Haberman has spent a good part of the past seven years immersed in Trumps deranged fantasia of American life. She's e-mailed me from the NYPD tow pounda place she said she'd already visited twice that month. He has called you, essentially, like his psychiatrist, whether you agree with that term or not. And it's just hard to know how much is that vs. he's convinced himself of this. Portions of the electorate learned to associate her with distressing updates about the country. ", Haberman's bullshit detector is appreciated by partisans on both sides: Even if they can't spin her, they know the other side won't be able to spin her either. Haberman says she'd had no interest in journalism up to this point. Trump frequently complains about Haberman's coverage. Would she tell the man to "stop screaming"? Its the crashing. Trump, apparently, does not get fazed by planes: on Air Force One, Haberman said, hed sometimes continue talking during rocky landings, while reporters slid around on their seats. And we clearly saw it continue in the White House, be it attacking Elijah Cummings in Baltimore, a city that is part of the United States, and Trump was supposed to be the president for all of the United States, whether he was attacking congresswomen of color, whether he was getting into various condemnations, or lack thereof, I should say, of white supremacists, whether he was flirting with the QAnon conspiracy theory. The New York Times reporter may be the greatest political reporter working today. One communications staffer after another told me that they appreciate the fact that she never blindsides them. Habermans Trump is also the Page Six demimondaine who flashed his grin on Sex and the City (Donald Trump, you just dont get more New York than that, Carrie mused) and the developer who perennially stiffed his contractors and enraged the Fifth Avenue lite by destroying two iconic friezes. But he is one of the things he said to me in one of our interviews was the he uses repetition in interviews to beat something into and I quote "my beautiful brain.". The tale concerns a boy named Harold who goes for a walk in the evening and draws things from his imagination, including an entire city, with his enchanted crayon. I just have totems, she said, hoarsely, because her press tour had already begun and she was losing her voice. A number of news reporters have tried and are still trying to understand former President Donald Trump and his influence on our nation's politics today. He admires autocrats in other countries. [1] In 2022, she published the best-selling book Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America. It was Haberman he dialed. Haberman had her first byline in 1980, when she was seven years old, writing for the Daily News kids' page about a meeting she had with then-mayor Ed Koch. She is not a fan of SNL's impression of Kellyanne Conway as a psychopathic fame whore. Like, Maggies friendly to us. We see many compliments in your future with Maggie, a rectangular frame with a metal construction and vibrant violet hue. Kellyanne Conway defended Haberman last April in an interview, calling her "a very hard-working, honest journalist who happens to be a very good person." Over the years, she has honed a stable interpretation of Trump, evoking not a strongman but a showman, an egomaniac with shrewd instincts and bad opinions. At first Thrush didn't like her, mistaking her voraciousness for shtick. As an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence, Haberman studied creative writing and child psychology. She almost never turns her phone off. Confidence Man, which synthesizes years of reporting on Trump and his milieu, is, in some ways, a standard-issue Trump book. I reflexively tense up; she doesn't flinch. She said that this notion is just not realistic: in a climate of partisan absolutism, distrust of the media, and the coarsening of norms, the context around the news itself has shifted. Her coverage is often grounded in statements about Trumps characterthat he thrives on chaos but loves routine, or that he stirs up infighting among his cronies. She wrote about Donald Trump for those publications and rose to prominence covering his campaign, presidency, and post-presidency for the Times. (The first time she quoted Trump in a piece was in 2006: "Real-estate mogul Donald Trump talked up Clinton as the next president in Florida on Friday night, reportedly saying at a state GOP fund-raiser, 'She's a brilliant woman and she's going to be a very, very formidable candidate. Absolutely I think she can win, especially if the war's still going on.' [12], Haberman frequently broke news about the Trump campaign and administration. ", While speaking on a New York Times Women in the World panel at Lincoln Center in April to a very Trump-unfriendly crowd (Nikki Haley, Trump's ambassador to the United Nations, was booed during her interview with Greta Van Susteren before Haberman came onstage), she kept repeating basic facts about Trumpthat he has been on both sides of most issues, that he's influenced by the last person he spoke toand getting huge laughs from the audience. Because she was literally talking to 16 people within our campaign at the same time.". Born to a publicist and a newspaperman, she grew up in the kind of privileged Manhattan set that Trump spent his early days envying. The next day, I called himhe's an old family friend of the Habermans and has known Maggie since she was about three days oldto ask him to elaborate. Haberman has what can only be described as a wildly expressive poker face: her slender, Clara Bow-ish eyebrows lifting, her tired eyes widening behind her smudged