A reader wondering whether to be surprised by such carelessness, such corruption, gets her answer: yes and no. 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. Most recently, just in the last few days, he put out a statement about Elaine Chao, the wife of Senator Mitch McConnell. The New York Times reporter may be the greatest political reporter working today. All rights reserved. Or is she simply good at her joba job that requires her, at times, to win the trust of the untrustworthy? During the Trump Presidency, Habermans output and name recognition placed her at the center of debates over how journalists should cover his Administration. I know a lot of people have been waiting to see this. [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. "The Triborough and Empire State view of Trump is very different from the national view of Trump," she points out. he says, holding out his fist. I would argue he is now occupying the most expensive and valuable real estate in the country. [4], Haberman's career began in 1996 when she was hired by the New York Post. Haberman heard rumors of colleagues fielding calls from the magnate during which hed dangle gossip items. "When we as a culture can't agree on a simple, basic fact setthat is very scary. We encounter all the usual suspects: Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway and Paul Manafort and Hope Hicks. 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. [12], Haberman frequently broke news about the Trump campaign and administration. 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. His behavior is really what matters on this front. [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 goes on to talk about a fragile ego that has to be constantly fed and so on. Your Privacy Choices: Opt Out of Sale/Targeted Ads. Maggie Haberman, a White House correspondent for the New York Times, stops midsentence to . Cruelty, pettiness and real estate: in Confidence Man, Maggie Haberman And, for all Habermans success in demystifying Trump, at times she seems to vest him with eerie power. 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. 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. "I do not think he is enjoying the job particularly, and that is based on reporting," she says. "Okay, wellfist bump?" 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. "The news was something my dad did." She glanced at it, then apologized. He's called him a weakling. But, no, I think that, of political of U.S. political leaders who are alive right now, I'm very hard-pressed to point to a single person who he really admires, unless they're fighting for him. "I didn't care for that metaphor," Haberman says. He admires autocrats in other countries. 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 . 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. 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. One attendee chastised another for looking at her phone, saying that its light was distracting, as though we were all at a cliffhanger movie. 24/7 Customer . "I'm wearing a sweatshirt, and my hair is in a bun," she told the producer. ", "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. [2] At that firm, a "publicity powerhouse" whose eponymous founder has been called "the dean of damage control" by Rudy Giuliani, Haberman's mother worked for a client list of influential New Yorkers including Donald Trump. When Haberman demurs, politely but without apology, he is momentarily stumped. 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'm having a hard time remembering it." 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. Pictures of the incident show Haberman talking nonstop as an uncharacteristically silent Koch stares at her, slightly astonished. Tweets with replies by Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) / Twitter Perhaps he glimpsed himself as if in a mirror. The Getty Images design is a trademark of Getty Images. "Haven't you joined us already?" 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. [2] They have three children and live in Brooklyn. And that's going to mean certain situations are fraught. 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. ", 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. 2023 Cond Nast. But my question to you is, what do you think he cares about the most or whom? Hutchinson asked her counsel not to take the call. She's out with a new book. ", .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. She was the dominant Trump reporter on the campaign, and she didn't travel with him. 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. And she clearly knows the family dynamic and knows him and all of these family stories very, very well, better than anyone. Haberman graduated in 1996 from Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied creative writing and psychology. Yes, I can! We see many compliments in your future with Maggie, a rectangular frame with a metal construction and vibrant violet hue. 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. 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. [13] In March 2016 Haberman, along with New York Times reporter David E. Sanger, questioned Trump in an interview, "Donald Trump Expounds on His Foreign Policy Views," during which he "agreed with a suggestion that his ideas might be summed up as 'America First'". She suggested a colleague to go on TV in her stead. Can you believe what he just did?' She's e-mailed me from the NYPD tow pounda place she said she'd already visited twice that month. Haberman joined Judy Woodruff to discuss the book. And then, by the second week, something had just switched, and he was insisting that he had won. Her measured stance infuriates Trump's detractors, who harangue her on Twitter for "normalizing" the president. Maggie Haberman's new book 'Confidence Man' details Trump's rise to COVID-19 at Three: Who Got the Pandemic Right? Some of his aides laughed. