megan Jones told reporters during a news conference about the local weekend shooting.
The dad and his daughter were waiting in their car at the McDonald's while the child's mother was inside grabbing food when gunshots rang out around 1:30 p.m. Saturday, according to police.
"Our preliminary investigation indicates an altercation between multiple individuals escalated," the Hallandale Beach Police Department said on Facebook. "During the incident, innocent bystanders, including an 11-year-old girl and her father, were struck while sitting in their vehicle waiting for a food order. Both were transported to the hospital and are currently in stable condition."
Sign up for the Law&Crime Daily Newsletter for more breaking news and updatesDescribing the people involved in the "altercation," Jones told reporters, "We do believe that one of the parties involved was a McDonald's employee." Police confirmed Monday that the worker,
Ralph N-Kosi Blue III, was arrested for his involvement.
An investigation determined that the shooting stemmed from "a targeted incident that originated outside the City of Hallandale Beach" and "culminated" in the parking lot of the McDonald's where Blue was "reporting to work," according to a police press release. "[Blue] appears to have been the only individual who fired," the HBPD release says.
"Detectives worked tirelessly around the clock, identified Blue III as the shooter, and, in partnership with the Broward Sheriff's Office, took him into custody without incident," HBPD said on Facebook Monday. "Detectives also learned that two other children, ages 2 and 5, were inside the vehicle during the shooting. Thankfully, neither child was injured."
The others involved in the incident fled before officers arrived, according to the original HBPD Facebook post.
Jones told reporters that the mother of the 11-year-old victim "ran back outside looking to see if her family was involved" in the shooting "as soon as she heard the incident" unfold.
"[The mom] discovered that her husband and her child had been shot," Jones told reporters. "I was told that the child involved was screaming, which is a good thing, and crying, which is also a good thing, because anytime you get shot in certain extremities, no response is a very bad response. So, to be able to report that she's in stable condition at this time is a plus for us. It's a benefit."
Investigators were reviewing security footage as cops continued to follow up on leads and pursue "every avenue" to identify and apprehend those responsible, according to Jones.
Tags: child victimfatherFloridaMcDonald’sshooting
