That must have been a long time ago. Some of his aides laughed. "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. 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. "The Triborough and Empire State view of Trump is very different from the national view of Trump," she points out. 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. 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. 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. Questions about her process elicited similarly guarded answers. Haberman was born on October 30, 1973, in New York City, the daughter of Clyde Haberman, who became a longtime journalist for The New York Times, and Nancy Haberman (ne Spies), a media communications executive at Rubenstein Associates. Perhaps he glimpsed himself as if in a mirror. Most recently, just in the last few days, he put out a statement about Elaine Chao, the wife of Senator Mitch McConnell. I know a lot of people have been waiting to see this. 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 is a tireless, keen-eyed example. ", 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. Because she was literally talking to 16 people within our campaign at the same time.". She almost never turns her phone off. Like, Maggies friendly to us. He views the truth as something that's transactional. I mean, how does he take in facts? Yes, I can! Pictures of the incident show Haberman talking nonstop as an uncharacteristically silent Koch stares at her, slightly astonished. Lorenz's new classmates at the Post and a few of her old ones at the Times called her out-of-date self-empowerment-via-marketing-lingo "cringey" and basically labeled her a neo-journalism . I was shaped by understanding what sold in a tabloid, Haberman told me. By Sean Piccoli,Jonah E. Bromwich,Ben Protess and William K. Rashbaum. Millions of high-quality images, video, and music options are waiting for you. She catches herself. He said that to me in one of our interviews. 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. ", Trump has also sent her his famous press clippings with Sharpie notes on them, mostly with criticisms, but at least once with praise. Maggie Haberman / New York Times: DeSantis to Visit Early Primary States, Selling His Florida Record . "You're going to bring this up every time, aren't you?" You don't even know where she isshe could be anywhere. 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. These words were spoken in 2008 by an unlikely film critic named Donald Trump. I mean, does he just create a different factual universe? She glanced at it, then apologized. And probably because her mother is a publicist, she doesn't view Trump's press flacks, or flacks in general, as the enemy. Haberman graduated in 1996 from Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied creative writing and psychology. For Confidence Man, Haberman interviewed Trump three times. Amazingly detailed scenes here, including Jeffrey Clark, whose devices were recently seized by federal officials, holding court at an event in the spring Plus: each Wednesday, exclusively for subscribers, the best books of the week. He treats everyone like they're his psychiatrist, because he's working everything out in real time. She was thinking aloud about her scheduleshe doesn't keep an actual calendar, not on paper, not on her phone; it's all in her head. Further introspection on the subject of stifling her emotions did not seem to interest her, perhaps because she sees no alternative. This purple frame wouldn't be complete without the intricate temple detail, a distinct touch to help you stand out from the crowd. 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. And he makes that very clear. Stu Marques, then metro editor of the paper, hired Haberman and oversaw her early training. 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). People have a right to feel however they feel, she said, dismissing the subject. President Xi Jinping of China, he has been praising repeatedly since he left office. Haberman argued that she did not learn this until after Joe Biden took office. 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. 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. This book is her most sustained attempt to pin him down. Her expertise wasn't just Trumpit was the Trump psyche. Like, floating in the sky.". 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. This past November, by the end of the candidates meandering, hour-long campaign announcement, she had tweeted about the speech more than twenty times. 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. And that's going to mean certain situations are fraught. Donald Trump reading The New York Times at his Greenwich, Connecticut home in 1987. She said that she had never approved of anything Trump had doneevaluating him is not her job. Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. There was a lot of duking it out, she said. 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 says they were talking about infrastructure when, "out of nowhere," he raised the This Week laugh. Sister Sites: Techmeme Tech news essentials. By Damon Winter/The New York Times . He is who he is and he's not going to change. "She grew up in an environment where journalism that was as accurate as humanly possible was practically a religion," he says. A lot of Rudy Giuliani. These days, in her profession, the truth is a demanding god. And it's very hard to know now whether he really believes this or whether it is just something he is saying. 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. By Shane Goldmacher,Michael C. Bender and Maggie Haberman. When Haberman interviewed Trump in the Oval Office this April, he was making his usual complaint about how unfair her coverage is. 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. By the time Trump formally announced his candidacy in June 2015 and Haberman was assigned to his campaign, she'd been reporting on him for a decade. "When we as a culture can't agree on a simple, basic fact setthat is very scary. ", And this is the aspect of the job that Haberman tries to focus on in the midst of the storm of distractions his administration provides: holding him to the truth. (The Police Athletic League, a cause beloved by the former Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, profited handsomely from his shamelessness, Haberman writes.) Passantino, her lawyer at the time, was in a taxi with her on the way to a restaurant. " 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.). ", Her father, Clyde, says he likes to think that honest journalism is "hardwired" into her. Haberman, for her part, has been on the Trump beat for decades. Haberman and Thrush again, with their colleague Matthew Rosenberg. In a statement to The Wrap's Andi Ortiz, a Times spokesperson said, "Maggie Haberman took leave from The Times to write her book. And he is still surrounded by people who don't take him seriously, who he knows do not value him. Please check your inbox to confirm. From Eisenhower to Biden, questions of age have persisted. [8] She became a political analyst for CNN in 2014. 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.. 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. I reflexively tense up; she doesn't flinch. "In the beginning, you're going to a lot of crime scenes. As Twitter blew up as Trump compounded the backlash against Comey's dismissal with an incredible series of missteps, Haberman shot out an exasperated tweet of her own: "What is amazing is capacity of people who watched the campaign to be surprised by what they are seeing. After Trump rose to political prominence, Haberman became a player in the theatre of the Trump era: an avatar of journalisms promise, but also of its shortcomings. 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. ", 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. She finds the framing of her relationship with the president in romantic terms "facile." 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. Subscribe to Heres the Deal, our politics Habermans own confidence man, though overexposed, can seem similarly elusive. He is behaving in a racist way. Is there anyone in political life he truly admires? 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. 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. The man with the orange hair is making a scene. The books thesisTrumps gonna Trumpis pointedly unglamorous, in keeping with Habermans deflationary assessments of Trumps character. Haberman, for her part, has become a front-page fixture and a Fourth Estate folk hero. She leaves it hanging for a momentpanic flashes across his facebut then gives him a bump. During Rudy Giulianis second mayoral term, Haberman covered City Hall, a notoriously cutthroat beat. Haberman heard rumors of colleagues fielding calls from the magnate during which hed dangle gossip items. In late April, Haberman spoke on (yet another) panel, this one at the 92nd Street Y, with her colleague Alex Burns. [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. And, for all Habermans success in demystifying Trump, at times she seems to vest him with eerie power. Confidence Man by Maggie Haberman: 9780593297346 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books. [7] According to one commentator, Haberman "formed a potent journalistic tag team with Glenn Thrush". "So much of his approach is bending others to the way he sees things," she says. Haberman once said in an interview that she talked to 50 people a day. Parts of Confidence Man seem to wrestle with its authors role in amplifying Trumps lies. 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. At first Thrush didn't like her, mistaking her voraciousness for shtick. Premium Access. "Speak of the devil," she said into the phone. 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. 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. "If you're going to come at her," says a Democratic operative, "you've got to come correct. Last June, Haberman got the tip that Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski had been fired while she was sitting in the audience at her son's kindergarten graduation. For a moment, it seems he might be coming over to tell off the reporter. He admires autocrats in other countries. "This is a very precarious moment, in terms of what anyone can believe in. Habermans dark hair was blown out and she wore a forest-green blouse and pink lipstick. "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 . Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker. 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. 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. 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 . 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.