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy. She previously worked as a political reporter for the New York Post, the New York Daily News, and Politico. He is elated. I was shaped by understanding what sold in a tabloid, Haberman told me. "Maggie doesn't camouflage. I dont want this out there, she remembers saying. "If you're going to come at her," says a Democratic operative, "you've got to come correct. But effective salesmanship must be based in credibilityan area in which his administration has suffered significant set-backs in recent days. I mean, what what how does he do this? 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. She says they were talking about infrastructure when, "out of nowhere," he raised the This Week laugh. There is also the question of what prolonged exposure to Trumpa man who profanes and corrupts everything he toucheshas done to Haberman herself. "Speak of the devil," she said into the phone. She leaves it hanging for a momentpanic flashes across his facebut then gives him a bump. Ppl don't change." Highlights from the week in culture, every Saturday. [7] In 2010, Haberman was hired by Politico as a senior reporter. 'Confidence Man,' Maggie Haberman's Book on Trump: Review - The New In late April, Haberman spoke on (yet another) panel, this one at the 92nd Street Y, with her colleague Alex Burns. [1] In 2022, she published the best-selling book Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America. She echoed the same thought to me in email dispatches as she and her colleagues furiously traded scoops with the Washington Post last week. "It's like she's in the building, but she's not even in the city. Please check your inbox to confirm. 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. But he is one of the things he said to me in one of our interviews was the he uses repetition in interviews to beat something into and I quote "my beautiful brain.". By Sean Piccoli,Jonah E. Bromwich,Ben Protess and William K. Rashbaum. 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. 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. By Kenneth P. Vogel,Maggie Haberman and Michael S. Schmidt. 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. " She's like my psychiatrist . 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). 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. 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? "This is a president who is always selling. Maggie Haberman on Twitter: ">>>>" / Twitter Maggie Haberman, the Confidence Man's Chronicler | The New Yorker Her. Toward the end of our meeting, Haberman told me that she is superstitious. She almost never turns her phone off. Like the president she covers, Haberman, 43, is a born-and-bred New Yorker and slightly ill at ease in Washington. 77 Days: Trump's Campaign to Subvert the Election Over the years, she has honed a stable interpretation of Trump, evoking not a strongman but a showman, an egomaniac with shrewd instincts and bad opinions. 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. The scene underscores a question that has shadowed Haberman for the past several years. CNN, for whom she is a political analyst, called. "That's all I care about." 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. Another evil eye was in her pocket. Glass ceiling: Tishby, an Israeli native who now calls Los Angeles home, joined the podcast to discuss her new book . And I'm like, This is total bullshit, this is not a real person, nobody is this way," Thrush recalls. She previously worked as a political reporter for the New York Post, the New York Daily News, and Politico. [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? 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. Passantino, her lawyer at the time, was in a taxi with her on the way to a restaurant. What he needs his attention. 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. Photograph by Jeanette Spicer for The New Yorker, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America. I think that theres a misunderstanding among certain aspects of our readership about what it is we do, she said. he asks, pointing at the recorder between us. He mentioned Nixon unprompted in one of our interviews. births and plastic surgeries), and the funerals of firefighters and civic luminaries. 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. [7] According to one commentator, Haberman "formed a potent journalistic tag team with Glenn Thrush". 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. 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. Friends and colleagues say this is her standard operating procedure. We discussed Trumps romance with the media. In the weeks before John Wayne Gacys scheduled execution, he was far from reconciled to his fate. 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. (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.' She's so well-sourced and so well-connected that she doesn't need to," Karni says. ", Haberman is growing weary of the DC establishment's seeming inability to metabolize the president's personality. 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. And I think that the people who he would put into key jobs would be very alarming to a number of people across Washington. Meanwhile, Trump, still revelling in his defeat of Hillary Clinton, cast her as another antagonist, the embodiment of the Failing New York Times. She and the President invited doppelgnger comparisons: the flashy fabulist and the buttoned-down institutionalist locked in each others sights. 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. "But I also know he can't allow himself to ever quit." He "kind of chuckled" and replied, "It's like therapy. 