The Cobra (Maureen Dowd) has been superceded at The New York Times by White House reporter, Maggie Haberman. Dowd writes Op-Ed essays for the NY Fishwrap that appear weekly (most recently May 27, 2017) and Haberman's articles appear with much greater frequency. Daily trumps (no pun intended) weekly. If this is a (fair & balanced) profile of the teller of the tale, so be it.
[x Elle]
Wanna Know What Donald Trump Is Really Thinking? Read Maggie Haberman
By Rachael Combe
TagCrowd cloud of the following piece of writing
The man with the orange hair is making a scene. 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 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. Intense is one of the words friends and colleagues most often use to describe her. 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.
"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.
Like the president she covers, Haberman, 43, is a born-and-bred New Yorker and slightly ill at ease in Washington. She commutes to DC several times a week from her home in Brooklyn, where she lives with her husband and three young children. 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.
A lot of people would let it go, but Haberman signals to the hostess. Would she tell the man to "stop screaming"? A few minutes later, here he comes. He's tall with an athletic build and a military-style cut to his orange hair. He stands looking down at her, swaying a little, slightly walleyed, but he still has a big-man swagger. For a moment, it seems he might be coming over to tell off the reporter. I reflexively tense up; she doesn't flinch. "Can I join you guys? Are you doing an interview?" he asks, pointing at the recorder between us. He's hitting on her.
"Haven't you joined us already?" Maggie parries, her face inscrutable. The man is, it appears, too drunk to be able to discern if she's flirting or annoyed. "Can I come back?" he asks, uncertainly.
When Haberman demurs, politely but without apology, he is momentarily stumped. "Okay, well…fist bump?" he says, holding out his fist. She leaves it hanging for a moment—panic flashes across his face—but then gives him a bump. He is elated. "You're pretty!" he yelps like a sixth grader sent our way on a dare, and dashes off.
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. 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? Haberman reported and wrote it with her frequent collaborator, Glenn Thrush. The time Trump called the Times to blame the collapse of the Obamacare repeal on the Democrats? It was Haberman he dialed. When he accused former national security adviser Susan Rice of committing crimes, and defended Fox News' Bill O'Reilly against the sexual harassment claims that would soon end his career at the network? Haberman and Thrush again, with their colleague Matthew Rosenberg. 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. 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.
Trump frequently complains about Haberman's coverage. 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." But no matter what Haberman writes about Trump, he has never frozen her out. Slate called her Trump's "snake charmer"; New Yorker editor in chief David Remnick recently likened Trump to her "ardent, twisted suitor." "I didn't care for that metaphor," Haberman says. She finds the framing of her relationship with the president in romantic terms "facile." No one suggests her male colleagues are "wooing" Trump.
While the president and the reporter couldn't seem more different—Trump, 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 telling—the points at which their histories and personalities converge are revealing about both the media and the president himself. Trump wants what she can give him access to—a kind of status he's always craved in a newspaper that, she says, "holds an enormously large place in his imagination." Haberman, for her part, has become a front-page fixture and a Fourth Estate folk hero. "This is a symbiotic relationship," says an administration official. "Part of the reason" Haberman is so read in the Times "is because she is writing about Donald Trump."
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. Haberman's father, Clyde, is a Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times reporter, and her mother, Nancy, is a publicity powerhouse at Rubenstein—a communications firm founded by Howard Rubenstein, whose famous spinning prowess Trump availed himself of during various of his divorce and business contretemps. (Nancy worked on projects for Trump's business but says she never met him.)
Clyde and Nancy met at the tabloid New York Post—Clyde was a metro reporter there, and Nancy was a "copy boy" (what the Post called its entry-level cub reporters back then). Maggie grew up on the Upper West Side, attending PS 75 and the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, a private school in the Bronx. 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. Pictures of the incident show Haberman talking nonstop as an uncharacteristically silent Koch stares at her, slightly astonished. Clyde covered Trump very sporadically in the 1980s and '90s. 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.
Haberman graduated in 1996 from Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied creative writing and psychology. She tried to get work in magazines, but she ended up bartending at Cleopatra's Needle, a jazz club on the Upper West Side frequented by Columbia University students, before eventually landing a job at the Post as a "copy kid" (the new politically correct term at the paper). Haberman says she'd had no interest in journalism up to this point. She wrote fiction. "Short fiction, always somewhat curiously resembling my own life," she says. "The news was something my dad did." It was simply desperation for a job other than bartending that led her to newspapers. "She's like Michael Corleone," Thrush says, "sucked into the family business." (Both her brother, Zach, and her husband, Dareh Gregorian, work at the New York Daily News.)
