The book is frank about Trumps cruelty. He draws roads. The books thesisTrumps gonna Trumpis pointedly unglamorous, in keeping with Habermans deflationary assessments of Trumps character. According to Hutchinson, Passantinos phone rangit was the Times reporter Maggie Haberman. Haberman countered that such soap operas have been happening for years. [13] In March 2016 Haberman, along with New York Times reporter David E. Sanger, questioned Trump in an interview, "Donald Trump Expounds on His Foreign Policy Views," during which he "agreed with a suggestion that his ideas might be summed up as 'America First'". Is this something he believes to be true, or what? Organize, control, distribute and measure all of your digital content. Read Maggie Haberman", "New York Times Staffing Up For 2016 Election With Maggie Haberman Hire", "How Tabloids Helped NY Times' Maggie Haberman Ace Trump White House", "Maggie Haberman leaves huge hole at Politico, moves to New York Times", "Politico's Senior Political Reporter Maggie Haberman Joins New York Times", "The leakiest White House I've ever covered", "Maggie Haberman Hits Back In Twitter Spat With 'Trump Adviser' Sean Hannity", "Biden 'is planning to run again' in 2024", "The Trump Presidency Is Ending. 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. All Rights Reserved. Rosenhas taken issue with Habermans characterization of Trump as a master of media manipulation: If you are a man, and you bite a dog, he wrote, that does not make you a master of anything. But Haberman, who tends to predict that Trump will express his worst impulses and cause maximum damage, told me she believed that he is more often underestimated than overestimated. 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. I suggested that, once, reporters could vanish behind their facts. In advance of its release, CNN published an excerpt that revealed that Trump planned to simply remain in the White House after his November 2020 election loss. 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 Trumps advisers and their connections to Russia. "This is the book Trump fears most.". She echoed the same thought to me in email dispatches as she and her colleagues furiously traded scoops with the Washington Post last week. Do you think, at his core, that he is racist? Every item on this page was chosen by an ELLE editor. Haberman once said in an interview that she talked to 50 people a day. Ventura headset in 2024, smart glasses with a display and a "neural interface" smartwatch in 2025, and AR glasses in 2027 . He's brought up the moment repeatedly over the past two years, including during Haberman's recent Oval Office interview with him. [26][27], In January 2020, attorneys representing Nick Sandmann announced that Haberman was one of many media personalities they were suing for defamation for her coverage of the 2019 Lincoln Memorial Confrontation. She was a fixture on cable news, her face framed by eyeglasses that Trump, who shares her aptitude for pithy description, accused of being "smudged." After Trump rose to political prominence,. 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. [4], Haberman's career began in 1996 when she was hired by the New York Post. How Should an Older President Think About a Second Term? Are you doing an interview?" ", The 1980s and '90s New York in which Haberman was raised is the same milieu in which Trump began his crusade to sand down his Queens edges and gild the Manhattan skyline. These words were spoken in 2008 by an unlikely film critic named Donald Trump. Clyde and Nancy met at the tabloid New York PostClyde was a metro reporter there, and Nancy was a "copy boy" (what the Post called its entry-level cub reporters back then). . Her measured stance infuriates Trump's detractors, who harangue her on Twitter for "normalizing" the president. penguinrandomhouse.com. In the midst of his second divorce, from Marla Maples, Trump was a maestro of controlling his tabloid image, calling in tidbits about himself. 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. Haberman graduated in 1996 from Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied creative writing and psychology. What HBOs Chernobyl got right, and what it got terribly wrong. 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 covered his real estate business when she was a New York tabloid reporter before moving to Politico and later The Times. she says she told him. He is who he is and he's not going to change. 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). "You can change her mind," Madden says. And so it is easy for people to convince him that something is true, when it is not. Even those of us who had covered Trump for years struggled with how to handle the gush of falsehoods that dotted his sentences. But, in person, Haberman appeared nonplussed when I asked how she negotiates the gray areas in which her duty to break news aligns uncomfortably with Trumps interests. [2] Haberman returned to the Post to cover the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign and other political races. Haberman reported and wrote it with her frequent collaborator, Glenn Thrush. And Haberman, like Trump, knows how to spin: Confidence Man makes a show of refusing Trumps enticements. Include your name, the article headline, and your message. "You're going to bring this up every time, aren't you?" I think that theres a misunderstanding among certain aspects of our readership about what it is we do, she said. In the weeks before John Wayne Gacys scheduled execution, he was far from reconciled to his fate. Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. By Damon Winter/The New York Times . And, as I write, it was meant to flatter and it's a meaningless lie. Like, floating in the sky.". [19] She has also been accused "from certain corners of the left as a supposed water carrier for the 45th president". Confidence Man, which synthesizes years of reporting on Trump and his milieu, is, in some ways, a standard-issue Trump book. The first two years of the Trump presidency were a boom time for political books, and one of the boomiest was the deal announced in September 2017 in which the New York Times' star White House reporters, Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush . It was like watching someone juggle fire while standing on a tightrope. Mediagazer Must-read media news. 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. 