Maggie Haberman

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“The Evening Tore A Painful New Wound”

September 3, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Donald Trump, Father Coughlin reborn as Yucko the Clown, has in the past couple of weeks often tried to keep his Mussolini-esque tendencies under wraps, fitfully feigning concern for key minority voting blocs–the Birther as civil rights activist, President Arpaio as Mexican diplomat–before abruptly reverting to his rancidness as he did with his appalling immigration speech in Arizona. 

Some in the media have already given in to judging Trump merely on how his depraved comments play in the polls. From T.A. Frank at Vanity Fair:

“So how did Trump’s speech, delivered at a Phoenix rally, really go? No one can yet say. Ultimately, the only relevant measurement is whether it moved his numbers up or down relative to those of his opponent…”

Yes, when it comes to the horse race, numbers are the only relevant measurement, and the horse race is of paramount importance. But just because winning by appealing to the sun-less side of the American eclipse is the only concern of Trump, that doesn’t mean his psychotic proclamations don’t mean anything on their own. They do. They’re despicable, and there’s utility in pointing that out independent of their efficacy or lack thereof.

The Phoenix speech was not received merrily within the Republican National Committee, which was already at odds with the campaign. Two excerpts follow about the continuous internecine war. 

From Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman at the New York Times:

The Republican National Committee had high hopes that Donald J. Trump would deliver a compassionate and measured speech about immigration on Wednesday, and prepared to lavish praise on the candidate on the party’s Twitter account.

So when Mr. Trump instead offered a fiery denunciation of migrant criminals and suggested deporting Hillary Clinton, Reince Priebus, the party chairman, signaled that aides should scrap the plan, and the committee made no statement at all.

The evening tore a painful new wound in Mr. Trump’s relationship with the Republican National Committee, imperiling his most important remaining political alliance.

Mr. Priebus and his organization have been steadfastly supportive of Mr. Trump, defending him in public and spending millions of dollars to aid him. But the collaboration between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Mr. Priebus’s committee has grown strained over the last month, according to six senior Republicans with detailed knowledge of both groups, some of whom asked to speak anonymously for fear of exacerbating tensions.•

From Alex Isenstadt at Politico:

Late last week, with Labor Day and the final stretch of the 2016 campaign approaching, Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, met with Republican National Committee brass — including chief of staff Katie Walsh and political director Chris Carr — in New York City. Kushner, who has in many respects assumed the role of campaign manager, asked a series of direct questions to the GOP officials — all surrounding the troubles the party was having in deploying field staffers, opening up swing-state headquarters, and establishing field offices in battlegrounds that will decide the election.

Those present for the meeting, and those briefed on it, insisted there were no fireworks, no drag-out fights. But they said Kushner’s questions reflected a growing realization within Trump’s team that for all the party’s talk about implementing a major swing-state deployment plan, it hasn’t yet materialized.

For weeks, Republican officials and operatives have groused about a dearth of campaign infrastructure in battlegrounds across the country — a state of affairs that could have an impact on GOP candidates up and down the ballot. But like many aspects of the Trump campaign, the deployment plan has been wracked by confusion, false starts and a lack of quick decision-making. On Aug. 18, Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, came to Trump’s Alexandria, Virginia, headquarters for a day of meetings. He left ready to finalize a series of decisions.

But the next morning, Manafort, under withering scrutiny surrounding his work overseas, abruptly quit. His departure created a chain reaction, delaying the talks for days on end.•

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“They Described Their Nominee Is Exhausted, Frustrated And Bewildered”

August 13, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump, the Bernie Goetz as a business mogul, may not be merely ignorant, immoral and bigoted, but perhaps he’s also seriously mentally ill. Who knows? He certainly behaves that way, in a manner that goes beyond just a deeply narcissistic person long sealed inside an ugly-as-sin echo chamber. 

At Deadline Hollywood, Greg Evans reports on Robert De Niro comparing Trump to another unhinged New Yorker, the fictional Travis Bickle:

“What (Trump) has been saying is totally crazy, ridiculous, stuff that shouldn’t be even… he is totally nuts,” De Niro said. “One of the things to me was just the irony at the end [of Taxi Driver],” De Niro said about the moment in the film when Bickle “is back driving a cab, celebrated, which is kind of relevant in some way today too…People like Donald Trump who shouldn’t be where he is so… God help us.”

One of the odder things about this Baba Booey of an election season is Republicans clinging to the belief that Trump can hit some sort of magical reset button, making not only his heretofore disgusting behavior vanish but also disappearing all his horrid character traits, as if what might be remedied through decades of therapy could be cured in a campaign war room in minutes.

