The debate is set for August, in the same city that will host the partys 2024 convention. The phone rang, and she started laughing when she looked at her iPhone display. What is he at his core, what does he care about? I mean, does he just create a different factual universe? [12], Haberman frequently broke news about the Trump campaign and administration. I care about telling a thorough story. She was part of a team that was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2021 for coverage of the Trump administrations handling of the coronavirus. I first met Maggie Haberman in 2014. President Xi Jinping of China, he has been praising repeatedly since he left office. Confidence Man, which synthesizes years of reporting on Trump and his milieu, is, in some ways, a standard-issue Trump book. 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. 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. Ad Choices. Grow your brand authentically by sharing brand content with the internets creators. 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. "This is a symbiotic relationship," says an administration official. 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. When I asked her about these conceptual scoops, she corrected me: Theyre contextual scoops. Context is key to Habermans project. 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. There was a lot of duking it out, she said. He has called you, essentially, like his psychiatrist, whether you agree with that term or not. She was the dominant Trump reporter on the campaign, and she didn't travel with him. She was on her phone. 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). "But I also know he can't allow himself to ever quit." Trumps insistence on taking unnecessary flights kind of goes to what he will sublimate in the service of something else, Haberman said. This purple frame wouldn't be complete without the intricate temple detail, a distinct touch to help you stand out from the crowd. The former presidents lawyers cited executive privilege, a tactic they have used with other ex-Trump aides. These words were spoken in 2008 by an unlikely film critic named Donald Trump. Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker. "There's an enormous personal price that she pays, that people pay when they devote so much of themselves to this," Thrush says. By Kenneth P. Vogel,Maggie Haberman and Michael S. Schmidt. I think his niece is right. He "kind of chuckled" and replied, "It's like therapy. Habermans Trump is also the Page Six demimondaine who flashed his grin on Sex and the City (Donald Trump, you just dont get more New York than that, Carrie mused) and the developer who perennially stiffed his contractors and enraged the Fifth Avenue lite by destroying two iconic friezes. Haberman argued that she did not learn this until after Joe Biden took office. "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. He draws buildings. Mediagazer Must-read media news. 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. In hindsight, Haberman was building a reservoir of knowledge and contacts that would make her probably the best-sourced reporter of the 2016 campaign. "I love being with her," he says. I don't believe that he learned how to be president more astutely. Donald Trump reading The New York Times at his Greenwich, Connecticut home in 1987. During the Trump era, Haberman became an avatar of journalisms promise as well as of its failures. Plus: each Wednesday, exclusively for subscribers, the best books of the week. How do you explain it? 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. 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 . A lot of people would let it go, but Haberman signals to the hostess. He mentioned Nixon unprompted in one of our interviews. 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. Born to a publicist and a newspaperman, she grew up in the kind of privileged Manhattan set that Trump spent his early days envying. 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. 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. "If you're going to come at her," says a Democratic operative, "you've got to come correct. We know he does this. Organize, control, distribute and measure all of your digital content. Trumps performative macho is scaring voters in both parties away from women candidates. He's tall with an athletic build and a military-style cut to his orange hair. Like, Maggies friendly to us. 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. [9], Haberman was hired by The New York Times in early 2015 as a political correspondent for the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. "This is a very precarious moment, in terms of what anyone can believe in. She wrote about Donald Trump for those publications and rose to prominence covering his campaign, presidency, and post-presidency for the Times. 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. [19], In 2022, Haberman published a book on the Trump presidency called Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America. Would she tell the man to "stop screaming"? 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. ", 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. 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. . But, if he does, what do you think a second Donald Trump presidency term would look like? I can't think of anyone whose behavior in typical U.S. political fashion he admires right now. As we were talking, her phone buzzed. " She's like my psychiatrist . "I'm just trying not to get beat," she says. And I think, sometimes, he seems less clear. One attendee chastised another for looking at her phone, saying that its light was distracting, as though we were all at a cliffhanger movie. he yelps like a sixth grader sent our way on a dare, and dashes off. The next day, I called himhe's an old family friend of the Habermans and has known Maggie since she was about three days oldto ask him to elaborate. You don't even know where she isshe could be anywhere. He views the truth as something that's transactional. [4], Haberman's career began in 1996 when she was hired by the New York Post. 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. Habermans particular way of contextualizing often seems intended to puncture or undermine. How an unemployed blogger confirmed that Syria had used chemical weapons. And since President Trump fired FBI director James Comey, Haberman has been on the frontlines of the nonstop news bombshells that have been lobbed, bylining or credited with a reporting assist on around two dozen stories in two weeks. Part of what makes Haberman one of Trumps foremost contextualizers is her fluency in the worlds that formed him. Passantino, her lawyer at the time, was in a taxi with her on the way to a restaurant. 