These days, in her profession, the truth is a demanding god. It would look like him. COVID-19 at Three: Who Got the Pandemic Right? "She's got it with her at all times," says her husband, Dareh Gregorian. Haberman graduated in 1996 from Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied creative writing and psychology. That [Trump] is unconcerned by that, I think, is the big issue," she says. Trump conceded this was true and the story was about an "8. [4], Haberman's career began in 1996 when she was hired by the New York Post. He "kind of chuckled" and replied, "It's like therapy. And then, by the second week, something had just switched, and he was insisting that he had won. "On more than one occasion, somebody would fly out of their desk and [announce something] that the New York Times was about to post, or a story the Times was working on, or some random bit of gossip, and then somebody else would pop their head up and say, 'Oh, did Maggie just tell you that?' Trumps performative macho is scaring voters in both parties away from women candidates. 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 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. he asks, pointing at the recorder between us. When Haberman demurs, politely but without apology, he is momentarily stumped. Maggie Haberman, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, has been covering Donald Trump since the 1990s. Yes, I can! Like Kane in Orson Welles's masterpiece, Trump was a swaggering . Haberman, a White House correspondent for . Another evil eye was in her pocket. 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. 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. he yelps like a sixth grader sent our way on a dare, and dashes off. Feeling is also not her job. Because she was literally talking to 16 people within our campaign at the same time.". 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. And she's got a BlackBerry and a flip phone going at the same time. She finds the framing of her relationship with the president in romantic terms "facile." The man with the orange hair is making a scene. He said that to me in one of our interviews. In the weeks before John Wayne Gacys scheduled execution, he was far from reconciled to his fate. [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. As we were talking, her phone buzzed. For a moment, it seems he might be coming over to tell off the reporter. "This place is so loud I want to put a bullet in my brain," she had said, matter-of-factly, when we first sat down for a late dinner, observing that so much hard-partying energy on a weeknight seemed more NYC than DC. By the time Trump formally announced his candidacy in June 2015 and Haberman was assigned to his campaign, she'd been reporting on him for a decade. She was texting, taking calls, e-mailing, and Gchatting with colleagues and sources. Haberman joined Judy Woodruff to discuss the book. To some, she upheld the tradition that Woodward and Bernstein built; others condemned her failure to criticize Trumps behavior more vocally. But my question to you is, what do you think he cares about the most or whom? The former presidents lawyers cited executive privilege, a tactic they have used with other ex-Trump aides. 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. Maggie Haberman, a White House correspondent for the New York Times, stops midsentence to . I first met Maggie Haberman in 2014. He admires autocrats in other countries. The phone buzzed again. (Both her brother, Zach, and her husband, Dareh Gregorian, work at the New York Daily News.). Ad Choices. What erodes that is very dangerous." And Haberman, like Trump, knows how to spin: Confidence Man makes a show of refusing Trumps enticements. 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. 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. 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. [19], In 2022, Haberman published a book on the Trump presidency called Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America. [twitter ]https://twitter.com/maggieNYT/status/553574601733992449?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Fblogs%2Ferik-wemple%2Fwp%2F2015%2F01%2F09%2Fmaggie-haberman-leaves-huge-hole-at-politico-moves-to-new-york-times%2F[/twitter], It's why he deals with her, Haberman says: "Longevity, just being around him a long time, is something he values." It was simply desperation for a job other than bartending that led her to newspapers. 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. ", 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. Glass ceiling: Tishby, an Israeli native who now calls Los Angeles home, joined the podcast to discuss her new book . He's tall with an athletic build and a military-style cut to his orange hair. When I speak to him, it's because he's trying to sell me," Haberman tells the audience at the 92nd Street Y. Part of what makes Haberman one of Trumps foremost contextualizers is her fluency in the worlds that formed him. In the midst of his second divorce, from Marla Maples, Trump was a maestro of controlling his tabloid image, calling in tidbits about himself. Its the crashing. Trump, apparently, does not get fazed by planes: on Air Force One, Haberman said, hed sometimes continue talking during rocky landings, while reporters slid around on their seats. He draws buildings. The media writ large was unprepared to cover a political candidate who lied as freely as Trump did, on matters big and small, Haberman reflects, adding that the word lie presumes knowledge of a speakers motivations. The audience was, as always, hanging on her every word, hungry to have her translate Trump into someone they could understand. "There's an enormous personal price that she pays, that people pay when they devote so much of themselves to this," Thrush says. So, what exactly is in his heart, I think, becomes irrelevant. Collect, curate and comment on your files. ", 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. [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. Donald Trump reading The New York Times at his Greenwich, Connecticut home in 1987. [1] In 2022, she published the best-selling book Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America. And this is one of the things that makes establishing a baseline of discernible truth around him so incredibly hard. 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. Why it matters: Destroying records that should be preserved is potentially illegal. "But I also know he can't allow himself to ever quit." Her tweets frequently numbered more than a hundred and forty in twenty-four hours. 