Learn more about Friends of the NewsHour. Guy Cecil has led Priorities USA since 2015 and will leave at the end of March, as outside political groups begin to make plans for the 2024 races. The publication of Confidence Man reignited controversies over Habermans ethics. By Damon Winter/The New York Times . You're going to see if people were killed," Marques says. She sees herself as a demystifier. births and plastic surgeries), and the funerals of firefighters and civic luminaries. She leaves it hanging for a momentpanic flashes across his facebut then gives him a bump. It was simply desperation for a job other than bartending that led her to newspapers. That must have been a long time ago. . [8] She became a political analyst for CNN in 2014. As we were talking, her phone buzzed. I think he has a long pattern of racist behavior going back to when he was in New York City. To cover Trump is almost definitionally to repeat yourself: its a clich-ridden beat, strewn with familiar caveats and rehearsals of his rehearsals of what people are saying. In the book, Trump tells Haberman that he makes the same point over and over to drum it into your beautiful brain. Haberman told me that she does it because she has to. "Maggie doesn't camouflage. "No, that's not all I care about. she says she told him. None of this is to say that the Habermans and Trumps were showing up at the same dinner parties, but Manhattan can be a provincial place, among a certain inside crowd. She previously covered the Trump administration and continues to cover Donald Trump and politics in Washington. I was shaped by understanding what sold in a tabloid, Haberman told me. Mostly, copy kids at the Post did errands and administrative work, but once a week they would be named "Josephine reporter" or "Joe reporter" of the day and sent out to learn the ropes. Boards are the best place to save images and video clips. The one who has undoubtedly spent more time covering him than any other is New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman, who has been covering Mr. Trump since the 1990s. Both she and her subject navigate the public sphere as if they have something to prove. Because he is the same person he was during the campaign.". For a moment, it seems he might be coming over to tell off the reporter. Haberman reported and wrote it with her frequent collaborator, Glenn Thrush. 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 do not want you to come away with that impression. And it's very hard to know now whether he really believes this or whether it is just something he is saying. Are you doing an interview?" It was Haberman he dialed. It narrates how he and his siblings cut off medical funding for his brothers infant grandson, who was born with a disorder that led to cerebral palsy, in order to punish some of his relatives during an estate dispute. What erodes that is very dangerous." There was a lot of duking it out, she said. Would she tell the man to "stop screaming"? Like Kane in Orson Welles's masterpiece, Trump was a swaggering . Do you think he knows what's real and what isn't? There is also the question of what prolonged exposure to Trumpa man who profanes and corrupts everything he toucheshas done to Haberman herself. The former President once told her that he found air travel spooky.. "My enduring image of her is, she's standing outside the [press] van, she has a cigarette already lit in one hand, she's lighting a second one because she's forgotten that she has the first one lit, right? Well, we know that he I mean, and you have written this. Trump, having tasted the fairy food of the Oval Office, seems similarly stricken, entranced by power and fame that he is unable to forsake. He is very aware that, if you repeat something over and over again, it can turn it into something real. One attendee chastised another for looking at her phone, saying that its light was distracting, as though we were all at a cliffhanger movie. In the midst of his second divorce, from Marla Maples, Trump was a maestro of controlling his tabloid image, calling in tidbits about himself. 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. She is a native New Yorker, a competitive advantage given her subject. This past November, by the end of the candidates meandering, hour-long campaign announcement, she had tweeted about the speech more than twenty times. 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. And, early on, he figured out how to neutralize threats by hiring them, as when he lured Anthony Gliedman, the housing commissioner who denied his request for a tax break on Trump Tower, and whom Trump subsequently threatened and sued, to come work for him several years later. They range from an extraordinarily intimate account of a "sour and dark" Trump berating his staff as "incompetent" to the revelation that Trump called Comey a "nutjob" in an Oval Office meeting with the Russians the day after his dismissal, telling them that Comey's ouster had relieved the pressure of the investigation into possible collusion between Russia and his campaign. When he accused former national security adviser Susan Rice of committing crimes, and defended Fox News' Bill O'Reilly against the sexual harassment claims that would soon end his career at the network? Sister Sites: Techmeme Tech news essentials. Thats what people have really struggled to understand., Articles about Haberman like to say that the mother of three, who will turn fifty this October, desperately needs a break. She was the dominant Trump reporter on the campaign, and she didn't travel with him. Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump circa 1997, Jeff Greenfield interviews Maggie Haberman and Alexander Burns at the 92nd Street Y. Wanna Know What Donald Trump Is Really Thinking? Ventura headset in 2024, smart glasses with a display and a "neural interface" smartwatch in 2025, and AR glasses in 2027 . According to Hutchinson, Passantinos phone rangit was the Times reporter Maggie Haberman. Her new book, "Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America," chronicles where he came from and how his experiences in New York City impact our nation's politics today. She was wearing an evil-eye bracelet. [2] At that firm, a "publicity powerhouse" whose eponymous founder has been called "the dean of damage control" by Rudy Giuliani, Haberman's mother worked for a client list of influential New Yorkers including Donald Trump. ", Trump has also sent her his famous press clippings with Sharpie notes on them, mostly with criticisms, but at least once with praise. . She catches herself. Its possible that all of the jurors votes recommended against indictment, but it isnt sounding like it. "Every moment cannot be, 'Wow! Maggie grew up on the Upper West Side, attending P.S. I first met Maggie Haberman in 2014. As a woman and a receptacle for liberals disappointed hopes about the capacities of journalism in the MAGA era, Haberman received a tremendous amount of vitriol, Drezner said. You know, he plopped himself down on Fifth Avenue"a reference to the 58-story Trump Tower"and he still was not treated seriously by New York's business elite. How an unemployed blogger confirmed that Syria had used chemical weapons. [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." 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. 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). The phone buzzed again. The media writ large was unprepared to cover a political candidate who lied as freely as Trump did, on matters big and small, Haberman reflects, adding that the word lie presumes knowledge of a speakers motivations. When Haberman demurs, politely but without apology, he is momentarily stumped. "Haven't you joined us already?" We know he does this. Haberman did not let it slide. Its the gesture of a writer who knows that her unsentimental view of the President anchors her credibility. "The difference is, Maggie is in no sense carrying water for Trump," Greenfield said. Slate called her Trump's "snake charmer"; New Yorker editor in chief David Remnick recently likened Trump to her "ardent, twisted suitor." "This is a symbiotic relationship," says an administration official. Through it all, she never missed a beat in our conversation. "I'm just trying not to get beat," she says. Meanwhile, Trump, still revelling in his defeat of Hillary Clinton, cast her as another antagonist, the embodiment of the Failing New York Times. She and the President invited doppelgnger comparisons: the flashy fabulist and the buttoned-down institutionalist locked in each others sights. At first Thrush didn't like her, mistaking her voraciousness for shtick. I don't believe that he learned how to be president more astutely. ", 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 news was something my dad did." During the Trump Presidency, Habermans output and name recognition placed her at the center of debates over how journalists should cover his Administration. And I'm like, This is total bullshit, this is not a real person, nobody is this way," Thrush recalls. By Kenneth P. Vogel,Maggie Haberman and Michael S. Schmidt. 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. I also think he's extremely suggestible and I think he's extremely paranoid. He's called him a weakling. "Speak of the devil," she said into the phone. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. I reflexively tense up; she doesn't flinch. He said that to me in one of our interviews. With a tentative tour that would include stops in Iowa, Nevada and New Hampshire, the Florida governor is paving the way for a presidential run. Organize, control, distribute and measure all of your digital content. Yes, Haberman does a decent job laying out the business life of DJT, as seen thru her decidedly inhospitable glasses. Highlights from the week in culture, every Saturday. Because Haberman has known Trump for so long she has been derided as a schill. From Eisenhower to Biden, questions of age have persisted. "And it's not just any mayoralty; it's a late-'80s, early '90s New York mayoralty." When I speak to him, it's because he's trying to sell me," Haberman tells the audience at the 92nd Street Y. "I'm really not surprised. It was like watching someone juggle fire while standing on a tightrope. Well be fine.. "And so he will take this chair and say to you, 'This is actually a table.' Greenfield introduced Haberman by saying that he couldn't remember a reporter having established a relationship with a president quite like hers with Trump. NEW --> Declassified after-action reports support U.S. military commanders who said Biden team was indecisive during the Afghanistan crisis The White House said Friday that no such reports exist. 