All Rights Reserved. Because otherwise you're just never going to be able to cover him," she says. This book is her most sustained attempt to pin him down. "I'm just trying not to get beat," she says. Trump Tried to Get Maggie Haberman's Phone Records: Politico . Maggie Haberman - The New York Times 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 was a fixture on cable news, her face framed by eyeglasses that Trump, who shares her aptitude for pithy description, accused of being smudged.. That must have been a long time ago. Haberman reported and wrote it with her frequent collaborator, Glenn Thrush. "Part of it was for her son graduating kindergarten, and part of it was for Maggie for breaking this awesome scoop. Haberman, a White House correspondent for . Her tweets frequently numbered more than a hundred and forty in twenty-four hours. maggie haberman glasses - yummichic.com Maggie Haberman chose not to make this about another smear campaign against the 45th president of the United States, but rather offer some context that all readers ought to heed. The time Trump called the Times to blame the collapse of the Obamacare repeal on the Democrats? In her work, Trumps actions dont appear special or mysterious; they emerge as a clear consequence of his background. She was also on her laptop. Haberman jumped to Politico in 2010, where she covered him full-bore for the first time; he was then flirting with the idea of joining the 2012 Republican primary and beginning to spread the lie that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. 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. Another evil eye was in her pocket. 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). Maggie Haberman - Wikipedia She was on her phone. 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. In hindsight, Haberman was building a reservoir of knowledge and contacts that would make her probably the best-sourced reporter of the 2016 campaign. Do you think, at his core, that he is racist? "I love being with her," he says. She was accused of skewing her coverage in exchange for access (a claim she rejects)these allegations sometimes came from the same critics who bristled at her papers studious impartiality. He confesses that he is drawn to her, like a moth to a flame. 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. Is this something he believes to be true, or what? And so it is easy for people to convince him that something is true, when it is not. In those days, the future president was a fixture in Page Six, the Post's gossip column. 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. 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. Trump conceded this was true and the story was about an "8. On this evening, she is recovering from the flu and has been up for the better part of two days, racing back and forth on Amtrak between her family and an Oval Office interview with the president, and speaking engagements at New York's Lincoln Center and DC's Newseum. She's called me as she was drivingswearing and running latebetween an errand at the American Girl doll store and a dinner party. For his first term, Haberman has said, he wanted to campaign more than he wanted to be elected; now he wants to be elected without all the travails of campaigning. What Did We Learn About the Georgia Grand Jurys Findings? And Haberman, like Trump, knows how to spin: Confidence Man makes a show of refusing Trumps enticements. "No, that's not all I care about. As a construction tycoon, Trump sought out unsavory accomplices, partnering on one project with a Soviet-born investor whod been convicted for both first-degree assault (shoving a broken margarita glass into a mans face) and fraud (a pump-and-dump penny stock scheme involving the Genovese crime family). He donated heavily to politicians who could grease the wheels of his business machinations. "There's an enormous personal price that she pays, that people pay when they devote so much of themselves to this," Thrush says. 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. People wanted her to provide a normative framing for what was going on, the professor and media commentator Daniel Drezner said. She believes in the power of breaking incremental newsnot holding every-thing back for a long read. 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. Maggie Haberman, a White House correspondent for the New York Times, stops midsentence to stare at his back as he gesticulates broadly and shouts at his dinner companions over the already considerable din at BLT Steak in Washington, DC, downstairs from the offices of the Times' bureau. To some, she upheld the tradition that Woodward and Bernstein built; others condemned her failure to criticize Trumps behavior more vocally. She echoed the same thought to me in email dispatches as she and her colleagues furiously traded scoops with the Washington Post last week. Yes, I can! 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. NEW YORK Late one recent afternoon, Maggie Haberman pulled into a parking spot in the lot at Gargiulo's, the old-time Italian restaurant in Coney Island where Donald Trump's father used to . 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. How Maggie Haberman Covers Trump Without Losing Her Mind I think his niece is right. It's obviously not benign. 