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. Questions about her process elicited similarly guarded answers. He was constantly looking for a relationship with him in the past and kept it going out of office still, this admiration. Her daughter was home sick from school with a fever. I was somewhat surprised to see that, Haberman said when I asked her about the conversation, characterizing her call as routine. Shortly after Hutchinsons deposition, she notes, the Times published a story on the January 6th committees progress that included the news that at least one witness was willing to testify that Trump had approved of rioters chanting Hang Mike Pence and that Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, had burned documents in a fireplace. 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. This article appears in the July 2017 issue of ELLE. A new era of strength competitions is testing the limits of the human body. . He noticed right away that Haberman had talent. Haberman reported and wrote it with her frequent collaborator, Glenn Thrush. (The Police Athletic League, a cause beloved by the former Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, profited handsomely from his shamelessness, Haberman writes.) He draws roads. I dont want this out there, she remembers saying. 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). The tabloid playbook, which Haberman memorized and which Trump enacted, reflected a sense that journalists and subjects could feed off one another, that the whole enterprise might be boiled down to eyes and, eventually, wallets. And, as I write, it was meant to flatter and it's a meaningless lie. 14-Day Free Returns. 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. "You're going to bring this up every time, aren't you?" "Okay, wellfist bump?" ", "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. As for the breaking part, Haberman is more . Oct 9, 2022. He is who he is and he's not going to change. "Haven't you joined us already?" Maggie Haberman is a tireless, keen-eyed example. 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 . Yes, Haberman does a decent job laying out the business life of DJT, as seen thru her decidedly inhospitable glasses. ", [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. Over time, however, as Haberman did not get beat, did not get beat, he realized she was for real. I think that theres a misunderstanding among certain aspects of our readership about what it is we do, she said. People wanted her to provide a normative framing for what was going on, the professor and media commentator Daniel Drezner said. Her expertise wasn't just Trumpit was the Trump psyche. Habermans own confidence man, though overexposed, can seem similarly elusive. [7] In 2010, Haberman was hired by Politico as a senior reporter. Premium Access. Well, we know that he I mean, and you have written this. Donald Trump will be basking in affection from activists at CPAC on Saturday. Most recently, just in the last few days, he put out a statement about Elaine Chao, the wife of Senator Mitch McConnell. Maggie Haberman / New York Times: DeSantis to Visit Early Primary States, Selling His Florida Record . Trump is 70. Through it all, she never missed a beat in our conversation. She's so well-sourced and so well-connected that she doesn't need to," Karni says. It narrates how he and his siblings cut off medical funding for his brothers infant grandson, who was born with a disorder that led to cerebral palsy, in order to punish some of his relatives during an estate dispute. Is there anyone in political life he truly admires? Subscribe to Here's the Deal, our politics newsletter. Trump, having tasted the fairy food of the Oval Office, seems similarly stricken, entranced by power and fame that he is unable to forsake. He's tweeted, at various points, that she's "third-rate," "sad," and "totally in the Hillary circle of bias," and he almost exclusively refers to the Times as "failing" and "fake news." Hicks echoed Conway, e-mailing me a few days later that Haberman was "a true professional. She goes on to talk about a fragile ego that has to be constantly fed and so on. 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.. 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. "Part of the reason" Haberman is so read in the Times "is because she is writing about Donald Trump. In the course of reporting the book, she shared considerable . She's called me as she was drivingswearing and running latebetween an errand at the American Girl doll store and a dinner party. Haberman pressed her point: "It was two months ago. 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. We see many compliments in your future with Maggie, a rectangular frame with a metal construction and vibrant violet hue. Habermans particular way of contextualizing often seems intended to puncture or undermine. I mean, does he just create a different factual universe? Millions of high-quality images, video, and music options are waiting for you. I would argue he is now occupying the most expensive and valuable real estate in the country. He is behaving in a racist way. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy. She suggested a colleague to go on TV in her stead. 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. The tale concerns a boy named Harold who goes for a walk in the evening and draws things from his imagination, including an entire city, with his enchanted crayon. This book is her most sustained attempt to pin him down. 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. At first Thrush didn't like her, mistaking her voraciousness for shtick. Haberman did not let it slide. Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. "The news was something my dad did." And Haberman stresses the racism that has permeated Trumps image since he and his father were sued for housing discrimination in the seventies. Plus: each Wednesday, exclusively for subscribers, the best books of the week. ", Trump has also sent her his famous press clippings with Sharpie notes on them, mostly with criticisms, but at least once with praise. Is she, in fact, friendly to Trumps people? How Should an Older President Think About a Second Term? "The Triborough and Empire State view of Trump is very different from the national view of Trump," she points out. "[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". 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.". She was wearing an evil-eye bracelet. [12], Haberman frequently broke news about the Trump campaign and administration. he says, holding out his fist. She's out with a new book. [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. And that's going to mean certain situations are fraught. She is a native New Yorker, a competitive advantage given her subject. Haberman countered that such soap operas have been happening for years. The man with the orange hair is making a scene. The book is frank about Trumps cruelty. 