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. I just want to go back to the psychiatrist line. Maggie grew up on the Upper West Side, attending P.S. 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. But I do think he figured out personnel, which is often what he's focused on. Haberman and Thrush again, with their colleague Matthew Rosenberg. "You can change her mind," Madden says. It was a story about Mar-a-Lago." The debate is set for August, in the same city that will host the partys 2024 convention. She covered his real estate business when she was a New York tabloid reporter before moving to Politico and later The Times. [19], In 2022, Haberman published a book on the Trump presidency called Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America. Even those of us who had covered Trump for years struggled with how to handle the gush of falsehoods that dotted his sentences. But, in person, Haberman appeared nonplussed when I asked how she negotiates the gray areas in which her duty to break news aligns uncomfortably with Trumps interests. 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. I also think he's extremely suggestible and I think he's extremely paranoid. He treats everyone like they're his psychiatrist, because he's working everything out in real time. 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. Haberman was not the only reporter to see the underlying logic in the daily bedlam emanating from Washington. Search instead in. She was also on her laptop. Parts of Confidence Man seem to wrestle with its authors role in amplifying Trumps lies. Is it the claustrophobia that bothers her? She doesn't see any climactic resolution to the Trump saga coming anytime soon. She was wearing an evil-eye bracelet. He gives off a hint of reality TVwith his mirages, his come-ons, his brazenness, his feintsand a dash of the Devil. 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. How Should an Older President Think About a Second Term? [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. Maggie Haberman, thank you, the reporter who has known Donald Trump longer than any other. He was constantly looking for a relationship with him in the past and kept it going out of office still, this admiration. Maggie Haberman - The New York Times The subjects may have primed her for the task of deciphering Trump; her classmates, she said, talked a lot about magical thinking. Her first job in journalism was at the Post, which sent her to crime scenes, trials, hospitals (to document V.I.P. Since 2015, Habermans career has revolved around the most untrustworthy man in national politics. I think his niece is right. What Did We Learn About the Georgia Grand Jurys Findings? Haberman has what can only be described as a wildly expressive poker face: her slender, Clara Bow-ish eyebrows lifting, her tired eyes widening behind her smudged glasses, a tiny pinpoint of a mole on her upper lip emphasizing the thin line she's pressed her mouth into, the dimple in her chin appearing and disappearing as her jaw muscles shift. Is she, in fact, friendly to Trumps people? When Their Book Deal Blew Up After Sexual Misconduct Allegations, Glenn [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. 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. "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. "I'm not sure the objective facts will let him do that this time. And probably because her mother is a publicist, she doesn't view Trump's press flacks, or flacks in general, as the enemy. She has worked for the trifecta of local dailies The Post, The Daily News and, most. [11], According to an analysis by British digital strategist Rob Blackie, Haberman was one of the most commonly followed political writers among Biden administration staff on Twitter. Haberman says she'd had no interest in journalism up to this point. The former presidents lawyers cited executive privilege, a tactic they have used with other ex-Trump aides. James Carville wanted her to come to Louisiana to talk to a class, but her kids were about to go on school vacation. "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. . 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." After Trump rose to political prominence,. Collect, curate and comment on your files. Daily Kickoff: Maggie Haberman, Noa Tishby join JI's podcast + The new 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? But no matter what Haberman writes about Trump, he has never frozen her out. I just wanted to make the point that we were engaged in some revisionist history. 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. A lot of people would let it go, but Haberman signals to the hostess. 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. During the Trump era, Haberman became an avatar of journalisms promise as well as of its failures. A revelation in Maggie Haberman's new book stirs debate about reporters This would be a profound shift in the shape of the federal government. "She came into the Page One conference room, and there was this huge round of applause," Parker says. Trump Might Not See Out 2024 Presidential Bid: Maggie Haberman "This is a symbiotic relationship," says an administration official. 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. Haberman pressed her point: "It was two months ago. The man with the orange hair is making a scene. 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 is famously formidable. "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? The time Trump called the Times to blame the collapse of the Obamacare repeal on the Democrats? Her expertise wasn't just Trumpit was the Trump psyche. 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 . And laugh at him. The phone buzzed again. And I spoke with her about it this afternoon.