Maggie Haberman on Donald Trump: "He saw the presidency as the ultimate I don't believe that he learned how to be president more astutely. You are considered the reporter who goes back longer with Donald Trump than anyone else and who understands him better than any other reporter. And I think that the people who he would put into key jobs would be very alarming to a number of people across Washington. "Part of it was for her son graduating kindergarten, and part of it was for Maggie for breaking this awesome scoop. Haberman told me that she believed a number of people from the Trump era remain newsworthy, either because they illuminate something about Trump himself or because they are the subjects of or witnesses in investigations. She previously worked as a political reporter for the New York Post, the New York Daily News, and Politico. "I'm wearing a sweatshirt, and my hair is in a bun," she told the producer. Toward the end of our meeting, Haberman told me that she is superstitious. We see many compliments in your future with Maggie, a rectangular frame with a metal construction and vibrant violet hue. he yelps like a sixth grader sent our way on a dare, and dashes off. It would look like him. Haberman, one of the main conduits of Oval Office drama, came under particular fire for her handling of anonymous sources. Do you think he knows what's real and what isn't? 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." Habermans own sense of Trumps spooky potency continues to shape her coverage. Yes, Haberman does a decent job laying out the business life of DJT, as seen thru her decidedly inhospitable glasses. Through it all, she never missed a beat in our conversation. Trump Said NYT's Maggie Haberman Is Like His 'Psychiatrist': Book Confidence Man, which synthesizes years of reporting on Trump and his milieu, is, in some ways, a standard-issue Trump book. He is very aware that, if you repeat something over and over again, it can turn it into something real. 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. 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. Access the best of Getty Images with our simple subscription plan. Habermans particular way of contextualizing often seems intended to puncture or undermine. He is behaving in a racist way. And, as I write, it was meant to flatter and it's a meaningless lie. That [Trump] is unconcerned by that, I think, is the big issue," she says. Hutchinson asked her counsel not to take the call. Three years later, she moved to the Times as it beefed up its political staff in advance of the 2016 campaign. There is also the question of what prolonged exposure to Trumpa man who profanes and corrupts everything he toucheshas done to Haberman herself. 24/7 Customer . I also think he's extremely suggestible and I think he's extremely paranoid. I can't think of anyone whose behavior in typical U.S. political fashion he admires right now. [2] They have three children and live in Brooklyn. "You're going to bring this up every time, aren't you?" 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. Maggie Haberman, the Confidence Man's Chronicler | The New Yorker ", .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. "Speak of the devil," she said into the phone. ", [youtube ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPME4VCNmyc&t=79s[/youtube]. I just have totems, she said, hoarsely, because her press tour had already begun and she was losing her voice. She turned the phone over. [3], Last edited on 16 February 2023, at 19:13, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, Aldo Beckman Award for Journalistic Excellence, "Weddings/Celebrations: Maggie Haberman, Dareh Gregorian", "Wanna Know What Donald Trump Is Really Thinking? There are briefing-room tantrums, incredulous generals, and off-color mutterings. "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. She finds the framing of her relationship with the president in romantic terms "facile." She says she does most of her work from her car, shuttling her kids around, dashing between the office in Times Square and her apartment. Maggie Haberman is a tireless, keen-eyed example. 2023 Getty Images. Tweets with replies by Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) / Twitter Trumps performative macho is scaring voters in both parties away from women candidates. Haberman, a White House correspondent for . 'Confidence Man,' Maggie Haberman's Book on Trump: Review - The New Passantino, her lawyer at the time, was in a taxi with her on the way to a restaurant. 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. [5] In 1999, the Post assigned her to cover City Hall, where she became "hooked" on political reporting. 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). "I used to really cringe at the way my colleagues would talk to spokespeople," she said. And so it is easy for people to convince him that something is true, when it is not. As an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence, Haberman studied creative writing and child psychology. 