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. 14-Day Free Returns. . The Manhattan district attorneys office is scrutinizing the former presidents role in the hush money payment to a porn star. She goes on to talk about a fragile ego that has to be constantly fed and so on. Maggie Haberman on Twitter: ">>>>" / Twitter Haberman heard rumors of colleagues fielding calls from the magnate during which hed dangle gossip items. It was like watching someone juggle fire while standing on a tightrope. 24/7 Customer . "I'm really not surprised. Are you doing an interview?" 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 . She was texting, taking calls, e-mailing, and Gchatting with colleagues and sources. Oct 9, 2022. "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 . Parts of Confidence Man seem to wrestle with its authors role in amplifying Trumps lies. 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. Significantly, she was accumulating sources who were close to Trump, who knew when he was angry and what he watched on TV and how he could only sleep well in his own bed. She was part of a team that was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2021 for coverage of the Trump administrations handling of the coronavirus. For the next decade, she worked for both the Post and the other tab in town, the New York Daily News, covering Hillary Clinton's senate campaign, Michael Bloomberg's mayoralty, and Clinton's first presidential campaign. "This is a very precarious moment, in terms of what anyone can believe in. She wrote fiction. Would she tell the man to "stop screaming"? He "kind of chuckled" and replied, "It's like therapy. A reader wondering whether to be surprised by such carelessness, such corruption, gets her answer: yes and no. I mean, does he just create a different factual universe? He clearly, in my reporting and I describe this in the first few days after the November 2020 election, he seemed aware that he had lost in his conversations with a number of aides. 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. And, for all Habermans success in demystifying Trump, at times she seems to vest him with eerie power. 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. 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? "Part of the reason" Haberman is so read in the Times "is because she is writing about Donald Trump. Her expertise wasn't just Trumpit was the Trump psyche. The man with the orange hair is making a scene. But I do think that he needs whatever he doesn't have, and whatever that might be in any given moment. When the moderator of the panel, Jeff Greenfield, a veteran reporter and host of PBS's Need to Know, remarks that a Democratic senator told him the Republican senators think Trump is "nuts," Haberman prefaces her response with "I don't know that I'd go with the diagnostic that you used," but then offerswith specific details that are more enlightening and perhaps more damningthat she had lunch with a Republican senator who has been astonished to discover that Trump watches his every move in the media, calling him directly to parse his TV appearances and quotes he's given the print press. By Damon Winter/The New York Times . (But, she says, Melissa McCarthy's Sean Spicer portrayal more accurately captures him.) 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. He is behaving in a racist way. Lately he's gone digital (sort of): He'll write the note on the clip, and then have White House Director of Strategic Communications Hope Hicks take a picture of the note and e-mail it to her. Feeling is also not her job. Maggie Haberman, Author, "Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America": It's a really good question, Judy. 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. ", 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. It was a story about Mar-a-Lago." And probably because her mother is a publicist, she doesn't view Trump's press flacks, or flacks in general, as the enemy. 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. 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. ", 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. While the president and the reporter couldn't seem more differentTrump, the flamboyant tycoon and Manhattan establishment aspirant known for his devil- may-care mendacity; and Haberman, a political insider known for her straight-shooting truth tellingthe points at which their histories and personalities converge are revealing about both the media and the president himself. Trump responded, jokingly, "Really? 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 aides and advisers who spoke to Haberman for the book - she writes that she interviewed more than 250 people - offer a damning portrait of a commander in chief who was uninterested in. "This is a president who is always selling. penguinrandomhouse.com. he yelps like a sixth grader sent our way on a dare, and dashes off. He noticed right away that Haberman had talent. During Rudy Giulianis second mayoral term, Haberman covered City Hall, a notoriously cutthroat beat. 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). 