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. Portions of the electorate learned to associate her with distressing updates about the country. I think that theres a misunderstanding among certain aspects of our readership about what it is we do, she said. And, early on, he figured out how to neutralize threats by hiring them, as when he lured Anthony Gliedman, the housing commissioner who denied his request for a tax break on Trump Tower, and whom Trump subsequently threatened and sued, to come work for him several years later. Because Haberman has known Trump for so long she has been derided as a schill. In a statement to The Wrap's Andi Ortiz, a Times spokesperson said, "Maggie Haberman took leave from The Times to write her book. 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. Maggie Haberman, political corespondent for The New York Times, reporting at a Bernie Sanders rally at Hunter's Point South Park in New York, April 18, 2016. 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. In the course of reporting the book, she shared considerable . Glass ceiling: Tishby, an Israeli native who now calls Los Angeles home, joined the podcast to discuss her new book . She goes on to talk about a fragile ego that has to be constantly fed and so on. Haberman is famously formidable. During Rudy Giulianis second mayoral term, Haberman covered City Hall, a notoriously cutthroat beat. 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. ", The 1980s and '90s New York in which Haberman was raised is the same milieu in which Trump began his crusade to sand down his Queens edges and gild the Manhattan skyline. Maggie grew up on the Upper West Side, attending P.S. And, again, I could name many others. Instead, Habermans Times articles adhered to the journalistic conventions that the press critic Jay Rosen has labelled the view from nowhere. Rife with ostentatious neutrality, the pieces were seen to grant Trump and his circle undue legitimacy. It was Haberman he dialed. 1996 - 2023 NewsHour Productions LLC. She sees herself as a demystifier. You are considered the reporter who goes back longer with Donald Trump than anyone else and who understands him better than any other reporter. I'm having a hard time remembering it." Collect, curate and comment on your files. That [Trump] is unconcerned by that, I think, is the big issue," she says. "Part of the reason" Haberman is so read in the Times "is because she is writing about Donald Trump. "Okay, wellfist bump?" Is it the claustrophobia that bothers her? Every item on this page was chosen by an ELLE editor. Further introspection on the subject of stifling her emotions did not seem to interest her, perhaps because she sees no alternative. 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. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy. 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. "She grew up in an environment where journalism that was as accurate as humanly possible was practically a religion," he says. There's that Felix Sater character, who was arrested and, I think, did time, for shoving a broken Martini glass in someone's face . "I do not think he is enjoying the job particularly, and that is based on reporting," she says. She was wearing an evil-eye bracelet. "Short fiction, always somewhat curiously resembling my own life," she says. And Haberman, like Trump, knows how to spin: Confidence Man makes a show of refusing Trumps enticements. People have a right to feel however they feel, she said, dismissing the subject. 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. So, what exactly is in his heart, I think, becomes irrelevant. Another evil eye was in her pocket. Like the president she covers, Haberman, 43, is a born-and-bred New Yorker and slightly ill at ease in Washington. Maggie Lindsy Haberman (New York, 30 oktober 1973) is een Amerikaans journaliste.. Haberman is Witte Huis-correspondent voor The New York Times en politiek analist voor CNN.Daaraan voorafgaand was zij als politiek verslaggever werkzaam voor Politico en de New York Daily News.. Afkomst en opleiding. 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 . births and plastic surgeries), and the funerals of firefighters and civic luminaries. 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. Is this something he believes to be true, or what? [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. Ppl don't change." He draws roads. As for the breaking part, Haberman is more . 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. By Damon Winter/The New York Times . 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.. 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. 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. 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? [14], In October 2016, one month before Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the US presidential election, a stolen document released by WikiLeaks outlined how Clinton's campaign could induce Haberman to place sympathetic stories in Politico. I reflexively tense up; she doesn't flinch. [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. Haberman was not the only reporter to see the underlying logic in the daily bedlam emanating from Washington. 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. And probably because her mother is a publicist, she doesn't view Trump's press flacks, or flacks in general, as the enemy. Haberman countered that such soap operas have been happening for years. He gives off a hint of reality TVwith his mirages, his come-ons, his brazenness, his feintsand a dash of the Devil. All rights reserved. [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. Its the gesture of a writer who knows that her unsentimental view of the President anchors her credibility. 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 . 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. 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. Haberman, one of the main conduits of Oval Office drama, came under particular fire for her handling of anonymous sources. Hutchinson asked her counsel not to take the call. Streamline your workflow with our best-in-class digital asset management system. Do you think he knows what's real and what isn't? We discussed Trumps romance with the media. "Every moment cannot be, 'Wow! 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. 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. Habermans dark hair was blown out and she wore a forest-green blouse and pink lipstick. The publication of Confidence Man reignited controversies over Habermans ethics. But his campaign is preparing for an ugly, protracted primary fight for the nomination. "This is a president who is always selling. 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. "The Triborough and Empire State view of Trump is very different from the national view of Trump," she points out. 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). [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? 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. Haberman sees herself as a demystifier. 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. "When we as a culture can't agree on a simple, basic fact setthat is very scary. And then, by the second week, something had just switched, and he was insisting that he had won.