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. Her tweets frequently numbered more than a hundred and forty in twenty-four hours. (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. It was a story about Mar-a-Lago." An essay by Toni Morrison: The Work You Do, the Person You Are.. She commutes to DC several times a week from her home in Brooklyn, where she lives with her husband and three young children. Ashley Parker, now a Washington Post White House correspondent but then one of Haberman's colleagues at the Times, says Haberman confirmed the tip and wrote the story on her phone during the graduation. "There's an enormous personal price that she pays, that people pay when they devote so much of themselves to this," Thrush says. A word I didnt use in the book, she told me, but that a lot of people whove worked for [Trump] use, is nihilist. In Confidence Man, Haberman writes that Trump is often simply, purely opaque, permitting people to read meaning and depth into every action, no matter how empty they may be.. All Rights Reserved. Maggie Haberman's new book: Trump nearly fired Jared and Ivanka via he asks, uncertainly. And it's just hard to know how much is that vs. he's convinced himself of this. Amazingly detailed scenes here, including Jeffrey Clark, whose devices were recently seized by federal officials, holding court at an event in the spring When I speak to him, it's because he's trying to sell me," Haberman tells the audience at the 92nd Street Y. 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. And that's going to mean certain situations are fraught. "I didn't care for that metaphor," Haberman says. Haberman says her mirth had to do with the ridiculousness of talking momentum so early in the campaign; Trump took it as her mocking his chances of winning the Republican nomination. This article appears in the July 2017 issue of ELLE.. Is this something he believes to be true, or what? She was a correspondent for Politico with roots in city tabloids, and while I didn't know much about politics or the media, I knew that when she reported. Habermans dark hair was blown out and she wore a forest-green blouse and pink lipstick. The quick-hit rhythm that Trump and Haberman were both fine-tuning teed them up perfectly for today's Twitter-paced news environment. [3] She is a 1991 graduate of Ethical Culture Fieldston School, followed by Sarah Lawrence College where she obtained a bachelor's degree in 1995. I mean, does he just create a different factual universe? [9], Haberman was hired by The New York Times in early 2015 as a political correspondent for the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. 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. Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Maggie Haberman on Twitter: ">>>>" / Twitter And since President Trump fired FBI director James Comey, Haberman has been on the frontlines of the nonstop news bombshells that have been lobbed, bylining or credited with a reporting assist on around two dozen stories in two weeks. " The next time Haberman wrote about him was in 2009"Terror Tent Down at Camp Trump" was the headlinewhen Trump allowed Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi to pitch a Bedouin-style tent on the lawn of his estate in Bedford, New York.). "This is the book Trump fears most.". In the course of reporting the book, she shared considerable . She was also on her laptop. Hicks echoed Conway, e-mailing me a few days later that Haberman was "a true professional. I think, to quote someone who knew him years ago who said this to me a couple of months back, a second Trump presidency would be very heavily driven by spite. But effective salesmanship must be based in credibilityan area in which his administration has suffered significant set-backs in recent days. Some of his aides laughed. Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker. Journalists have become part of the story in the Trump administration, enablers and heroes of a nonstop political and constitutional soap opera, and last year Haberman was the most widely read journalist at the Times, according to its analytics. She leaves it hanging for a momentpanic flashes across his facebut then gives him a bump. President Xi Jinping of China, he has been praising repeatedly since he left office. Maggie Haberman reacts to Trump grand jury foreperson's remarks: 'I've "If you're going to come at her," says a Democratic operative, "you've got to come correct. She is not a fan of SNL's impression of Kellyanne Conway as a psychopathic fame whore. (Nancy worked on projects for Trump's business but says she never met 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. She was on her phone. 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. Oct 9, 2022. 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? "Part of the reason" Haberman is so read in the Times "is because she is writing about Donald Trump. In hindsight, Haberman was building a reservoir of knowledge and contacts that would make her probably the best-sourced reporter of the 2016 campaign. Cruelty, pettiness and real estate: in Confidence Man, Maggie Haberman Adds Haberman, "Some Ed Koch. 2023 Cond Nast. [19] She has also been accused "from certain corners of the left as a supposed water carrier for the 45th president". 