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. Toward the end of our meeting, Haberman told me that she is superstitious. And, as I write, it was meant to flatter and it's a meaningless lie. The former presidents lawyers cited executive privilege, a tactic they have used with other ex-Trump aides. "I'm actually not trying to be funny," Haberman said, correcting them, and, when they continued to laugh, insisting, "Again, I'm not doing a comedy line. ", Her father, Clyde, says he likes to think that honest journalism is "hardwired" into her. "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. Well, we know that he I mean, and you have written this. By Sean Piccoli,Jonah E. Bromwich,Ben Protess and William K. Rashbaum. I care about getting it right. "She is literally always doing four things," says her friend and former New York Post colleague Annie Karni. Please check your inbox to confirm. Donald Trump will be basking in affection from activists at CPAC on Saturday. 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. 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. [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. The Times hired her to cover the 2016 election five months before Donald Trump declared his first Presidential campaign. 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. The New York Times reporter may be the greatest political reporter working today. As we were talking, her phone buzzed. Hicks echoed Conway, e-mailing me a few days later that Haberman was "a true professional. Yes, Haberman does a decent job laying out the business life of DJT, as seen thru her decidedly inhospitable glasses. He said that to me in one of our interviews. 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. [15] Haberman was criticized for applying a double standard in her reporting about the scandals involving the two presidential candidates of the 2016 election. Maggie Haberman Photos and Premium High Res Pictures - Getty Images People have a right to feel however they feel, she said, dismissing the subject. Habermans own sense of Trumps spooky potency continues to shape her coverage. 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. Its the gesture of a writer who knows that her unsentimental view of the President anchors her credibility. Her son didn't have school after the ceremony, so Haberman brought him with her to a politics meeting at the Times. She commutes to DC several times a week from her home in Brooklyn, where she lives with her husband and three young children. Or is she simply good at her joba job that requires her, at times, to win the trust of the untrustworthy? Theyre outraged by what were covering, and they dont understand why its not having the effect it should. Is it the claustrophobia that bothers her? he asks, pointing at the recorder between us. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy. 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. But that's what he said. Its possible that all of the jurors votes recommended against indictment, but it isnt sounding like it. Is a Woman Ever Going to Win the White House? I reflexively tense up; she doesn't flinch. This article appears in the July 2017 issue of ELLE.. The media personality Keith Olbermann and the opinion columnist Michael J. Stern, among others, charged her with failing to immediately report vital knowledge uncovered over the course of her book researchmost significantly, that Trump had told aides that he wasnt leaving 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue after the election. The former President once told her that he found air travel spooky.. When Haberman interviewed Trump in the Oval Office this April, he was making his usual complaint about how unfair her coverage is. What erodes that is very dangerous." This would be a profound shift in the shape of the federal government. She was wearing an evil-eye bracelet. Is she, in fact, friendly to Trumps people? Learn more about Friends of the NewsHour. It was Haberman he dialed. The quick-hit rhythm that Trump and Haberman were both fine-tuning teed them up perfectly for today's Twitter-paced news environment. births and plastic surgeries), and the funerals of firefighters and civic luminaries. 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. I mean, what what how does he do this? Since 2015, Habermans career has revolved around the most untrustworthy man in national politics. "It's like she's in the building, but she's not even in the city. "She grew up in an environment where journalism that was as accurate as humanly possible was practically a religion," he says. There are briefing-room tantrums, incredulous generals, and off-color mutterings. For a moment, it seems he might be coming over to tell off the reporter. Trump Said NYT's Maggie Haberman Is Like His 'Psychiatrist': Book I'm having a hard time remembering it." In the epilogue, Haberman describes a post-Presidential interview in which Trump cracked to his aides, I love being with her, shes like my psychiatrist. The next sentence reflexively brushes his statement aside, insisting, It was a meaningless line, almost certainly intended to flatter. Habermans point is that Trump rarely changes from context to context; he treats everyone like his psychiatrist. Confidence Man, which synthesizes years of reporting on Trump and his milieu, is, in some ways, a standard-issue Trump book. Maggie grew up on the Upper West Side, attending P.S. Throughout our conversation, she gave practiced, useful answers that slipped easily into anecdote, and she continually steered