Maggie Haberman has been covering Donald Trump forever, and for four years she covered him in the White House for the New York Times. Naturally she wrote a book after he left office, and lefties have been up in arms about the fact that she revealed things which perhaps should have been revealed at the time they happened instead of waiting a couple of years.
I didn't really follow this whole kerfuffle, vaguely chalking it up to the fact that lots of lefties hate Haberman for being too soft on Trump. But over the weekend I got into a Twitter conversation that got me curious about the whole thing, so I checked to see what her precise offense was. Here it is:
Former President Donald Trump repeatedly told aides in the days following his 2020 election loss that he would remain in the White House rather than let incoming President Joe Biden take over, according to reporting provided to CNN from a forthcoming book by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman.
“I’m just not going to leave,” Trump told one aide, according to Haberman.
That's it? Sure, this would have been slightly more interesting around the time of the January 6 insurrection, but only slightly. On the list of Trump braggadocio and inanity over his four years as president, I'm not sure this even makes the top 100. On this list of "bonkers revelations" it only rates #7 in the book.
On the Kevin scale, this rates four mehs.
I think what drives a lot of people nuts about Haberman is that she probably had the most intimate access to Trump of anyone in the WH press corps, and regularly broke stories about some truly batshit things going on during his maladministration, all while seeming to act like this was just another job covering a conventional administration and playing off her access to an authoritarian madman like it was some kind of clever game.
As a lot people have been saying, it's interesting that the MSM is *now* suddenly interested in the many ways Trump was clearly an unfit lunatic, as opposed to maybe checking on those rumors *before* he was elected president. You know, what we used to call "vetting" a candidate. Hillary Clinton can tell you how it works.
What drives me nuts is that Haberman is one of the NY media who covered Trump for years as a colorful celebrity when it was obvious he was a crook. For years journalists like Wayne Barrett of the Village Voice and David Cay Johnston of the Philadelphia Inquirer covered Trump’s sketchy dealings but most of the mainstream “liberal” media ignored it.
let's see:
trump university, plus trump's comments about the judge.
trump's comments about john mccain.
trump's comments about mexican immigrants.
trump's comments about a handicapped reporter.
trump's comments about war.
various reports about trump's business practices, his proclivity to lose money and stiff contractors.
trump's grab 'em by the you-know-what comment, plus various allegations sexual assault.
all of this BEFORE trump was elected, much of it BEFORE the primaries. you had to be living in a cave or watching fox news to not know that trump was morally and intellectually unfit to be president BEFORE the election.
and that's just what i can remember off the top of my head.
you had to be living in a cave or watching fox news to not know that trump was morally and intellectually unfit to be president BEFORE the election.
Two thirds of Americans barely watch any news or read anything. The other 1/3 watch Fox or listen to crazy relatives who do. This is how we got Trump.
If you're threatening to burn my house down, I have a problem with that. If you're standing around taking notes on the fire rather than helping stop them, then you may not be my enemy, but you're certainly not my friend.
I personally don't feel the same vitriol towards her, but thenI also have never considered the NYT "liberal", or my friend, either.
I suspect a lot of people may be resisting learning that the NYT is not theirs, either.
Writing glowing puff pieces about dictators seems to be a special metier of the NYT.
If your explanation is correct, it raises the question of why anyone on the left would expect the New York Times to be their friend. The New York Times markets itself as an impartial news source, not as an advocate for the left. Has right wing propaganda been so effective that even people on the left think that the New York Times has a leftist agenda?
If you receive a notice of foreclosure, and as a retaliation against the bank you burn your house down, that's probably a crime. If, on the other hand, you brag to your friend "I'm just not going to leave," I'm hard-pressed to figure out whether you have, in advance, announced your intention to commit a crime. That, I believe, is the threshold for a journalist to call the cops.
Your unstated standard seems to be that journalists deserve no criticism so long as the follow law.
That's fine, if those are sincerely your standards. I just don't think anyone else shares them.
If someone says they are going to go to a school and kill all the children should you call the cops, or are you hard pressed to figure out in advance the person has the intention to commit a crime? Should you wait until he has done it, then report that you heard him say it?
Having reviewed the list of "revelations", most of them were thoroughly covered in The Librul Media (aka not the NY Times) around when they occurred. I'm hoping there's a lot more interesting stuff in Ms Haberman's book, since I'm on the list to check it out at the local library.
(And yes, I don't intend to reward her for keeping critical information secret to drive up book sales by actually buying the volume myself. $21,48 on Amazon, by the way. Marked down from $32.)
Authors get paid for library borrows also.
I am devastated to learn that.