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. I was somewhat surprised to see that, Haberman said when I asked her about the conversation, characterizing her call as routine. Shortly after Hutchinsons deposition, she notes, the Times published a story on the January 6th committees progress that included the news that at least one witness was willing to testify that Trump had approved of rioters chanting Hang Mike Pence and that Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, had burned documents in a fireplace. "Can I join you guys? But, for all Habermans reticence, she maintains a combative Twitter presence, and is quick to press her case in replies when she believes that shes been mischaracterized. "Maggie doesn't camouflage. Throughout our conversation, she gave practiced, useful answers that slipped easily into anecdote, and she continually steered the topic away from herself. He was constantly looking for a relationship with him in the past and kept it going out of office still, this admiration. The phone rang, and she started laughing when she looked at her iPhone display. She wrote fiction. Trump, having tasted the fairy food of the Oval Office, seems similarly stricken, entranced by power and fame that he is unable to forsake. Maggie Haberman, thank you, the reporter who has known Donald Trump longer than any other. Haberman, for her part, has become a front-page fixture and a Fourth Estate folk hero. She finds the framing of her relationship with the president in romantic terms "facile." From Eisenhower to Biden, questions of age have persisted. . She's called me as she was drivingswearing and running latebetween an errand at the American Girl doll store and a dinner party. "No, that's not all I care about. Habermans own sense of Trumps spooky potency continues to shape her coverage. People wanted her to provide a normative framing for what was going on, the professor and media commentator Daniel Drezner said. In hindsight, Haberman was building a reservoir of knowledge and contacts that would make her probably the best-sourced reporter of the 2016 campaign. And he makes that very clear. The New York Times reporter may be the greatest political reporter working today. 1996 - 2023 NewsHour Productions LLC. 2023 Cond Nast. He's tall with an athletic build and a military-style cut to his orange hair. By 1999, Marques put Haberman on the City Hall beat, where she covered then-mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Trump friend. It would look like him. ", Haberman is careful, even in the current free-for-all, to avoid the snide attitude many of the New York intelligentsia have taken toward Trump and his administration. The subjects may have primed her for the task of deciphering Trump; her classmates, she said, talked a lot about magical thinking. Her first job in journalism was at the Post, which sent her to crime scenes, trials, hospitals (to document V.I.P. Like Kane in Orson Welles's masterpiece, Trump was a swaggering . She's perfectly willing to walk like a redcoat into the middle of the field and let everyone know she's there because she's going to get [her story]," says Kevin Madden, a Republican communications veteran who has worked for John Boehner, George W. Bush, and Mitt Romney. Over time, however, as Haberman did not get beat, did not get beat, he realized she was for real. Haberman was learning the same arthow to "punch through" in a daily news cycle, as New York Times political reporter and frequent collaborator Alexander Burns puts it. Haberman and The New York Times supposedly disproportionately covered Hillary Clinton's email controversy with many more articles critical of her than of the numerous scandals involving her competitor Donald Trump, including his sexual misconduct allegations,[16][17] with Taylor Link writing: "The NYT's White House reporter calls the Clinton campaign liars, but was hesitant to use that word with Trump. We discussed Trumps romance with the media. The appointment of a special counsel Robert Mueller last week "took some of the air out of his tires" but he is still spoiling for a fight, Haberman says. ", It makes her both an enticing challenge and a nettlesome problem for a president who does not let the truth get in the way of a good story. I know a lot of people have been waiting to see this. Portions of the electorate learned to associate her with distressing updates about the country. In her work, Trumps actions dont appear special or mysterious; they emerge as a clear consequence of his background. "She came into the Page One conference room, and there was this huge round of applause," Parker says. He learned showmanship from the former mayor Ed Koch, the Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, and the McCarthyite lawyer Roy Cohnwhose singular talent, the book notes, was for emotional terrorism. From the remnants of Brooklyns Democratic machine he extracted lessons about the power that might be gained from pitting ethnic groups against one another. "I'm just trying not to get beat," she says. Congratulations on the book. Once, in July 2015, she did laugh, on This Week With George Stephanopoulos, at something Democratic congressman Keith Ellison said about Trump having "momentum" going into the primaries. A few minutes later, here he comes. He treats everyone like they're his psychiatrist, because he's working everything out in real time. Donald Trumps support in the citys wealthy political circles is waning, as 2024 rivals and potential candidates, including Nikki Haley and Mike Pence, make the rounds. To some, she upheld the tradition that Woodward and Bernstein built; others condemned her failure to criticize Trumps behavior more vocally. I mean, we know it is not true. Please check your inbox to confirm. The former presidents lawyers cited executive privilege, a tactic they have used with other ex-Trump aides. She's "wickedly competitive," says Gregg Birnbaum, the former Post editor (now senior political editor at NBC News Digital) whom Haberman credits with drilling into her head, "Do not get beat, do not get beat. And while there are still hard feelings toward the Times from Hillary Clinton operatives and votersthey complain that the paper obsessed over Clinton's e-mail scandal but failed to give commensurate ink to Trump's ties to Russia and potential conflicts of interest, among other subjectsmultiple people I spoke to who worked for Clinton are careful to draw a distinction between Haberman and the institution of the Times.