Access the best of Getty Images with our simple subscription plan. The time Trump called the Times to blame the collapse of the Obamacare repeal on the Democrats? 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. [19] She has also been accused "from certain corners of the left as a supposed water carrier for the 45th president". "You're going to bring this up every time, aren't you?" Subscribe to Heres the Deal, our politics "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. 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. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy. 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. "She came into the Page One conference room, and there was this huge round of applause," Parker says. ", "I don't know if the scale was 1 out of 100 or 1 out of 10," Haberman tells me the day after that interview, "and, by the way, the goal is not to be thanked for coverage, to be clear. I can't think of anyone whose behavior in typical U.S. political fashion he admires right now. She previously worked as a political reporter for the New York Post, the New York Daily News, and Politico. To some, she upheld the tradition that Woodward and Bernstein built; others condemned her failure to criticize Trumps behavior more vocally. ", .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. Portions of the electorate learned to associate her with distressing updates about the country. And she clearly knows the family dynamic and knows him and all of these family stories very, very well, better than anyone. I think, sometimes, he does. 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. Mediagazer Must-read media news. "This is the book Trump fears most.". Access the best of Getty Images with our simple subscription plan.Millions of high-quality images, video, and music options are waiting for you. Confidence Man by Maggie Haberman: 9780593297346 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books. Haberman says she'd had no interest in journalism up to this point. It made me more able to take a punch. This worlda soap opera of excess and corruption playing non-stop through the New York of the ninetieswas Trumps, too. As a woman and a receptacle for liberals disappointed hopes about the capacities of journalism in the MAGA era, Haberman received a tremendous amount of vitriol, Drezner said. Stu Marques, then metro editor of the paper, hired Haberman and oversaw her early training. Maggie Haberman is a tireless, keen-eyed example. Part of what makes Haberman one of Trumps foremost contextualizers is her fluency in the worlds that formed him. The man with the orange hair is making a scene. It was simply desperation for a job other than bartending that led her to newspapers. 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? 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. Its the gesture of a writer who knows that her unsentimental view of the President anchors her credibility. Her. The Getty Images design is a trademark of Getty Images. "In the beginning, you're going to a lot of crime scenes. 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. 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). (The Police Athletic League, a cause beloved by the former Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, profited handsomely from his shamelessness, Haberman writes.) Since 2015, Habermans career has revolved around the most untrustworthy man in national politics. Maggie Haberman, Author, "Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America": It's a really good question, Judy. Subscribe to Here's the Deal, our politics newsletter. By Shane Goldmacher,Michael C. Bender and Maggie Haberman. And probably because her mother is a publicist, she doesn't view Trump's press flacks, or flacks in general, as the enemy. 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. She's e-mailed me from the NYPD tow pounda place she said she'd already visited twice that month. Like, floating in the sky.". ", [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. Born to a publicist and a newspaperman, she grew up in the kind of privileged Manhattan set that Trump spent his early days envying. 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. newsletter for analysis you wont find anywhereelse. She sees herself as a demystifier. And I spoke with her about it this afternoon. (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.' But I do think that he needs whatever he doesn't have, and whatever that might be in any given moment. I'm having a hard time remembering it." He mentioned Nixon unprompted in one of our interviews. 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. 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 I do think he figured out personnel, which is often what he's focused on. 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. 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. He learned showmanship from the former mayor Ed Koch, the Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, and the McCarthyite lawyer Roy Cohnwhose singular talent, the book notes, was for emotional terrorism. From the remnants of Brooklyns Democratic machine he extracted lessons about the power that might be gained from pitting ethnic groups against one another. How does he see the truth? I mean, how does he take in facts? But that's what he said. 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 countered that such soap operas have been happening for years. 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. 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. Haberman was not the only reporter to see the underlying logic in the daily bedlam emanating from Washington. Questions about her process elicited similarly guarded answers. She glanced at it, then apologized. A lot of people would let it go, but Haberman signals to the hostess. 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. [7] According to one commentator, Haberman "formed a potent journalistic tag team with Glenn Thrush". For Confidence Man, Haberman interviewed Trump three times. No one suggests her male colleagues are "wooing" Trump. In her work, Trumps actions dont appear special or mysterious; they emerge as a clear consequence of his background. 14-Day Free Returns. "You can change her mind," Madden says. 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.. I'm quoting now Mary Trump, his niece, who, among other things, said that she thinks he is he has what she calls narcissistic personality disorder. 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. 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. . Is she, in fact, friendly to Trumps people? He draws roads. 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. And, for all Habermans success in demystifying Trump, at times she seems to vest him with eerie power. She was also on her laptop. The Times hired her to cover the 2016 election five months before Donald Trump declared his first Presidential campaign. Its possible that all of the jurors votes recommended against indictment, but it isnt sounding like it. Trumps performative macho is scaring voters in both parties away from women candidates. The scene underscores a question that has shadowed Haberman for the past several years. 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. "Haven't you joined us already?" 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. And I think, sometimes, he seems less clear. He has called you, essentially, like his psychiatrist, whether you agree with that term or not. The audience was, as always, hanging on her every word, hungry to have her translate Trump into someone they could understand. In hindsight, Haberman was building a reservoir of knowledge and contacts that would make her probably the best-sourced reporter of the 2016 campaign. She was, however, one of the most relentless and consistent. She commutes to DC several times a week from her home in Brooklyn, where she lives with her husband and three young children. 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. Haberman graduated in 1996 from Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied creative writing and psychology. Like the president she covers, Haberman, 43, is a born-and-bred New Yorker and slightly ill at ease in Washington. That [Trump] is unconcerned by that, I think, is the big issue," she says. [29][21], Haberman married Dareh Ardashes Gregorian, a reporter for the New York Daily News, formerly of the New York Post, and son of Vartan Gregorian, in a November 2003 ceremony at the Tribeca Rooftop in Manhattan. 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". I know a lot of people have been waiting to see this. Maggie Lindsy Haberman (born October 30, 1973) is an American journalist, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and a political analyst for CNN. She'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. She leaves it hanging for a momentpanic flashes across his facebut then gives him a bump. 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." He was telling people he wasn't going to leave. One colleague says she didn't realize there was a limit to how many Gchats you could have going at one time until she saw Haberman hit the maximum. You don't even know where she isshe could be anywhere. Because she was literally talking to 16 people within our campaign at the same time.". During Rudy Giulianis second mayoral term, Haberman covered City Hall, a notoriously cutthroat beat. She is not a fan of SNL's impression of Kellyanne Conway as a psychopathic fame whore. Haberman sees herself as a demystifier. She tried to get work in magazines, but she ended up bartending at Cleopatra's Needle, a jazz club on the Upper West Side frequented by Columbia University students, before eventually landing a job at the Post as a "copy kid" (the new politically correct term at the paper). he yelps like a sixth grader sent our way on a dare, and dashes off. 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. This article appears in the July 2017 issue of ELLE. Adds Haberman, "Some Ed Koch. 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. Trump frequently complains about Haberman's coverage. It was a story about Mar-a-Lago." Because he is the same person he was during the campaign.". WeSmirch Celebrity news and gossip 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. Judy Woodruff: A number of news reporters have tried and are still trying to understand former President Donald Trump and his influence on our nation's politics today. Do you think, at his core, that he is racist? He's tall with an athletic build and a military-style cut to his orange hair. 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. "I'm wearing a sweatshirt, and my hair is in a bun," she told the producer. 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. he asks, uncertainly. 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. 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. 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. Her measured stance infuriates Trump's detractors, who harangue her on Twitter for "normalizing" the president. 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. Some of his aides laughed. 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.