Cruelty, pettiness and real estate: in Confidence Man, Maggie Haberman Grow your brand authentically by sharing brand content with the internets creators. In late April, Haberman spoke on (yet another) panel, this one at the 92nd Street Y, with her colleague Alex Burns. 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. 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. He was shaped by how to attract those stories.. An essay by Toni Morrison: The Work You Do, the Person You Are.. [2] Haberman returned to the Post to cover the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign and other political races. ", 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. The former President once told her that he found air travel spooky.. Trump Might Not See Out 2024 Presidential Bid: Maggie Haberman "Haven't you joined us already?" She is a native New Yorker, a competitive advantage given her subject. [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. (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. he asks, uncertainly. There's a malevolence around how he does this a lot of the time, but he treats facts as if they are things that can be either discarded or invented or created or augmented, but facts are an ongoing, fluid thing with him. "She grew up in an environment where journalism that was as accurate as humanly possible was practically a religion," he says. People wanted her to provide a normative framing for what was going on, the professor and media commentator Daniel Drezner said. Ppl don't change." At first Thrush didn't like her, mistaking her voraciousness for shtick. 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. He's tweeted, at various points, that she's "third-rate," "sad," and "totally in the Hillary circle of bias," and he almost exclusively refers to the Times as "failing" and "fake news." Haberman described how delighted he was when the New York Post headlined a piece about him with a possibly erroneous quote from Marla Maples: Best Sex Ive Ever Had. She would repeat versions of these same answers and stories at her book event later that evening. This article appears in the July 2017 issue of ELLE.. 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. 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? he says, holding out his fist. Maggie Haberman on Twitter: ">>>>" / Twitter And, for all Habermans success in demystifying Trump, at times she seems to vest him with eerie power. Questions about her process elicited similarly guarded answers. She said that this notion is just not realistic: in a climate of partisan absolutism, distrust of the media, and the coarsening of norms, the context around the news itself has shifted. Maggie Haberman - Wikipedia Sister Sites: Techmeme Tech news essentials. "I do not think he is enjoying the job particularly, and that is based on reporting," she says. 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. You don't even know where she isshe could be anywhere. The phone buzzed again. I just wanted to make the point that we were engaged in some revisionist history. Maggie grew up on the Upper West Side, attending P.S. Habermans own sense of Trumps spooky potency continues to shape her coverage. Whereas most of the country knows Trump foremost as a reality-TV star from his time on The Apprentice, Haberman remembers that he was a New York institution before he became a national figure. I mean, what what how does he do this? 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. Donald Trump reading The New York Times at his Greenwich, Connecticut home in 1987. From Eisenhower to Biden, questions of age have persisted. "But I also know he can't allow himself to ever quit." 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 . Please check your inbox to confirm. But he and Haberman say it reminds them of New York politics; they see Trump's presidency more as a "national mayoraltyit's got that scale, it has that informality," Thrush says. he asks, pointing at the recorder between us. [19] She has also been accused "from certain corners of the left as a supposed water carrier for the 45th president". 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. Its the gesture of a writer who knows that her unsentimental view of the President anchors her credibility. she says she told him. As an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence, Haberman studied creative writing and child psychology. But she also acknowledges Trumps seductiveness, recognizing that he was mesmerizing to watch, his speech fast and cocky and self-assured, with the ability to be both funny and cutting, both charming and derisive, often in the same sentence. Trumps gestures, Haberman insisted, have a metaphysical hollowness. In those days, the future president was a fixture in Page Six, the Post's gossip column. She had a story that was about to go live on nytimes.com. 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. ", Her father, Clyde, says he likes to think that honest journalism is "hardwired" into her. Maggie Haberman during a screening of The Fourth Estate at TheTimesCenter on May 9, 2018, in New York City. We see many compliments in your future with Maggie, a rectangular frame with a metal construction and vibrant violet hue. She previously covered the Trump administration and continues to cover Donald Trump and politics in Washington. Tap into Getty Images' global scale, data-driven insights, and network of more than 340,000 creators to create content exclusively for your brand. Other commentators, reacting to Rupert Murdochs withdrawal of support and the strong Democratic showing in the midterms, were beginning to treat Trump like a political has-been. And she's got a BlackBerry and a flip phone going at the same time. 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. A revelation in Maggie Haberman's new book stirs debate about reporters Her measured stance infuriates Trump's detractors, who harangue her on Twitter for "normalizing" the president. For Confidence Man, Haberman interviewed Trump three times. A reader wondering whether to be surprised by such carelessness, such corruption, gets her answer: yes and no. [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. "On more than one occasion, somebody would fly out of their desk and [announce something] that the New York Times was about to post, or a story the Times was working on, or some random bit of gossip, and then somebody else would pop their head up and say, 'Oh, did Maggie just tell you that?' Maggie Haberman, thank you so much for joining us. As her book tour began, in October, Haberman and I met for an interview in Washington. Collect, curate and comment on your files. [8] She became a political analyst for CNN in 2014. 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. [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. She catches herself. [12], Haberman frequently broke news about the Trump campaign and administration. He's hitting on her. All rights reserved. 75 and the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, a private school in the Bronx. Haberman, one of the main conduits of Oval Office drama, came under particular fire for her handling of anonymous sources. "Maggie's whole career has been about grabbing people by the lapels," Burns says. When Haberman demurs, politely but without apology, he is momentarily stumped. The instant #1 New York Times bestseller. As she regards the man with the orange hair, it's like watching a predator decide whether or not to go in for the kill. 