Mostly, copy kids at the Post did errands and administrative work, but once a week they would be named "Josephine reporter" or "Joe reporter" of the day and sent out to learn the ropes. Stu Marques, then metro editor of the paper, hired Haberman and oversaw her early training. "In the beginning, you're going to a lot of crime scenes. You're going to see if people were killed," Marques says. "We were pretty demanding in terms of getting quotes, good-quality ones"—which, in tabloid terms, means they have to be memorable and true—"and getting them fast." He noticed right away that Haberman had talent. By 1999, Marques put Haberman on the City Hall beat, where she covered then-mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Trump friend.
In those days, the future president was a fixture in Page Six, the Post's gossip column. In the midst of his second divorce, from Marla Maples, Trump was a maestro of controlling his tabloid image, calling in tidbits about himself. Haberman was learning the same art—how to "punch through" in a daily news cycle, as New York Times political reporter and frequent collaborator Alexander Burns puts it. The quick-hit rhythm that Trump and Haberman were both fine-tuning teed them up perfectly for today's Twitter-paced news environment. "Maggie's whole career has been about grabbing people by the lapels," Burns says. She believes in the power of breaking incremental news—not holding every-thing back for a long read. 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."
It was at City Hall that she met Thrush, who was working at the New York tabloid Newsday. At first Thrush didn't like her, mistaking her voraciousness for shtick. "My enduring image of her is, she's standing outside the [press] van, she has a cigarette already lit in one hand, she's lighting a second one because she's forgotten that she has the first one lit, right? And she's got a BlackBerry and a flip phone going at the same time. And I'm like, This is total bullshit, this is not a real person, nobody is this way," Thrush recalls. Over time, however, as Haberman did not get beat, did not get beat, he realized she was for real. 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. (The first time she quoted Trump in a piece was in 2006: "Real-estate mogul Donald Trump talked up Clinton as the next president in Florida on Friday night, reportedly saying at a state GOP fund-raiser, 'She's a brilliant woman and she's going to be a very, very formidable candidate.... Absolutely I think she can win, especially if the war's still going on.' " The next time Haberman wrote about him was in 2009—"Terror Tent Down at Camp Trump" was the headline—when Trump allowed Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi to pitch a Bedouin-style tent on the lawn of his estate in Bedford, New York.)
In hindsight, Haberman was building a reservoir of knowledge and contacts that would make her probably the best-sourced reporter of the 2016 campaign. 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. Her expertise wasn't just Trump—it was the Trump psyche.
Haberman jumped to Politico in 2010, where she covered him full-bore for the first time; he was then flirting with the idea of joining the 2012 Republican primary and beginning to spread the lie that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Three years later, she moved to the Times as it beefed up its political staff in advance of the 2016 campaign. 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.
It's why he deals with her, Haberman says: "Longevity, just being around him a long time, is something he values." 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. "The Triborough and Empire State view of Trump is very different from the national view of Trump," she points out. "His whole thing has always been to be accepted among the New York elites, whom he sort of preemptively sneers at—that 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 know, he plopped himself down on Fifth Avenue"—a reference to the 58-story Trump Tower—"and he still was not treated seriously by New York's business elite. I would argue he is now occupying the most expensive and valuable real estate in the country. And he is still surrounded by people who don't take him seriously, who he knows do not value him. And laugh at him."
While speaking on a New York Times Women in the World panel at Lincoln Center in April to a very Trump-unfriendly crowd (Nikki Haley, Trump's ambassador to the United Nations, was booed during her interview with Greta Van Susteren before Haberman came onstage), she kept repeating basic facts about Trump—that he has been on both sides of most issues, that he's influenced by the last person he spoke to—and getting huge laughs from the audience. "I'm actually not trying to be funny," Haberman said, correcting them, and, when they continued to laugh, insisting, "Again, I'm not doing a comedy line."
Once, in July 2015, she did laugh, on "This Week With George Stephanopoulos," at something Democratic congressman Keith Ellison said about Trump having "momentum" going into the primaries. Haberman says her mirth had to do with the ridiculousness of talking momentum so early in the campaign; Trump took it as her mocking his chances of winning the Republican nomination. He's brought up the moment repeatedly over the past two years, including during Haberman's recent Oval Office interview with him. She says they were talking about infrastructure when, "out of nowhere," he raised the "This Week" laugh.
"You're going to bring this up every time, aren't you?" she says she told him. He "kind of chuckled" and replied, "It's like therapy."