glasses, a tiny pinpoint of a mole on her upper lip emphasizing the thin line she's pressed her mouth into, the dimple in her chin appearing and disappearing as her jaw muscles shift. Three years later, she moved to the Times as it beefed up its political staff in advance of the 2016 campaign. And, as I write, it was meant to flatter and it's a meaningless lie. Her tweets frequently numbered more than a hundred and forty in twenty-four hours. These words were spoken in 2008 by an unlikely film critic named Donald Trump. People have a right to feel however they feel, she said, dismissing the subject. (The Police Athletic League, a cause beloved by the former Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, profited handsomely from his shamelessness, Haberman writes.) But who he is is also why he won and why he tripled down after Access Hollywood," the political crisis which Haberman says is probably the yardstick Trump is using to measure his response to the current situation. The former President is not what he seems, she said, but hes not nothing. According to Hutchinson, Passantinos phone rangit was the Times reporter Maggie Haberman. She previously worked as a political reporter for the New York Post, the New York Daily News, and Politico. She echoed the same thought to me in email dispatches as she and her colleagues furiously traded scoops with the Washington Post last week. He said that to me in one of our interviews. "I'm not sure the objective facts will let him do that this time. How do you explain it? We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy. She says they were talking about infrastructure when, "out of nowhere," he raised the This Week laugh. And Haberman, like Trump, knows how to spin: Confidence Man makes a show of refusing Trumps enticements. People wanted her to provide a normative framing for what was going on, the professor and media commentator Daniel Drezner said. The phone rang, and she started laughing when she looked at her iPhone display. he yelps like a sixth grader sent our way on a dare, and dashes off. A characteristic article, which she co-wrote in July of 2017, emphasized that Donald Trump, Jr.,s huddle with a Kremlin-linked lawyer proved unusual for a political campaign but consistent with the haphazard approach the Trump operation, and the White House, have taken in vetting people they deal with. It was a quintessential Haberman balancing act, which underlined both the meetings extraordinary nature (for Washington) and the mundane pattern that it fit (for the Trumps). Haberman reported and wrote it with her frequent collaborator, Glenn Thrush. "She grew up in an environment where journalism that was as accurate as humanly possible was practically a religion," he says. "She's got it with her at all times," says her husband, Dareh Gregorian. And then, by the second week, something had just switched, and he was insisting that he had won. To some, she upheld the tradition that Woodward and Bernstein built; others condemned her failure to criticize Trumps behavior more vocally. Perhaps he glimpsed himself as if in a mirror. His behavior is really what matters on this front. These days, in her profession, the truth is a demanding god. And somewhat in connection with that, there's a long list of people he's belittled, people who've been loyal to him, like Lindsey Graham, Senator Graham, Kevin McCarthy. He views the truth as something that's transactional. Clyde covered Trump very sporadically in the 1980s and '90s. He confesses that he is drawn to her, like a moth to a flame. He is behaving in a racist way. "This is a president who is always selling. During the Trump era, Haberman became an avatar of journalisms promise as well as of its failures. ", Her father, Clyde, says he likes to think that honest journalism is "hardwired" into her. Glass ceiling: Tishby, an Israeli native who now calls Los Angeles home, joined the podcast to discuss her new book . When Trump gave an undisciplined press conference a few weeks into his presidency, the DC press and pols were comparing it to late-stage Nixon, Thrush says. The book is frank about Trumps cruelty. As she regards the man with the orange hair, it's like watching a predator decide whether or not to go in for the kill. Is this something he believes to be true, or what? He is elated. 24/7 Customer . Plus: each Wednesday, exclusively for subscribers, the best books of the week. [11], According to an analysis by British digital strategist Rob Blackie, Haberman was one of the most commonly followed political writers among Biden administration staff on Twitter. Judy Woodruff: A number of news reporters have tried and are still trying to understand former President Donald Trump and his influence on our nation's politics today. "Okay, wellfist bump?" "[22] The book debuted at number one on The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list for the week ending October 8, 2022. Amazingly detailed scenes here, including Jeffrey Clark, whose devices were recently seized by federal officials, holding court at an event in the spring So it must be that were doing it wrong. I noted that the idea of silver-bullet journalismof the one article that levels the Trump White Houseis deeply bewitching. But Confidence Man is among the first to seriously consider its subjects backstory, how he sprang from the overlapping scenes of New York real estate, city government, and media celebrity. Last June, Haberman got the tip that Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski had been fired while she was sitting in the audience at her son's kindergarten graduation. She was wearing an evil-eye bracelet. "And so he will take this chair and say to you, 'This is actually a table.' Habermans own confidence man, though overexposed, can seem similarly elusive. "The news was something my dad did." That [Trump] is unconcerned by that, I think, is the big issue," she says. Haberman heard rumors of colleagues fielding calls from the magnate during which hed dangle gossip items. Most recently, just in the last few days, he put out a statement about Elaine Chao, the wife of Senator Mitch McConnell. Maggie Haberman, thank you, the reporter who has known Donald Trump longer than any other. I do not want you to come away with that impression. Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent who joined The New York Times in 2015 and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on Donald Trump's advisers and . Do you think he knows what's real and what isn't? By the time Trump formally announced his candidacy in June 2015 and Haberman was assigned to his campaign, she'd been reporting on him for a decade. She had a story that was about to go live on nytimes.com. [7] According to one commentator, Haberman "formed a potent journalistic tag team with Glenn Thrush". Habermans own sense of Trumps spooky potency continues to shape her coverage. How does he see the truth? Haberman, who's known for her extensive contacts in Trump's circle, revealed behind-the-scenes details of Trump's political career in her book, such as that Trump considered refusing to leave the. Collect, curate and comment on your files. Some passages unfold as groans of exhaustion: For all the intrigue that is part of the Trump mythos, Haberman writes, the irony, say those who have known him for years, is that he has had only a handful of moves throughout his entire adult life. Part of the work of Confidence Man is to source and taxonomize each of these moves, and to identify when Trump is drawing on any one of them. I was shaped by understanding what sold in a tabloid, Haberman told me. [twitter ]https://twitter.com/maggieNYT/status/553574601733992449?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Fblogs%2Ferik-wemple%2Fwp%2F2015%2F01%2F09%2Fmaggie-haberman-leaves-huge-hole-at-politico-moves-to-new-york-times%2F[/twitter], It's why he deals with her, Haberman says: "Longevity, just being around him a long time, is something he values." He was shaped by how to attract those stories.. But that's what he said. I used that metaphor to describe him in 2017. 2023 Cond Nast. He's tweeted, at various points, that she's "third-rate," "sad," and "totally in the Hillary circle of bias," and he almost exclusively refers to the Times as "failing" and "fake news." "I have respect for you, sir, but you have called me to thank me about my coverage over the past year and a half at different points," she told him. ", "I don't know if the scale was 1 out of 100 or 1 out of 10," Haberman tells me the day after that interview, "and, by the way, the goal is not to be thanked for coverage, to be clear. This past November, by the end of the candidates meandering, hour-long campaign announcement, she had tweeted about the speech more than twenty times. Haberman's father, Clyde, is a Pulitzer Prizewinning New York Times reporter, and her mother, Nancy, is a publicity powerhouse at Rubensteina communications firm founded by Howard Rubenstein, whose famous spinning prowess Trump availed himself of during various of his divorce and business contretemps. And, finally, Maggie Haberman, you have said that he may have backed himself into a corner when it comes to whether he's going to run for president again, and, for that reason, he may do it. What Trump tries to do, Haberman told me, is create realities for himself and everyone else. But his conjuring is notshe searched for the right wordfriendly; theres a malevolence to it. Dhruv Khullar examines what strategies worked to control the virus, and talks to the C.D.C.s director, Rochelle Walensky, about the issue of misinformation. Trump, Haberman writes, was usually selling, saying whatever he had to in order to survive life in ten-minute increments. He was interested primarily in money, dominance, power, bullying, and himself. In Herman Melvilles novel The Confidence-Man, from 1857, the title character is a shapeshifter who remakes himself in the image of others desires. "And yet Trump seems driven to connect with her.". "That's all I care about." https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/maggie-habermans-new-book-confidence-man-details-trumps-rise-to-prominence, Donald Trump asks Supreme Court to intervene in Mar-a-Lago dispute, Rex Tillerson testifies at corruption trial of Trump adviser, Trumps embrace of QAnon raising concerns about future political violence, How Trump may have violated the Presidential Records Act, "confidence man: the making of donald trump and the breaking of america". Maggie Haberman during a screening of The Fourth Estate at TheTimesCenter on May 9, 2018, in New York City. It's obviously not benign. Intense is one of the words friends and colleagues most often use to describe her. She glanced at it, then apologized. As his star climbed, she served as one of his most diligent chroniclers: in 2016, her byline appeared on five hundred and ninety-nine articles; more recently, she has averaged about an article a day. Maggie Haberman is a tireless, keen-eyed example. Her reporting, much of it written with other Times staffers, mingled Pulitzer-winning discoveries (Trump told Russian officials that firing James Comey relieved great pressure on him), palace intrigue (John Kelly clashed with Corey Lewandowski), and bathetic details (Trump watching television in his bathrobe).