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). This past November, by the end of the candidates meandering, hour-long campaign announcement, she had tweeted about the speech more than twenty times. Most recently, just in the last few days, he put out a statement about Elaine Chao, the wife of Senator Mitch McConnell. In the midst of his second divorce, from Marla Maples, Trump was a maestro of controlling his tabloid image, calling in tidbits about himself. To revisit this article, select My Account, thenView saved stories, To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories, Among the revelations in the recently released materials from the January 6th committee was an account of a conversation that took place in May, 2022, between the former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson and the former White House ethics attorney Stefan Passantino. She previously worked as a political reporter for the New York Post, the New York Daily News, and Politico. She's called me as she was drivingswearing and running latebetween an errand at the American Girl doll store and a dinner party. But my question to you is, what do you think he cares about the most or whom? "And it's not just any mayoralty; it's a late-'80s, early '90s New York mayoralty." Maggie Haberman's new book 'Confidence Man' details Trump's rise to She doesn't see any climactic resolution to the Trump saga coming anytime soon. Can you believe what he just did?' During Rudy Giulianis second mayoral term, Haberman covered City Hall, a notoriously cutthroat beat. 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.. Well, we know that he I mean, and you have written this. (The first time she quoted Trump in a piece was in 2006: "Real-estate mogul Donald Trump talked up Clinton as the next president in Florida on Friday night, reportedly saying at a state GOP fund-raiser, 'She's a brilliant woman and she's going to be a very, very formidable candidate. Absolutely I think she can win, especially if the war's still going on.' At the annual conference this week, conservative celebrities like Mike Lindell and Kari Lake will attend, as will Donald Trump, but many possible 2024 rivals are skipping it. 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 like Michael Corleone," Thrush says, "sucked into the family business." Haberman and Thrush again, with their colleague Matthew Rosenberg. 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 came into the Page One conference room, and there was this huge round of applause," Parker says. Would she tell the man to "stop screaming"? By Jim Rutenberg, Jo Becker, Eric Lipton, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Martin, Matthew Rosenberg and Michael S. Schmidt Published Jan. 31, 2021 Updated June 14, 2022 In her work, Trumps actions dont appear special or mysterious; they emerge as a clear consequence of his background. 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. How Should an Older President Think About a Second Term? 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. 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? [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? Her tweets frequently numbered more than a hundred and forty in twenty-four hours. 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. "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. 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 Haberman / New York Times: DeSantis to Visit Early Primary States, Selling His Florida Record . Access the best of Getty Images with our simple subscription plan. 'It's My Curse and My Salvation': Trump's Most Famous Chronicler Opens 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. 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. ", 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. ", .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. 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. 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. 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. I would argue he is now occupying the most expensive and valuable real estate in the country. [10], Her reporting style as a member of the White House staff of the Times features in the Liz Garbus documentary series The Fourth Estate. 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. 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. And, again, I could name many others. he yelps like a sixth grader sent our way on a dare, and dashes off. Maggie Haberman - The New York Times She has worked for the trifecta of local dailies The Post, The Daily News and, most. He confesses that he is drawn to her, like a moth to a flame. I mentioned her well-documented fear of flying. I think that theres a misunderstanding among certain aspects of our readership about what it is we do, she said. The shift by Mr. Lowell, one of Washingtons best-known scandal lawyers, highlights the blurry lines between self-promotion, access to power and the right to legal representation. The publication of Confidence Man reignited controversies over Habermans ethics. 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. She was on her phone. 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. Haberman heard rumors of colleagues fielding calls from the magnate during which hed dangle gossip items. There is also the question of what prolonged exposure to Trumpa man who profanes and corrupts everything he toucheshas done to Haberman herself. It was like watching someone juggle fire while standing on a tightrope. So, what exactly is in his heart, I think, becomes irrelevant. Is a Woman Ever Going to Win the White House? He's called him a weakling. 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 . Ad Choices. Some of his aides laughed. "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? 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. 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." Adds Haberman, "Some Ed Koch. "This is a president who is always selling. All Rights Reserved. "There's an enormous personal price that she pays, that people pay when they devote so much of themselves to this," Thrush says. The time Trump called the Times to blame the collapse of the Obamacare repeal on the Democrats? Haberman, a White House correspondent for . The audience was, as always, hanging on her every word, hungry to have her translate Trump into someone they could understand. But I do think that he needs whatever he doesn't have, and whatever that might be in any given moment. "This place is so loud I want to put a bullet in my brain," she had said, matter-of-factly, when we first sat down for a late dinner, observing that so much hard-partying energy on a weeknight seemed more NYC than DC. 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. Hicks echoed Conway, e-mailing me a few days later that Haberman was "a true professional. The former President is not what he seems, she said, but hes not nothing. Trumps performative macho is scaring voters in both parties away from women candidates. ", "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. 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. The man with the orange hair is making a scene. The New York Times reporter may be the greatest political reporter working today. Maggie parries, her face inscrutable. I was shaped by understanding what sold in a tabloid, Haberman told me. [2] They have three children and live in Brooklyn. Haberman did not let it slide. Mediagazer Must-read media news. 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. Do you think, at his core, that he is racist? Hutchinson had just finished her third deposition with the committee. ", When I tell Haberman what her colleagues say about her, she shrugs, like she's being complimented for breathing. 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. "Can I join you guys? . penguinrandomhouse.com. What is he at his core, what does he care about? And I think that the people who he would put into key jobs would be very alarming to a number of people across Washington. He is very aware that, if you repeat something over and over again, it can turn it into something real.