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,. 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 . 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. Todays press culture thrusts reporters onstage, parsing their judgments and perspectives as part of a ceaseless Twitter meta-drama about journalistic integrity. Haberman and Thrush again, with their colleague Matthew Rosenberg. Mostly, copy kids at the Post did errands and administrative work, but once a week they would be named "Josephine reporter" or "Joe reporter" of the day and sent out to learn the ropes. That must have been a long time ago. [9], Haberman was hired by The New York Times in early 2015 as a political correspondent for the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. 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? [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. "I'm wearing a sweatshirt, and my hair is in a bun," she told the producer. . Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. Designed with adjustable nose pads for a custom fit. Both she and her subject navigate the public sphere as if they have something to prove. And then, by the second week, something had just switched, and he was insisting that he had won. Showing Editorial results for maggie haberman. 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. I mentioned her well-documented fear of flying. 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." 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. But, if he does, what do you think a second Donald Trump presidency term would look like? 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. We discussed Trumps romance with the media. [2] They have three children and live in Brooklyn. [28], Journalists and authors criticized Haberman for allegedly choosing to withhold information about Donald Trump for the sake of her book, despite being aware of it ahead of the January 6 United States Capitol attack, although they presented no evidence of when she had learned of Trump's statements. 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. 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. She finds the framing of her relationship with the president in romantic terms "facile." 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. And probably because her mother is a publicist, she doesn't view Trump's press flacks, or flacks in general, as the enemy. 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 who he is and he's not going to change. Your Privacy Choices: Opt Out of Sale/Targeted Ads. In hindsight, Haberman was building a reservoir of knowledge and contacts that would make her probably the best-sourced reporter of the 2016 campaign. (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.' In the course of reporting the book, she shared considerable . "There has been a very protracted shocked stage in Washington, and I think people have to move past that. In late April, Haberman spoke on (yet another) panel, this one at the 92nd Street Y, with her colleague Alex Burns. 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. He mentioned Nixon unprompted in one of our interviews. "She is literally always doing four things," says her friend and former New York Post colleague Annie Karni. 24/7 Customer . She glanced at it, then apologized. There is also the question of what prolonged exposure to Trumpa man who profanes and corrupts everything he toucheshas done to Haberman herself. ", 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. When I asked her about these conceptual scoops, she corrected me: Theyre contextual scoops. Context is key to Habermans project. "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. I mean, does he just create a different factual universe? He's brought up the moment repeatedly over the past two years, including during Haberman's recent Oval Office interview with him. The scene underscores a question that has shadowed Haberman for the past several years. Is it the claustrophobia that bothers her? The Times hired her to cover the 2016 election five months before Donald Trump declared his first Presidential campaign. 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. And Haberman, like Trump, knows how to spin: Confidence Man makes a show of refusing Trumps enticements. Her son didn't have school after the ceremony, so Haberman brought him with her to a politics meeting at the Times. He "kind of chuckled" and replied, "It's like therapy. ", 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. 2023 Getty Images. "You can offer perspective, you can offer insight, you can offer details, but they've got to be locked down. "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. "I'm not sure the objective facts will let him do that this time. She almost never turns her phone off. "No, that's not all I care about. You are considered the reporter who goes back longer with Donald Trump than anyone else and who understands him better than any other reporter. By Damon Winter/The New York Times . She previously worked as a political reporter for the New York Post, the New York Daily News, and Politico. 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 the dominant Trump reporter on the campaign, and she didn't travel with him. There are briefing-room tantrums, incredulous generals, and off-color mutterings. Slate called her Trump's "snake charmer"; New Yorker editor in chief David Remnick recently likened Trump to her "ardent, twisted suitor." A reader wondering whether to be surprised by such carelessness, such corruption, gets her answer: yes and no. penguinrandomhouse.com. 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. ", [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. "You're going to bring this up every time, aren't you?" People have a right to feel however they feel, she said, dismissing the subject. "This is a president who is always selling. In her work, Trumps actions dont appear special or mysterious; they emerge as a clear consequence of his background. I think that theres a misunderstanding among certain aspects of our readership about what it is we do, she said. Is she, in fact, friendly to Trumps people? "What do they thinkthat it's going in a secret newspaper?". And Haberman stresses the racism that has permeated Trumps image since he and his father were sued for housing discrimination in the seventies. Search instead in. Haberman's father, Clyde, is a Pulitzer Prizewinning New York Times reporter, and her mother, Nancy, is a publicity powerhouse at Rubensteina communications firm founded by Howard Rubenstein, whose famous spinning prowess Trump availed himself of during various of his divorce and business contretemps. These days, in her profession, the truth is a demanding god. But my question to you is, what do you think he cares about the most or whom? I don't believe that he learned how to be president more astutely. The quick-hit rhythm that Trump and Haberman were both fine-tuning teed them up perfectly for today's Twitter-paced news environment. 