the topic away from herself. She was the dominant Trump reporter on the campaign, and she didn't travel with him. The phone rang, and she started laughing when she looked at her iPhone display. "You're going to bring this up every time, aren't you?" Hope you'll take a moment to order CONFIDENCE MAN here. " 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.). Can you believe what he just did?' Portions of the electorate learned to associate her with distressing updates about the country. Maggie Haberman reacts to Trump grand jury foreperson's remarks: 'I've He stands looking down at her, swaying a little, slightly walleyed, but he still has a big-man swagger. Exclusive: See the Trump toilet photos that he denies ever existed - Axios Habermans dark hair was blown out and she wore a forest-green blouse and pink lipstick. Prosecutors have asked a federal judge to set aside any claims of executive privilege that former Vice President Mike Pence might raise to avoid answering questions. Every item on this page was chosen by an ELLE editor. "The news was something my dad did." And I think that the people who he would put into key jobs would be very alarming to a number of people across Washington. Ventura headset in 2024, smart glasses with a display and a "neural interface" smartwatch in 2025, and AR glasses in 2027 . Adds Haberman, "Some Ed Koch. In late April, Haberman spoke on (yet another) panel, this one at the 92nd Street Y, with her colleague Alex Burns. Tweets with replies by Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) / Twitter Ppl don't change." She's former transportation secretary. President Xi Jinping of China, he has been praising repeatedly since he left office. You're going to see if people were killed," Marques says. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. Because Haberman has known Trump for so long she has been derided as a schill. Maggie Haberman's new book: Trump nearly fired Jared and Ivanka via Friends and colleagues say this is her standard operating procedure. Why it matters: Destroying records that should be preserved is potentially illegal. 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. She wore an iteration of her usual uniform: black pants, black jacket, reddish-pink blouse, and an air of bone-crushing fatigue. . Do you think he knows what's real and what isn't? "But I also know he can't allow himself to ever quit." Greenfield introduced Haberman by saying that he couldn't remember a reporter having established a relationship with a president quite like hers with Trump. She'll wake up in the middle of the night and, instead of rolling over and going back to sleep, pick up her phone and start working. "Haven't you joined us already?" In interviews, she has often invoked the childrens book Harold and the Purple Crayon to illustrate Trumps peculiar blurring of fact and fantasy. She said that she had never approved of anything Trump had doneevaluating him is not her job. Trump is growing visibly with his speech and delivering some adlibs, she wrote on the site, echoing her observation, in Confidence Man, that in the eighties news outlets treated him as if he were born anew with every story. (At one point in our conversation, she told me that he regenerates.) As Trumps political missteps and legal woes pile up, Haberman appears to be relaxing her vigil. You don't even know where she isshe could be anywhere. He was constantly looking for a relationship with him in the past and kept it going out of office still, this admiration. "What do they thinkthat it's going in a secret newspaper?". Sean Piccoli,Jonah E. Bromwich,Ben Protess. "She's like Michael Corleone," Thrush says, "sucked into the family business." The audience was, as always, hanging on her every word, hungry to have her translate Trump into someone they could understand. Instead, Habermans Times articles adhered to the journalistic conventions that the press critic Jay Rosen has labelled the view from nowhere. Rife with ostentatious neutrality, the pieces were seen to grant Trump and his circle undue legitimacy. Greenfield said there are journalists who have been tight with presidents before; he cited Chalmers Roberts, a Washington Post reporter who'd been close to Kennedy and, later in life, admitted he'd compromised himself by giving Kennedy overly favorable coverage. ", 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. 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. Maggie Haberman Profile - How Maggie Haberman Covers Donald Trump - ELLE She's out with a new book. He is who he is and he's not going to change. ", 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. Todays press culture thrusts reporters onstage, parsing their judgments and perspectives as part of a ceaseless Twitter meta-drama about journalistic integrity. It was simply desperation for a job other than bartending that led her to newspapers. 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 . "I'm wearing a sweatshirt, and my hair is in a bun," she told the producer. You are considered the reporter who goes back longer with Donald Trump than anyone else and who understands him better than any other reporter. 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. 2023 Cond Nast. Maggie Haberman, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, has been covering Donald Trump since the 1990s.