"You're pretty!" 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). All rights reserved. The man with the orange hair is making a scene. [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. He "kind of chuckled" and replied, "It's like therapy. [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 previously covered the Trump administration and continues to cover Donald Trump and politics in Washington. We encounter all the usual suspects: Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway and Paul Manafort and Hope Hicks. 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.. He is elated. That [Trump] is unconcerned by that, I think, is the big issue," she says. 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. Why it matters: Destroying records that should be preserved is potentially illegal. I don't believe that he learned how to be president more astutely. 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. "This is a very precarious moment, in terms of what anyone can believe in. Confidence Man, which synthesizes years of reporting on Trump and his milieu, is, in some ways, a standard-issue Trump book. As her book tour began, in October, Haberman and I met for an interview in Washington. "The Triborough and Empire State view of Trump is very different from the national view of Trump," she points out. To some, she upheld the tradition that Woodward and Bernstein built; others condemned her failure to criticize Trumps behavior more vocally. His behavior is really what matters on this front. It's obviously not benign. But effective salesmanship must be based in credibilityan area in which his administration has suffered significant set-backs in recent days. On this week's episode of Jewish Insider 's "Limited Liability Podcast, " hosts Jarrod Bernstein and Rich Goldberg are joined by both actress, producer and author Noa Tishby and New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman. "Okay, wellfist bump?" "She's got it with her at all times," says her husband, Dareh Gregorian. Habermans own confidence man, though overexposed, can seem similarly elusive. Would she tell the man to "stop screaming"? Her coverage is often grounded in statements about Trumps characterthat he thrives on chaos but loves routine, or that he stirs up infighting among his cronies. " She's like my psychiatrist . Haberman has spent a good part of the past seven years immersed in Trumps deranged fantasia of American life. She stared. 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. COVID-19 at Three: Who Got the Pandemic Right? This book is her most sustained attempt to pin him down. Parts of Confidence Man seem to wrestle with its authors role in amplifying Trumps lies. 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 suggested that, once, reporters could vanish behind their facts. Donald Trump reading The New York Times at his Greenwich, Connecticut home in 1987. Haberman argued that she did not learn this until after Joe Biden took office. Her expertise wasn't just Trumpit was the Trump psyche. She says they were talking about infrastructure when, "out of nowhere," he raised the This Week laugh. 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. She was, however, one of the most relentless and consistent. 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. [1] In 2022, she published the best-selling book Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America. (But, she says, Melissa McCarthy's Sean Spicer portrayal more accurately captures him.) Like, Maggies friendly to us. Its the gesture of a writer who knows that her unsentimental view of the President anchors her credibility. ", 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 was on her phone. 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. The instant #1 New York Times bestseller. Haberman joined Judy Woodruff to discuss the book. 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. 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. This article appears in the July 2017 issue of ELLE. The book is frank about Trumps cruelty. 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. For his first term, Haberman has said, he wanted to campaign more than he wanted to be elected; now he wants to be elected without all the travails of campaigning. And he is still surrounded by people who don't take him seriously, who he knows do not value him. How an unemployed blogger confirmed that Syria had used chemical weapons. During the Trump Presidency, Habermans output and name recognition placed her at the center of debates over how journalists should cover his Administration. Haberman was learning the same arthow to "punch through" in a daily news cycle, as New York Times political reporter and frequent collaborator Alexander Burns puts it. Haberman was not the only reporter to see the underlying logic in the daily bedlam emanating from Washington. He is very aware that, if you repeat something over and over again, it can turn it into something real. Part of what makes Haberman one of Trumps foremost contextualizers is her fluency in the worlds that formed him. [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. ", 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. "And yet Trump seems driven to connect with her.". She said that she had never approved of anything Trump had doneevaluating him is not her job. 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 also think he's extremely suggestible and I think he's extremely paranoid. Haberman sees herself as a demystifier. 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. 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. I care about telling a thorough story. The audience was, as always, hanging on her every word, hungry to have her translate Trump into someone they could understand. Yes, Haberman does a decent job laying out the business life of DJT, as seen thru her decidedly inhospitable glasses. 