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. [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. "There's an enormous personal price that she pays, that people pay when they devote so much of themselves to this," Thrush says. Haberman, a White House correspondent for . 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. She goes on to talk about a fragile ego that has to be constantly fed and so on. . 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. It was a story about Mar-a-Lago." "If you're going to come at her," says a Democratic operative, "you've got to come correct. A lot of Rudy Giuliani. And it's very hard to know now whether he really believes this or whether it is just something he is saying. During the Trump era, Haberman became an avatar of journalisms promise as well as of its failures. He gives off a hint of reality TVwith his mirages, his come-ons, his brazenness, his feintsand a dash of the Devil. "When we as a culture can't agree on a simple, basic fact setthat is very scary. Haberman once said in an interview that she talked to 50 people a day. 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. People wanted her to provide a normative framing for what was going on, the professor and media commentator Daniel Drezner said. Is this something he believes to be true, or what? Part of what makes Haberman one of Trumps foremost contextualizers is her fluency in the worlds that formed him. I suggested that, once, reporters could vanish behind their facts. 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? WeSmirch Celebrity news and gossip Not true, says Risa Heller, a spokesperson for Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner: "She speaks to 100 people a day." You're going to see if people were killed," Marques says. He said that to me in one of our interviews. She turned the phone over. Toward the end of our meeting, Haberman told me that she is superstitious. The former presidents lawyers cited executive privilege, a tactic they have used with other ex-Trump aides. Well, we know that he I mean, and you have written this. 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. . The former President is not what he seems, she said, but hes not nothing. The phone buzzed again. 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. He admires autocrats in other countries. Her expertise wasn't just Trumpit was the Trump psyche. 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). "Part of it was for her son graduating kindergarten, and part of it was for Maggie for breaking this awesome scoop. Maggie Haberman's forthcoming book about former President Trump will report that White House residence staff periodically found wads of paper clogging a toilet and believed the former president, a notorious destroyer of Oval Office documents, was the flusher. As we were talking, her phone buzzed. In a statement to The Wrap's Andi Ortiz, a Times spokesperson said, "Maggie Haberman took leave from The Times to write her book. 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. Parts of Confidence Man seem to wrestle with its authors role in amplifying Trumps lies. In those days, the future president was a fixture in Page Six, the Post's gossip column. ", Haberman is growing weary of the DC establishment's seeming inability to metabolize the president's personality. "She's like Michael Corleone," Thrush says, "sucked into the family business." 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 . 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 . Maggie Haberman is a tireless, keen-eyed example. And thank you for having me to talk about the book. 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. [8] She became a political analyst for CNN in 2014. 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. 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. Thank you. 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. I do not want you to come away with that impression. The former President once told her that he found air travel spooky.. Haberman, one of the main conduits of Oval Office drama, came under particular fire for her handling of anonymous sources. "I used to really cringe at the way my colleagues would talk to spokespeople," she said. Its possible that all of the jurors votes recommended against indictment, but it isnt sounding like it. "[22] The book debuted at number one on The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list for the week ending October 8, 2022. A new era of strength competitions is testing the limits of the human body. " She's like my psychiatrist . Hutchinson asked her counsel not to take the call. It was like watching someone juggle fire while standing on a tightrope. Haberman, for her part, has become a front-page fixture and a Fourth Estate folk hero. Habermans assessment was grimmer. Tap into Getty Images' global scale, data-driven insights, and network of more than 340,000 creators to create content exclusively for your brand. "Can I come back?" Haberman did not let it slide. 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. How do you explain it? By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. "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? ", Haberman has reached the point in her career where sources are now chasing her, instead of the other way aroundlying to her risks banishment and access to her news-promulgating prowess. She commutes to DC several times a week from her home in Brooklyn, where she lives with her husband and three young children. 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. It would look like him. 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. " 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.). Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker. The debate is set for August, in the same city that will host the partys 2024 convention. Grow your brand authentically by sharing brand content with the internets creators. Photograph by Jeanette Spicer for The New Yorker, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America. Because Haberman has known Trump for so long she has been derided as a schill. I think his niece is right.