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. "Maggie doesn't camouflage. "I'm not sure the objective facts will let him do that this time. He was telling people he wasn't going to leave. No one suggests her male colleagues are "wooing" Trump. This past November, by the end of the candidates meandering, hour-long campaign announcement, she had tweeted about the speech more than twenty times. Her reporting, much of it written with other Times staffers, mingled Pulitzer-winning discoveries (Trump told Russian officials that firing James Comey relieved great pressure on him), palace intrigue (John Kelly clashed with Corey Lewandowski), and bathetic details (Trump watching television in his bathrobe). Greenfield said there are journalists who have been tight with presidents before; he cited Chalmers Roberts, a Washington Post reporter who'd been close to Kennedy and, later in life, admitted he'd compromised himself by giving Kennedy overly favorable coverage. Haberman sees herself as a demystifier. Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent who joined The New York Times in 2015 and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on Donald Trumps advisers and their connections to Russia. This would be a profound shift in the shape of the federal government. Haberman has spent a good part of the past seven years immersed in Trumps deranged fantasia of American life. Whereas most of the country knows Trump foremost as a reality-TV star from his time on The Apprentice, Haberman remembers that he was a New York institution before he became a national figure. Search instead in. "And yet Trump seems driven to connect with her.". "Can I come back?" 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 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. [20][21] A Guardian review of the book describes her as "the New York Times' Trump whisperer", and describes the book as "much more than 600 pages of context, scoop and drama.it gives Trump and those close to him plenty of voice and rope. 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. "[22] The book debuted at number one on The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list for the week ending October 8, 2022. And, again, I could name many others. He is very aware that, if you repeat something over and over again, it can turn it into something real. One attendee chastised another for looking at her phone, saying that its light was distracting, as though we were all at a cliffhanger movie. "If you're going to come at her," says a Democratic operative, "you've got to come correct. Is it the claustrophobia that bothers her? Is this something he believes to be true, or what? 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. 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? 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. "I'm just trying not to get beat," she says. Three years later, she moved to the Times as it beefed up its political staff in advance of the 2016 campaign. Maggie parries, her face inscrutable. 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. "This is a very precarious moment, in terms of what anyone can believe in. "Speak of the devil," she said into the phone. "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. "You can change her mind," Madden says. And it's just hard to know how much is that vs. he's convinced himself of this. 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. Boards are the best place to save images and video clips. 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. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. Photograph by Jeanette Spicer for The New Yorker, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America. Some of his aides laughed. Ventura headset in 2024, smart glasses with a display and a "neural interface" smartwatch in 2025, and AR glasses in 2027 . She says they were talking about infrastructure when, "out of nowhere," he raised the This Week laugh. The Manhattan district attorneys office is scrutinizing the former presidents role in the hush money payment to a porn star. A reader wondering whether to be surprised by such carelessness, such corruption, gets her answer: yes and no. 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. Its the gesture of a writer who knows that her unsentimental view of the President anchors her credibility. She was also on her laptop. The books thesisTrumps gonna Trumpis pointedly unglamorous, in keeping with Habermans deflationary assessments of Trumps character. 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. Confidence Man by Maggie Haberman: 9780593297346 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books. Ppl don't change." Maggie Haberman during a screening of The Fourth Estate at TheTimesCenter on May 9, 2018, in New York City. I don't believe that he learned how to be president more astutely. "Can I join you guys? The Getty Images design is a trademark of Getty Images. Learn more about Friends of the NewsHour. 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. 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. ", 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 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. Confidence Man, which synthesizes years of reporting on Trump and his milieu, is, in some ways, a standard-issue Trump book. He's hitting on her. The instant #1 New York Times bestseller. 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. Haberman described how delighted he was when the New York Post headlined a piece about him with a possibly erroneous quote from Marla Maples: Best Sex Ive Ever Had. She would repeat versions of these same answers and stories at her book event later that evening. And 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. 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. ", 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. " She's like my psychiatrist . Haberman once said in an interview that she talked to 50 people a day. 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. The first time I met Haberman, we were in the airy, modern cafeteria of the New York Times building in Manhattan. Theyre outraged by what were covering, and they dont understand why its not having the effect it should. 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. How do you explain it? "She's like Michael Corleone," Thrush says, "sucked into the family business." I also think he's extremely suggestible and I think he's extremely paranoid. And laugh at him. By Sean Piccoli,Jonah E. Bromwich,Ben Protess and William K. Rashbaum. He gives off a hint of reality TVwith his mirages, his come-ons, his brazenness, his feintsand a dash of the Devil. She almost never turns her phone off. Access the best of Getty Images with our simple subscription plan.Millions of high-quality images, video, and music options are waiting for you. [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 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.