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. By Damon Winter/The New York Times . Taylor Lorenz now at Washington Post fights Maggie Haberman - Intelligencer I was shaped by understanding what sold in a tabloid, Haberman told me. Can you believe what he just did?' And I'm like, This is total bullshit, this is not a real person, nobody is this way," Thrush recalls. As the 2024 race gears up, the Confidence Man and his chronicler have become each others context, bound together and propelled by desires that both are and arent their own. Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Brea ", Haberman is growing weary of the DC establishment's seeming inability to metabolize the president's personality. This would be a profound shift in the shape of the federal government. 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. Haberman has spent a good part of the past seven years immersed in Trumps deranged fantasia of American life. Tap into Getty Images' global scale, data-driven insights, and network of more than 340,000 creators to create content exclusively for your brand. He draws roads. [23], In 2018, Haberman's reporting on the Trump administration earned the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting (shared with colleagues at the Times and The Washington Post),[24] the individual Aldo Beckman Award for Journalistic Excellence award from the White House Correspondents' Association,[25] and the Front Page Award for Journalist of the Year from the Newswomen's Club of New York. He draws buildings. What erodes that is very dangerous." The former President once told her that he found air travel spooky.. 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. She wrote about Donald Trump for those publications and rose to prominence covering his campaign, presidency, and post-presidency for the Times. Feeling is also not her job. Because Haberman has known Trump for so long she has been derided as a schill. She echoed the same thought to me in email dispatches as she and her colleagues furiously traded scoops with the Washington Post last week. Questions about her process elicited similarly guarded answers. The Getty Images design is a trademark of Getty Images. Since 2015, Habermans career has revolved around the most untrustworthy man in national politics. "She's got it with her at all times," says her husband, Dareh Gregorian. The debate is set for August, in the same city that will host the partys 2024 convention. In a December 19th front-page article, she portrayed the candidate as a shrunken presence on the political landscape. Yet, if a single overarching lesson emerges from the body of work that Haberman has assembled over the past half decade, its that the press and the American public discount Trump at our peril. Maggie Rectangle Purple Glasses for Women | Eyebuydirect 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. I mean, how does he take in facts? Maggie Haberman, thank you so much for joining us. The man with the orange hair is making a scene. He noticed right away that Haberman had talent. It was Haberman he dialed. I just wanted to make the point that we were engaged in some revisionist history. [8] She became a political analyst for CNN in 2014. But it gives her added credibility when she argues, as she did when Trump fired Comey, that one of Trump's aberrant moves is a big deal. When Haberman demurs, politely but without apology, he is momentarily stumped. 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. Lyndon Johnson gave preference to Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist Walter Lippmann, and Lippmann had once gone so far as to secretly write part of a speech for Johnsonand then write a story praising the speech. "Maggie doesn't camouflage. Perhaps he glimpsed himself as if in a mirror. The book is frank about Trumps cruelty. 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. At first Thrush didn't like her, mistaking her voraciousness for shtick. By Sean Piccoli,Jonah E. Bromwich,Ben Protess and William K. Rashbaum. Sister Sites: Techmeme Tech news essentials. Haberman, for her part, has become a front-page fixture and a Fourth Estate folk hero. It was like watching someone juggle fire while standing on a tightrope. 