Haberman is growing weary of the DC establishment's seeming inability to metabolize the president's personality. "There has been a very protracted shocked stage in Washington, and I think people have to move past that. Because otherwise you're just never going to be able to cover him," she says. "Every moment cannot be, 'Wow! Can you believe what he just did?' Yes, I can! Because he is the same person he was during the campaign."
Her measured stance infuriates Trump's detractors, who harangue her on Twitter for "normalizing" the president. 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.
As Twitter blew up as Trump compounded the backlash against Comey's dismissal with an incredible series of missteps, Haberman shot out an exasperated tweet of her own: "What is amazing is capacity of people who watched the campaign to be surprised by what they are seeing. Trump is 70. Ppl don't change." She echoed the same thought to me in email dispatches as she and her colleagues furiously traded scoops with the Washington Post last week. "I'm really not surprised. He is who he is and he's not going to change. And that's going to mean certain situations are fraught. 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. Just as he didn't back down after being accused of sexual assault, she says he is unlikely to walk away from this fight or resign. "I do not think he is enjoying the job particularly, and that is based on reporting," she says. "But I also know he can't allow himself to ever quit." 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. She doesn't see any climactic resolution to the Trump saga coming anytime soon.
When Trump gave an undisciplined press conference a few weeks into his presidency, the DC press and pols were comparing it to late-stage Nixon, Thrush says. But he and Haberman say it reminds them of New York politics; they see Trump's presidency more as a "national mayoralty…it's got that scale, it has that informality," Thrush says. "And it's not just any mayoralty; it's a late-'80s, early '90s New York mayoralty." Adds Haberman, "Some Ed Koch. A lot of Rudy Giuliani."
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. She is not a fan of "SNL"'s impression of Kellyanne Conway as a psychopathic fame whore. (But, she says, Melissa McCarthy's Sean Spicer portrayal more accurately captures him.) And probably because her mother is a publicist, she doesn't view Trump's press flacks, or flacks in general, as the enemy. "I used to really cringe at the way my colleagues would talk to spokespeople," she said. One communications staffer after another told me that they appreciate the fact that she never blindsides them. "Maggie doesn't camouflage. She's perfectly willing to walk like a redcoat into the middle of the field and let everyone know she's there because she's going to get [her story]," says Kevin Madden, a Republican communications veteran who has worked for John Boehner, George W. Bush, and Mitt Romney. 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 morning—a practice some journalists follow that Haberman calls "the stupidest thing I've ever heard of. They're going to lose [their access] anyway," she says. "What do they think—that it's going in a secret newspaper?"
And while there are still hard feelings toward the Times from Hillary Clinton operatives and voters—they complain that the paper obsessed over Clinton's e-mail scandal but failed to give commensurate ink to Trump's ties to Russia and potential conflicts of interest, among other subjects—multiple people I spoke to who worked for Clinton are careful to draw a distinction between Haberman and the institution of the Times.
The first time I met Haberman, we were in the airy, modern cafeteria of the New York Times building in Manhattan. She was on her phone. She was also on her laptop. She was texting, taking calls, e-mailing, and Gchatting with colleagues and sources. Her daughter was home sick from school with a fever. She had a story that was about to go live on nytimes.com. CNN, for whom she is a political analyst, called. "I'm wearing a sweatshirt, and my hair is in a bun," she told the producer. She suggested a colleague to go on TV in her stead. She was thinking aloud about her schedule—she doesn't keep an actual calendar, not on paper, not on her phone; it's all in her head. James Carville wanted her to come to Louisiana to talk to a class, but her kids were about to go on school vacation. The phone rang, and she started laughing when she looked at her iPhone display. "Speak of the devil," she said into the phone. Through it all, she never missed a beat in our conversation. It was like watching someone juggle fire while standing on a tightrope.
Friends and colleagues say this is her standard operating procedure. "She is literally always doing four things," says her friend and former New York Post colleague Annie Karni. Haberman once said in an interview that she talked to 50 people a day. Not true, says Risa Heller, a spokesperson for Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner: "She speaks to 100 people a day." 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.
Brian Fallon, who was a campaign spokesperson for Clinton, says that Haberman was in touch with him and his staff so often that it was like she'd been assigned to cover them. "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?' Because she was literally talking to 16 people within our campaign at the same time."
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. She's called me as she was driving—swearing and running late—between an errand at the American Girl doll store and a dinner party. She's e-mailed me from the NYPD tow pound—a place she said she'd already visited twice that month. She almost never turns her phone off. "She's got it with her at all times," says her husband, Dareh Gregorian. She'll wake up in the middle of the night and, instead of rolling over and going back to sleep, pick up her phone and start working.