2023 Getty Images. Haberman, one of the main conduits of Oval Office drama, came under particular fire for her handling of anonymous sources. Well, we know that he I mean, and you have written this. By Kenneth P. Vogel,Maggie Haberman and Michael S. Schmidt. Haberman did not let it slide. As the 2024 race gears up, the Confidence Man and his chronicler have become each others context, bound together and propelled by desires that both are and arent their own. [9], Haberman was hired by The New York Times in early 2015 as a political correspondent for the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. And, again, I could name many others. 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's e-mailed me from the NYPD tow pounda place she said she'd already visited twice that month. Maggie grew up on the Upper West Side, attending P.S. I just have totems, she said, hoarsely, because her press tour had already begun and she was losing her voice. And she clearly knows the family dynamic and knows him and all of these family stories very, very well, better than anyone. He said that to me in one of our interviews. I mean, does he just create a different factual universe? Washington, D.C.,s power players, a wider swath of whom than wishes to admit it has Habermans number saved, grew habituated to her presence, if not exactly thrilled by it. She believes in the power of breaking incremental newsnot holding every-thing back for a long read. "[18], She has been credited with becoming "the highest-profile reporter" to cover Trump's campaign and presidency, as well as "the most-cited journalist in the Mueller report". Donald Trump will be basking in affection from activists at CPAC on Saturday. 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. he asks, pointing at the recorder between us. I think that's what a second President Trump presidency would look like. 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." ", [youtube ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPME4VCNmyc&t=79s[/youtube]. ", 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. Haberman graduated in 1996 from Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied creative writing and psychology. newsletter for analysis you wont find anywhereelse. 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. I mentioned her well-documented fear of flying. 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. Haberman and Thrush again, with their colleague Matthew Rosenberg. "We were pretty demanding in terms of getting quotes, good-quality ones"which, in tabloid terms, means they have to be memorable and true"and getting them fast." I think that theres a misunderstanding among certain aspects of our readership about what it is we do, she said. Maggie Haberman, Author, "Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America": It's a really good question, Judy. [19] She has also been accused "from certain corners of the left as a supposed water carrier for the 45th president". My job, she said, is to provide as much information on a topic as possible that is significant and relevant and related to events. What a President does, she noted, will always get coverage. He admires autocrats in other countries. 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. 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. She almost never turns her phone off. The Getty Images design is a trademark of Getty Images. She echoed the same thought to me in email dispatches as she and her colleagues furiously traded scoops with the Washington Post last week. "When we as a culture can't agree on a simple, basic fact setthat is very scary. Trump responded, jokingly, "Really? He was shaped by how to attract those stories.. Greenfield introduced Haberman by saying that he couldn't remember a reporter having established a relationship with a president quite like hers with Trump. She goes on to talk about a fragile ego that has to be constantly fed and so on. ", While speaking on a New York Times Women in the World panel at Lincoln Center in April to a very Trump-unfriendly crowd (Nikki Haley, Trump's ambassador to the United Nations, was booed during her interview with Greta Van Susteren before Haberman came onstage), she kept repeating basic facts about Trumpthat he has been on both sides of most issues, that he's influenced by the last person he spoke toand getting huge laughs from the audience. 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. . The scene underscores a question that has shadowed Haberman for the past several years. 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). And I spoke with her about it this afternoon. Every item on this page was chosen by an ELLE editor. Hope you'll take a moment to order CONFIDENCE MAN here. 1996 - 2023 NewsHour Productions LLC. When Trump gave an undisciplined press conference a few weeks into his presidency, the DC press and pols were comparing it to late-stage Nixon, Thrush says. "I'm just trying not to get beat," she says. "If you're going to come at her," says a Democratic operative, "you've got to come correct. 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. A few minutes later, here he comes. Read Maggie Haberman", "New York Times Staffing Up For 2016 Election With Maggie Haberman Hire", "How Tabloids Helped NY Times' Maggie Haberman Ace Trump White House", "Maggie Haberman leaves huge hole at Politico, moves to New York Times", "Politico's Senior Political Reporter Maggie Haberman Joins New York Times", "The leakiest White House I've ever covered", "Maggie Haberman Hits Back In Twitter Spat With 'Trump Adviser' Sean Hannity", "Biden 'is planning to run again' in 2024", "The Trump Presidency Is Ending. 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. ", 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. Well be fine.. 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. Collect, curate and comment on your files. Her son didn't have school after the ceremony, so Haberman brought him with her to a politics meeting at the Times. [5] In 1999, the Post assigned her to cover City Hall, where she became "hooked" on political reporting. But his campaign is preparing for an ugly, protracted primary fight for the nomination. The publication of Confidence Man reignited controversies over Habermans ethics. She was wearing an evil-eye bracelet. 