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. He's hitting on her. "So much of his approach is bending others to the way he sees things," she says. "This is a very precarious moment, in terms of what anyone can believe in. I'm having a hard time remembering it." "Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America" by Maggie Haberman (Penguin Press), in Hardcover, Large Print, eBook and Audio formats, available October 4 via Amazon . "You're pretty!" He's tall with an athletic build and a military-style cut to his orange hair. In interviews, she has often invoked the childrens book Harold and the Purple Crayon to illustrate Trumps peculiar blurring of fact and fantasy. She had a story that was about to go live on nytimes.com. When Their Book Deal Blew Up After Sexual Misconduct Allegations, Glenn Ad Choices. "His whole thing has always been to be accepted among the New York elites, whom he sort of preemptively sneers atthat thing that people do when they are not really sure if they will be completely validated, where they push away people whose approval they are seeking. 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. She never hedges her angle to try to protect her access, only to give politicians an unwelcome surprise when they read the story in the morninga practice some journalists follow that Haberman calls "the stupidest thing I've ever heard of. [2] Haberman returned to the Post to cover the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign and other political races. ", 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. He stands looking down at her, swaying a little, slightly walleyed, but he still has a big-man swagger. Haberman, for her part, has been on the Trump beat for decades. And laugh at him. I don't know if you're familiar with the children's book "Harold and the Purple Crayon," but it's about a child named Harold who literally has a purple crayon, and he draws a whole world at night one night. It was simply desperation for a job other than bartending that led her to newspapers. Portions of the electorate learned to associate her with distressing updates about the country. She was wearing an evil-eye bracelet. Because she enjoyed good access to him on the campaign trail and during his presidency she has been called a "Trump. A lot of people would let it go, but Haberman signals to the hostess. This past November, by the end of the candidates meandering, hour-long campaign announcement, she had tweeted about the speech more than twenty times. " She's like my psychiatrist . Like the president she covers, Haberman, 43, is a born-and-bred New Yorker and slightly ill at ease in Washington. ", Her father, Clyde, says he likes to think that honest journalism is "hardwired" into her. In a statement to The Wrap's Andi Ortiz, a Times spokesperson said, "Maggie Haberman took leave from The Times to write her book. ", When I tell Haberman what her colleagues say about her, she shrugs, like she's being complimented for breathing. I mean, what what how does he do this? Greenfield introduced Haberman by saying that he couldn't remember a reporter having established a relationship with a president quite like hers with Trump. And I want to start with, I think, the question a question that is all about what keeps him in the news, and that is his denial of the result of the 2020 election, insisting that he actually won. Well be fine.. I care about getting it right. The audience was, as always, hanging on her every word, hungry to have her translate Trump into someone they could understand. Mediagazer Must-read media news. Maggie Haberman / New York Times: DeSantis to Visit Early Primary States, Selling His Florida Record . 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. [12], Haberman frequently broke news about the Trump campaign and administration. Haberman argued that she did not learn this until after Joe Biden took office. Organize, control, distribute and measure all of your digital content. I reflexively tense up; she doesn't flinch. Donald Trump will be basking in affection from activists at CPAC on Saturday. Washington, D.C.,s power players, a wider swath of whom than wishes to admit it has Habermans number saved, grew habituated to her presence, if not exactly thrilled by it. There's that Felix Sater character, who was arrested and, I think, did time, for shoving a broken Martini glass in someone's face . I think, sometimes, he does. Because she was literally talking to 16 people within our campaign at the same time.". She doesn't see any climactic resolution to the Trump saga coming anytime soon. Yes, I can! The New York Times reporter may be the greatest political reporter working today. 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 do not want you to come away with that impression. Like Kane in Orson Welles's masterpiece, Trump was a swaggering . Just as he didn't back down after being accused of sexual assault, she says he is unlikely to walk away from this fight or resign. 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. ", [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. Your Privacy Choices: Opt Out of Sale/Targeted Ads. COVID-19 at Three: Who Got the Pandemic Right? Haberman countered that such soap operas have been happening for years. Many of the juiciest Trump pieces have been broken by her: That story about him spending his evenings alone in a bathrobe, watching cable news? What Did We Learn About the Georgia Grand Jurys Findings? Haberman pressed her point: "It was two months ago. 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".