He gets competitive with everybody
The Guardian talks to Maggie Haberman:
The 45th president lived down to her expectations. She was on the receiving end of both his insatiable desire for attention and his poison-pen responses to critical coverage. A month after taking office, Trump, while developing a symbiotic relationship with Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News channel, branded the New York Times and other outlets “the enemy of the American people”.
Haberman comments: “He has endangered journalists with that language and that language has been used by authoritarians in other countries to legitimise anti-press crackdowns. I don’t think Donald Trump has any sense of what the role of the free press is in a democracy. None.”
Naturally not. It’s not the kind of thing that interests or concerns him. He’s very flat in that way – very thin, diminished, airless. His interests are few and trivial and shallow.
Was there anything, amid the four-year madness of all caps tweets, hirings and firings, insults and lies that shocked even her? 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.”
In a way that’s part of his flatness. If he had any mind, if he knew how to think, he wouldn’t be competitive with everybody, because he would understand the value of knowledge and expertise. Having an empty brain, he can’t understand how medical experts could know more than he does about medical issues.
Some White House alumni have been condemned for cashing in by writing memoirs. Haberman herself has been accused of holding back pearls of news for her book rather than publishing them in the Times immediately. Critics seized on its revelation that, following his defeat by Joe Biden in the 2020 election, Trump told an aide: “I’m just not going to leave.” His state of denial culminated in a deadly insurrection by a mob of his supporters at the US Capitol on January 6.
Political consultant Steve Schmidt tweeted: “Was it important information for the public to know Trump said he wasn’t leaving after losing an election? Yes. Was this information deliberately concealed for an economic reason that took higher precedence than the truth and the public right to know? YES.”
Haberman flatly denies the charge, saying that she would have published the story if she could have confirmed it at the time but she only nailed it down long after Trump left office. When, during research for the book, she did land a scoop about Trump apparently trying to flush documents down a White House toilet, she alerted the Times and printed it right away.
“Books take time. They’re a process of going back and interviewing people again and revisiting scenes that have happened. I turned to this project in earnest after February 2021 and the second impeachment trial. My goal was to get confirmed, reportable information in print as quick as possible and, if I had known these things in real time, and had them confirmed, I would have published them.”
For Confidence Man she spoke to 250 people, some of whom were more willing to speak for a book than a here-today-gone-tomorrow news story.
I saw a lot of those “Haberman saved the biggest stories for her book” rants, and wondered if they were fair or not. (The same criticism is made of Bob Woodward.) It’s good to see some arguments from the other direction.
It’s important that journalists be careful and conscientious, particularly in an age of misinformation when people make stuff up and float it as truth. They need to be better than Trump’s laughable “People are saying” level of “corroboration.” The people I find unforgiveable and irresponsible are those holding cabinet level positions who knew Trump was a danger because they were actual witnesses rather than sources, yet “saved it for the book.”
It’s especially important with Trump, because the “Both sides are just as bad, and that’s why it’s okay that I support the Neo-Nazis because I don’t like inflation” crowd will seize upon any excuse to discount any and all information critical of the Great Orange One. Sadly, a single false (or even merely unproven) story just gives them cover to declare it all part of the Great Conspiracy. (See also: The reports that Trump had been videotaped having sex with underage prostitutes by Russian intelligence; even though it comported with everything we knew about the man, the odds of it ever actually being proven seemed low, since Putin had–and has–better use for Trump than that. So I was worried, correctly, that repeating the story as heavily as it was meant that we’d be hearing Trumpeteers respond to every allegation against him with, “Oh, just like that supposed Pee-Pee Tape that never came out, right?”)
Before I read Steve Schmidt’s Twitter thread, I did not have an opinion, but comments on his thread reminded me that Trump not leaving office was a pubic discussion circa the November 2020 election, and that makes Schmidt’s claim against Maggie Haberman and the media look like bullshit. I can add:
• I just did an Internet search for Trump not leaving, and I got hits from 2022 and 2020. The hits from 2022 are for the new book. The hits from 2020 are for the public discussion circa the November 2020 election, including:
• HBO posted Trump’s Not Leaving on YouTube in September 2020, where Bill Maher said so in April 13, 2018 / May 4, 2018 / June 8, 2018 / June 15, 2018 / August 17, 2018 / September 28, 2018 / November 9, 2018 / November 16, 2018 / August 2, 2019 / October 18, 2019 / November 1, 2019 / January 17, 2020 / January 24, 2020 / April 3, 2020 / May 1, 2020 / August 7, 2020.