Last June, Haberman got the tip that Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski had been fired while she was sitting in the audience at her son's kindergarten graduation. 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. Her son didn't have school after the ceremony, so Haberman brought him with her to a politics meeting at the Times. "She came into the Page One conference room, and there was this huge round of applause," Parker says. "Part of it was for her son graduating kindergarten, and part of it was for Maggie for breaking this awesome scoop."
"Maggie's magic is that she's the dominant reporter on the [White House] beat, and she doesn't even live in Washington. She was the dominant Trump reporter on the campaign, and she didn't travel with him. She's so well-sourced and so well-connected that she doesn't need to," Karni says. "It's like she's in the building, but she's not even in the city. You don't even know where she is—she could be anywhere. Like, floating in the sky."
In late April, Haberman spoke on (yet another) panel, this one at the 92nd Street Y, with her colleague Alex Burns. She wore an iteration of her usual uniform: black pants, black jacket, reddish-pink blouse, and an air of bone-crushing fatigue. The audience was, as always, hanging on her every word, hungry to have her translate Trump into someone they could understand. One attendee chastised another for looking at her phone, saying that its light was distracting, as though we were all at a cliffhanger movie.
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 offers—with specific details that are more enlightening and perhaps more damning—that 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.
Greenfield introduced Haberman by saying that he couldn't remember a reporter having established a relationship with a president quite like hers with Trump. The next day, I called him—he's an old family friend of the Habermans and has known Maggie since she was about three days old—to ask him to elaborate. 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. Lyndon Johnson gave preference to Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Walter Lippmann, and Lippmann had once gone so far as to secretly write part of a speech for Johnson—and then write a story praising the speech. "The difference is, Maggie is in no sense carrying water for Trump," Greenfield said. "And yet Trump seems driven to connect with her."
When Haberman interviewed Trump in the Oval Office this April, he was making his usual complaint about how unfair her coverage is. Haberman did not let it slide. "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.
Trump responded, jokingly, "Really? That must have been a long time ago. I'm having a hard time remembering it." Some of his aides laughed.
Haberman pressed her point: "It was two months ago. It was a story about Mar-a-Lago." Trump conceded this was true and the story was about an "8."
"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. I do not want you to come away with that impression. I just wanted to make the point that we were engaged in some revisionist history."
Trump has also sent her his famous press clippings with Sharpie notes on them, mostly with criticisms, but at least once with praise. Lately he's gone digital (sort of): He'll write the note on the clip, and then have White House Director of Strategic Communications Hope Hicks take a picture of the note and e-mail it to her. Kellyanne Conway defended Haberman last April in an interview, calling her "a very hard-working, honest journalist who happens to be a very good person." Hicks echoed Conway, e-mailing me a few days later that Haberman was "a true professional."
Haberman's bullshit detector is appreciated by partisans on both sides: Even if they can't spin her, they know the other side won't be able to spin her either. "You can change her mind," Madden says. "You can offer perspective, you can offer insight, you can offer details, but they've got to be locked down."
Haberman has reached the point in her career where sources are now chasing her, instead of the other way around—lying to her risks banishment and access to her news-promulgating prowess. "If you're going to come at her," says a Democratic operative, "you've got to come correct."
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. "This is a president who is always selling. When I speak to him, it's because he's trying to sell me," Haberman tells the audience at the 92nd Street Y. "And so he will take this chair and say to you, 'This is actually a table.' "
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. "When we as a culture can't agree on a simple, basic fact set—that is very scary. That [Trump] is unconcerned by that, I think, is the big issue," she says. "This is a very precarious moment, in terms of what anyone can believe in. What erodes that is very dangerous." But effective salesmanship must be based in credibility—an area in which his administration has suffered significant set-backs in recent days. "So much of his approach is bending others to the way he sees things," she says. "I'm not sure the objective facts will let him do that this time."
Her father, Clyde, says he likes to think that honest journalism is "hardwired" into her. "She grew up in an environment where journalism that was as accurate as humanly possible was practically a religion," he says. These days, in her profession, the truth is a demanding god. "There's an enormous personal price that she pays, that people pay when they devote so much of themselves to this," Thrush says. "What you're seeing with Maggie Haberman is, you're watching one of the greatest people to ever do this job, giving a maximum effort."
When I tell Haberman what her colleagues say about her, she shrugs, like she's being complimented for breathing. "I'm just trying not to get beat," she says. "That's all I care about." She catches herself. "No, that's not all I care about. I care about getting it right. I care about telling a thorough story." # # #
[Rachael Combe is the Editor-at-Large at Elle magazine. Prior to joining Elle in 2000, she was a features editor at Glamour magazine. Combe received a BA (English language and literature) and an MA (journalism) from Columbia University.]
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