Not in the US
Only when they buy the book, not each time a user borrows the book.
The media always play up the latest "revelation" about what an idiot Trump supposedly is, or how dishonest he is, etc. Some people even think that the latest thing will finally "bring him down". But this has been going on since 2015 and it has obviously never worked. There is a large segment of the public that doesn't care about anything politicians do except whether they supports White Christian Supremacy. Another segment, not so large but having most of the money, only cares about whether he supports tax cuts for the rich and deregulation of big business. Another large segment seems only to be aware of how well the economy is doing, and blame or credit the current President for this. This last segment, or part of it, is likely to be the decider in 2024 as well as this year. But it remains to be seen how much the abortion issue will affect some of these groups this year.
ding! ding! ding! we have a winner! it was well known that trump was neither intellectually or morally fit to be president. 62,979,636 of our fellow citizens voted for him anyway.
You can rate it "four mehs" because you are Kevin Drum - politically engaged, knowledgable, savvy, and cynical. But none of us can know - least of all Haberman & her salty gang of defenders - how the facts about Trump would have impacted the disconnected people whose votes determine election outcomes.
Haberman is not just soft on Trump. Almost the entire political press world was soft & fuzzy on Trump while applying the fire to Clinton. Haberman has been connected with Trump's inner circle for years. It's her only thing. She is not a great reporter nor a particularly talented writer. She's a source because Trump & his people use her as one of their outlets. She is despised because she is on his team while pretending to be a big time journalist at the only newspaper that matters. And she and her co-workers are complete jerks when they get called out on it.
You are correct on all counts.
One of the weirdest things is to read people's accounts of why their eyes were finally opened to a con. It is often something you'd never suspect, a revelation that seems banal compared to everything else, or the 12th time they did the exact same thing that was ignored before.
And, yes, Trump was treated with kid gloves. I was expecting that, though. I lived through the Jesse Ventura years as MN governor. Reporters don't treat people according to the job they want. They label people with a type and treat them accordingly. "Politicians" get tough questions and are vetted. "Celebrities" get treated as if everything is a puff piece.
"the only newspaper that matters"
Disagree; the Washington Post is a better paper. Not perfect, but better than the New York Times. Disclosure: I pay to read both online. I'm not likely to renew the NYT though; I no longer live in the NY metro area.
We do too, plus some old-timey paper rags like The New Yorker. Mind, I only read the NYT for Krugman and the culture sections, which I think are still good, though not as good as they were in their heyday.
It's more along the lines of Haberman frequently operating as a Trump apologist, coming across as a naïve journalist being used by Trump to get his message out.
Don't let yourself think Maggie Haberman doesn't know what she's doing. She knows exactly what she's doing.
Don't let yourself think Maggie Haberman doesn't know what she's doing. She knows exactly what she's doing.
OTOH, I know it's a quid pro quo relationship. OTOH, it feels too slimy for a seasoned journalist to get used in this way.
If we are going to accuse Haberman of anything, let us accuse her of something significant -- such as misprision of felony. That is the cue for anyone who has the book to hand to reply with page citations where she, in effect, confesses to failure to report criminal activity.
“Can you imagine Jared and his skinny ass camping? It’d be like something out of Deliverance.”
Nobody's wrong about everything.
I agree that Donald changing things with his mind, like the classification of secret government documents and who is and is not the president, is batshit crazy. But I also think that Mitch changing things with his mind, like that elected officials choose the voters and not the other way round, is batshit crazy. Question: Is incompetent and evil better than competent and evil?
From what you describe, mr. Drum, Habs had nothing to report. Anybody paying attention knew that Trump would resist leaving. He signaled it constantly. Now if he had laid out his specific plans or even just said. I’ll just overthrow the government, and she didn’t report that, then we got something to complain about. Heck, even many of his relatives and those in his inner circle seem to have been surprised by how far Trump was willing to go on Jan.6.
But, no, I won’t be buying the book. But, having read the New York article (thanks for the link) …. The Superman shirt was no. 8? No.8???!!!! Must be a really boring book.
19 Surely thou wilt slay the wicked, O God: depart from me therefore, ye bloody men.
20 For they speak against thee wickedly, and thine enemies take thy name in vain.
21 Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate thee? and am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee?
22 I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies.
Atrios is right on this one.
The specific issue here is boring.
But the fact that journalists do this regularly is not. They know things that are pretty salient. But they don’t tell their readers/viewers for very murky (and generally indefensible) reasons.
I'm pretty sure the reasons are pretty clear.
The analytical mistake, which was really only obvious in hindsight, was that Trump successfully, extremely successfully, pitched himself as completely outside any analysis of whether or not he is an idiot.
