Renowned New York Times correspondent, author, and so-called “Trump Whisperer” Maggie Haberman recently sat down for an interview with the Guardian’s David Smith on the heels of her bombshell new book, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America. In the telling new interview, Haberman talked of her four-plus years covering the now-former president, Donald Trump, and ultimately admitted that she didn’t often find herself all that surprised with the ex-president’s antics, rhetoric, and behaviors, as she’d become very familiar with the guy through growing up in New York City.
However, there was one particular incident during Trump’s presidency that even she found to be a “striking moment.”
Smith writes that Haberman “…was born in New York to parents who met while working at the New York Post, a tabloid newspaper that he long courted, and lived most of her adult life in the borough where Trump learned the mechanics of political power.”
He goes on to note that Maggie remained in New York instead of transferring to Washington D.C. upon Trump’s election, but still managed to successfully cover the 45th president from a long distance. “Everything about this presidency was foretold,” the piece notes. “The past is prologue with lots of people, but particularly with him. He ended up having this set of behaviors of his own that were augmented by the world he came from, the climate he came from in New York, the industry he came from, and the industries he dealt with in terms of politics, of media.”
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Haberman herself explained, “Our politics are broken. They’ve been broken for a while. I don’t think he created that but he fueled it and exacerbated it and benefited from it,” Smith wrote that Trump, nonetheless, “lived down to her expectations.”
At one point in the interview, Smith specifically asked Maggie Was there anything, amid the four-year madness of all caps tweets, hirings and firings, insults and lies that shocked even her?” The Times correspondent said that the most shocking moment of Trump’s presidency for her came at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Smith writes that “Haberman picks the day that Trump stood on the White House podium floating the idea that coronavirus patients might inject themselves with bleach.”
“He was feeling competitive with the doctors because he gets competitive with everybody. That was a pretty striking moment,” Maggie recalled on the infamous incident.
Smith added, “As Trump mused on the utility of disinfectants as a miracle cure, the then coronavirus response coordinator, Deborah Birx, infamously sat silent. It was one incident among many that shone a light on the White House officials and aides who enabled Trump – or at least failed to make a stand until it was too late.”
You can read the full report from The Guardian here.
Featured image via Political Tribune Gallery