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. [2] They have three children and live in Brooklyn. And so it is easy for people to convince him that something is true, when it is not. Toward the end of our meeting, Haberman told me that she is superstitious. The man is, it appears, too drunk to be able to discern if she's flirting or annoyed. Honestly, the first name that came to mind as you were asking that question was Richard Nixon, with whom who is obviously not alive anymore, with whom he had a huge fascination. And, as I write, it was meant to flatter and it's a meaningless lie. 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. And probably because her mother is a publicist, she doesn't view Trump's press flacks, or flacks in general, as the enemy. The profiles sometimes suggest that she is addicted to her job, yet it might be equally accurate to say that she is enthralled by it: she made an initial choice and then lost the agency to decide. 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. "That's all I care about." And I think, sometimes, he seems less clear. Questions about her process elicited similarly guarded answers. "What do they thinkthat it's going in a secret newspaper?". How does he see the truth? ", [youtube ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMj21lPeAEk&t=345s[/youtube], It was at City Hall that she met Thrush, who was working at the New York tabloid Newsday. Oct 9, 2022. Her. "We were pretty demanding in terms of getting quotes, good-quality ones"which, in tabloid terms, means they have to be memorable and true"and getting them fast." "You can offer perspective, you can offer insight, you can offer details, but they've got to be locked down. ", 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. Throughout our conversation, she gave practiced, useful answers that slipped easily into anecdote, and she continually steered the topic away from herself. ", 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. 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. But I do think that he needs whatever he doesn't have, and whatever that might be in any given moment. Hicks echoed Conway, e-mailing me a few days later that Haberman was "a true professional. 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. [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. Maggie Lindsy Haberman (born October 30, 1973) is an American journalist, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and a political analyst for CNN. She's former transportation secretary. He draws roads. [14], In October 2016, one month before Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the US presidential election, a stolen document released by WikiLeaks outlined how Clinton's campaign could induce Haberman to place sympathetic stories in Politico. But I do think he figured out personnel, which is often what he's focused on. 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. "There has been a very protracted shocked stage in Washington, and I think people have to move past that. She wore an iteration of her usual uniform: black pants, black jacket, reddish-pink blouse, and an air of bone-crushing fatigue. ", "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. I'm quoting now Mary Trump, his niece, who, among other things, said that she thinks he is he has what she calls narcissistic personality disorder. 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. By Shane Goldmacher,Michael C. Bender and Maggie Haberman. "Maggie's whole career has been about grabbing people by the lapels," Burns says. The New York Times ' Maggie Haberman raised the possibility that former President Donald Trump might not run for office again despite many political observers considering it a foregone. Haberman, a White House correspondent for . Mediagazer Must-read media news. 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. 