In point of fact, I think he says idiotic things on purpose - not because he believes them or even cares about them, but because he knows a large portion of his base wishes that they too, could say idiotic, maybe racist, sexist stuff, and pay no price for it.
Its akin to his crazy practice of engaging in lawsuits. Pretty much every other successful business person avoids lawsuits as a completely avoidable, or at least minimizable, expense.
Trump loves it, he stiffs contractors, his own attorneys, and whomever else. Which is exactly the way his supporters would behave if they could get away with it.
And yet, the liberal media falls for it every time, if they would just add, to each story about Trump's idiotic behavior, that his supporters are in favor of it, it would help get out the anti Trumpist vote.
"In point of fact, I think he says idiotic things on purpose ..!
The fact that his base like it is part of it. But it is also a pretension to be and idiot, which make people undersppreciate how dangerous he is. He also tells many obvious lies, to give the impression that it is to tell when he is lying. When he really wants to decieve he uses much more subtle lies.
The problem people have with Haberman is that she has no journalistic ethics. She practices "access journalism", saying whatever's needed to keep her access to her subject.
So, in Trump's case that just makes her a tool.
Also worth noting she has family with Trump/Kushner relationships. The NYT is reprehensible for letting her cover Trump at all given her conflicts of interest. Not to mention her general inability to actually report the news.
The real problem is this: In a recent interview of Haberman, she was asked why Trump behaves the way he does - defying regulators, breaking the law, getting favorable treatment from officials because he'd given them money, working the courts, etc.
Her reply was, in essence, "There a lot of shady stuff that takes place in New York City, making it an environment where Trump could thrive".
The problem? The New York Times failed to inform the nation that NYC is a moral cesspool in many quarters and Trump is a byproduct.
The New York Times held their tongue. I'd say they did it for non-journalistic reasons. Didn't want to sully the city's reputation. Focus on Hillary's emails instead. That a newspaper would do that is a disgrace.
The problem with that narrative is that Trump didn't thrive. At all. Run out of town on a rail after he'd stiffed enough people and lost enough dough is more like it.
Kevin's framing in the original post seems completely incorrect. I don't recall anyone saying that Habermans book/effort is bad because if only she had shared this one piece of information, it alone would have changed everything.
Then again, I didn't frame it that way. Not even close.
It would have been really funny if Trump *had* tried to stay, and had been arrested for trespassing.
Bethby30 and cephalopod get closest to what's really graveled my butt about trump coverage since he became primarily a political figure.
It's a combination effect-- for veteran NY journos he was just a harmless celebrity gasbag who'd been around forever. For straight political reporters who started to cover him in 2015 he was another pol they had to treat as if what he said is the same thing as what he "believed" (check out sometime how often they characterize what politicians *say* with verbs that describe inner states of belief). And for anchors and producers (and a lot of voters) he was Mark Burnett's fantasy depiction of him on The Apprentice who could draw big responsive crowds and because he wasn't really a *real* politician was somebody you could cover endlessly because of course he could never actually *win* an election, only politicians can do that.
Billions in free air time came his way in 2015 and 2016. Then all through his term most political reporters never worked out that "believe" just isn't a category with him at all. It isn't there in him, it's just missing. So covering him that way has no meaning.
The thing is, access journalism is based entirely on what people say. With most of humanity it's an easy script-- X said *that* in public, said *this* in private and now I can let you in on it like an insider if you shell out for it. Booby Woodward has made a tidy fortune doing that.
The specific problem Kevin says "lefties" have with Haberman, the quote about squatting in the White House, would be kind of trivial except for 1/6. But it's a stand-in. It stands in for years of frustration with standard media coverage patterns applied to somebody who can't be honestly covered that way if we care about what happens to the country.
And her book, tediously, is yet another of the hackneyed public statement/private statement contrast catalogs that are all based on the politics-coverage standard idea that when a politician says something, it's supposed to spring from deep innermost wells of feeling and thought and consideration and belief.
You can do that with Clinton, you can do that with the bushes, you can do that with most pols *because they accept that same premise about the words they say*. You simply can't do that with somebody who doesn't have the category "what I believe."
And that's what I think is the mismatch with these tell-all books that are specifically about trump, and I think people are increasingly frustrated by it. That frustration underlies a lot of the reaction to Haberman as the most recent example. (I mean, I've always found her kind of sleazy and self-important whenever I've seen her as a talking head, but that's a different rant.)
Woodward was savvy enough to do his while trump was still in the White House so the method had some salience and shock value. Now that he's out, though, frustration over the coverage method can come to the fore.