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. How do you explain it? . CNN political analyst Maggie Haberman weighs in on the statements made to CNN by Emily Kohrs, the foreperson of the Atlanta-based grand jury that investigated former President Donald Trump's . Brian Fallon, who was a campaign spokesperson for Clinton, says that Haberman was in touch with him and his staff so often that it was like she'd been assigned to cover them. By Shane Goldmacher,Michael C. Bender and Maggie Haberman. Amazingly detailed scenes here, including Jeffrey Clark, whose devices were recently seized by federal officials, holding court at an event in the spring 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. [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 also on her laptop. Adds Haberman, "Some Ed Koch. Slate called her Trump's "snake charmer"; New Yorker editor in chief David Remnick recently likened Trump to her "ardent, twisted suitor." Congratulations on the book. I just wanted to make the point that we were engaged in some revisionist history. Haberman says she'd had no interest in journalism up to this point. 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. The man is, it appears, too drunk to be able to discern if she's flirting or annoyed. She's "wickedly competitive," says Gregg Birnbaum, the former Post editor (now senior political editor at NBC News Digital) whom Haberman credits with drilling into her head, "Do not get beat, do not get beat. What erodes that is very dangerous." Since 2015, Habermans career has revolved around the most untrustworthy man in national politics. 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). Clyde covered Trump very sporadically in the 1980s and '90s. But, if he does, what do you think a second Donald Trump presidency term would look like? 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. These words were spoken in 2008 by an unlikely film critic named Donald Trump. ", Her father, Clyde, says he likes to think that honest journalism is "hardwired" into her. Do you think, at his core, that he is racist? As for the breaking part, Haberman is more . I was shaped by understanding what sold in a tabloid, Haberman told me. [19], In 2022, Haberman published a book on the Trump presidency called Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America. She catches herself. Grow your brand authentically by sharing brand content with the internets creators. There was a lot of duking it out, she said. "What do they thinkthat it's going in a secret newspaper?". A lot of people would let it go, but Haberman signals to the hostess. 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. Because he is the same person he was during the campaign.". Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. Please check your inbox to confirm. "I didn't care for that metaphor," Haberman says. [6] Haberman worked for the Post's rival newspaper, the New York Daily News, for three and a half years in the early 2000s,[6] where she continued to cover City Hall. The phone buzzed again. I'm having a hard time remembering it." "Can I come back?" She never hedges her angle to try to protect her access, only to give politicians an unwelcome surprise when they read the story in the morninga practice some journalists follow that Haberman calls "the stupidest thing I've ever heard of. Rosenhas taken issue with Habermans characterization of Trump as a master of media manipulation: If you are a man, and you bite a dog, he wrote, that does not make you a master of anything. But Haberman, who tends to predict that Trump will express his worst impulses and cause maximum damage, told me she believed that he is more often underestimated than overestimated. Maggie Haberman / New York Times: DeSantis to Visit Early Primary States, Selling His Florida Record . 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. 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. And I'm like, This is total bullshit, this is not a real person, nobody is this way," Thrush recalls. Is there anyone in political life he truly admires? 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 . 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. He draws roads. 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. The debate is set for August, in the same city that will host the partys 2024 convention. 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. Do you think he knows what's real and what isn't? Organize, control, distribute and measure all of your digital content. I don't think he figured the office out. [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. I just want to go back to the psychiatrist line. He is behaving in a racist way. ", [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. 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. 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. Sister Sites: Techmeme Tech news essentials. It's titled "Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.". Like the president she covers, Haberman, 43, is a born-and-bred New Yorker and slightly ill at ease in Washington. 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. He was constantly looking for a relationship with him in the past and kept it going out of office still, this admiration. I used that metaphor to describe him in 2017. Through it all, she never missed a beat in our conversation. 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. But I do think he figured out personnel, which is often what he's focused on. Intense is one of the words friends and colleagues most often use to describe her. 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. And he makes that very clear. James Carville wanted her to come to Louisiana to talk to a class, but her kids were about to go on school vacation. 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 .