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. (One of her refrains is I was shocked but not surprised.) She mounts a similar argument about Trump in her recent book, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America. The book presents Trump as a bullshit artist whose grand theme is his own greatness. To some, she upheld the tradition that Woodward and Bernstein built; others condemned her failure to criticize Trumps behavior more vocally. She's called me as she was drivingswearing and running latebetween an errand at the American Girl doll store and a dinner party. She has worked for the trifecta of local dailies The Post, The Daily News and, most. "I didn't care for that metaphor," Haberman says. Her multitasking and compartmentalizing, which the press has covered tirelessly, almost seem like necessary steps in the quarantining of orderindividual and psychic as well as shared and politicalfrom chaos. She tried to get work in magazines, but she ended up bartending at Cleopatra's Needle, a jazz club on the Upper West Side frequented by Columbia University students, before eventually landing a job at the Post as a "copy kid" (the new politically correct term at the paper). ", When I tell Haberman what her colleagues say about her, she shrugs, like she's being complimented for breathing. Congratulations on the book. And Haberman stresses the racism that has permeated Trumps image since he and his father were sued for housing discrimination in the seventies. [4], Haberman's career began in 1996 when she was hired by the New York Post. Haberman countered that such soap operas have been happening for years. President Xi Jinping of China, he has been praising repeatedly since he left office. Lorenz's new classmates at the Post and a few of her old ones at the Times called her out-of-date self-empowerment-via-marketing-lingo "cringey" and basically labeled her a neo-journalism . She was texting, taking calls, e-mailing, and Gchatting with colleagues and sources. But, no, I think that, of political of U.S. political leaders who are alive right now, I'm very hard-pressed to point to a single person who he really admires, unless they're fighting for him. ", .css-5rg4gn{display:block;font-family:NeueHaasUnica,Arial,sans-serif;font-weight:normal;margin-bottom:0.3125rem;margin-top:0;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}@media (any-hover: hover){.css-5rg4gn:hover{color:link-hover;}}@media(max-width: 48rem){.css-5rg4gn{font-size:1rem;line-height:1.3;letter-spacing:-0.02em;margin:0.75rem 0 0;}}@media(min-width: 40.625rem){.css-5rg4gn{font-size:1rem;line-height:1.3;letter-spacing:0.02rem;margin:0.9375rem 0 0;}}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-5rg4gn{font-size:1rem;line-height:1.4;margin:0.9375rem 0 0.625rem;}}@media(min-width: 73.75rem){.css-5rg4gn{font-size:1rem;line-height:1.4;}}The First Day Back Was Agonizing, Monterey Park Has Been a Safe Haven for My Family, How to Help Victims of the Turkey-Syria Earthquake, Iranians Are Fighting and Dying for Their Rights, This Black History Month, Im Angry as Hell, Jacinda Ardern Showed Moms How to Speak Up, My Chronic Illness Led Me to Get an Abortion, How Barnard Students Fought for Abortion Pills. 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. She wrote about Donald Trump for those publications and rose to prominence covering his campaign, presidency, and post-presidency for the Times. [7] In 2010, Haberman was hired by Politico as a senior reporter. 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. I can't think of anyone whose behavior in typical U.S. political fashion he admires right now. And this is one of the things that makes establishing a baseline of discernible truth around him so incredibly hard. I think, sometimes, he does. But his campaign is preparing for an ugly, protracted primary fight for the nomination. The tabloid playbook, which Haberman memorized and which Trump enacted, reflected a sense that journalists and subjects could feed off one another, that the whole enterprise might be boiled down to eyes and, eventually, wallets. Maggie Haberman, Author, "Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America": It's a really good question, Judy. "You can change her mind," Madden says. It would look like him. But effective salesmanship must be based in credibilityan area in which his administration has suffered significant set-backs in recent days. Yet her emphasis on her own unspecialness feels more canny than sincere, animated by the need to convey that she is immune to Trumps games. [19], In 2022, Haberman published a book on the Trump presidency called Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America. As her book tour began, in October, Haberman and I met for an interview in Washington. By Sean Piccoli,Jonah E. Bromwich,Ben Protess and William K. Rashbaum. The time Trump called the Times to blame the collapse of the Obamacare repeal on the Democrats? One communications staffer after another told me that they appreciate the fact that she never blindsides them. The books thesisTrumps gonna Trumpis pointedly unglamorous, in keeping with Habermans deflationary assessments of Trumps character. Trump is 70. 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. (But, she says, Melissa McCarthy's Sean Spicer portrayal more accurately captures him.) 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. However, contrary to the hopes of her campaign, subsequent stories by Haberman about Clinton were much more critical of her than they had hoped for.
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