In a New York Times article, Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman, who’ve done brilliant work throughout the election, write of the hideous hotelier’s foundering efforts at reinvention. An excerpt:

Advisers who once hoped a Pygmalion-like transformation would refashion a crudely effective political showman into a plausible American president now increasingly concede that Mr. Trump may be beyond coaching. He has ignored their pleas and counsel as his poll numbers have dropped, boasting to friends about the size of his crowds and maintaining that he can read surveys better than the professionals. 

In private, Mr. Trump’s mood is often sullen and erratic, his associates say. He veers from barking at members of his staff to grumbling about how he was better off following his own instincts during the primaries and suggesting he should not have heeded their calls for change.

He broods about his souring relationship with the news media, calling Mr. Manafort several times a day to talk about specific stories. Occasionally, Mr. Trump blows off steam in bursts of boyish exuberance: At the end of a fund-raiser on Long Island last week, he playfully buzzed the crowd twice with his helicopter. 

But in interviews with more than 20 Republicans who are close to Mr. Trump or in communication with his campaign, many of whom insisted on anonymity to avoid clashing with him, they described their nominee as exhausted, frustrated and still bewildered by fine points of the political process and why his incendiary approach seems to be sputtering.•

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“A Sense Of Paranoia Is Growing Among His Campaign Staff Members”

May 27, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Donald Trump, Chairman Mao with a Big Mac, celebrated his GOP nomination by shoveling heart-clogging comfort food into his Sad Clown face, but winning can’t placate a truly miserable person for more than a few minutes. Despite the victory, the candidate’s inner circle is engaged in a Hunger Games-esque contest for power within the campaign while fearing conspiracy from the outside. The ugliness has taken on the paranoia of a cult, not surprising for a campaign based on Identity Politics ugly enough to make Mussolini blush.

From Ashley Parker and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times:

BISMARCK, N.D. — A constant stream of changes and scuffles are roiling Donald J. Trump’s campaign team, including the abrupt dismissal this week of his national political director.

A sense of paranoia is growing among his campaign staff members, including some who have told associates they believe that their Trump Tower offices may be bugged.

And there is confusion among his donors, who want to give money to a “super PAC” supporting Mr. Trump, but have received conflicting signals from top aides about which one to support.

On Thursday, Mr. Trump secured the Republican Party’s nomination for president, a remarkable achievement for a political newcomer. But inside his campaign, the limits of the real estate mogul’s managerial style — reliant on his gut and built around his unpredictable personality — are vividly on display, according to interviews with nearly a dozen Republicans inside and outside of the operation.

Two months after assurances that was the candidate would become “more presidential” and transition to a more unifying phase of his campaign, Mr. Trump continues to act as if the primary is still underway.•

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“I Do Think We Are Operating In A Particularly Post-Truth Moment”

March 1, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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As I’ve mentioned before, I’m in awe of the work the New York Times has done this election season. Yes, I was angry about an early NYT interview with Donald Trump that painted him as a slightly irreverent great-uncle rather than holding him to his racist, fascistic noises, but the daily reports from the trail have been balanced, thoughtful and provocative (in the best sense of the word).

One of the key figures in the coverage has been Maggie Haberman, an excellent journalist who identifies important issues and writes about them from interesting angles. Just yesterday, she published a smart piece about Trump’s reliance on conspiracy theories he unearths by noodling around online. There’s some question as to whether the Times’ stellar work–and facts, in general–are permeating our Reality TV culture, but the news organization has held up its end of the bargain.

Haberman took time from her Super Tuesday for a Reddit Ask Me Anything. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

Of the reporters I read, it seems you and the staff at the NYT were the most measured/cautious to not treat Trump as a “joke” candidate. Did you have any inkling early on that Trump was unlike other burnout candidates a la Herman Cain? To that point, I’m amazed that there are still skeptics within the media and particularly within the GOP that Trump can somehow be stopped — save a brokered convention — as he’s now polling nationally at 49%.

Maggie Haberman:

Hi there – nice to meet you again! Since the first debate I have not thought treating Trump like a “joke” was advisable, given where he was in the polls and given his ability to command media and survive controversies that would have killed other candidates. I also never thought he was a boom-and-bust candidate like Cain because he was a known commodity well ahead of the 2016 campaign cycle. He’s spent years being broadcast into homes of millions of people on The Apprentice, where he sat in a leather chair and looked, well, leaderly. That said, I did not think he would be as dominant as he is now and was skeptical that he could hold this plurality win. I did not think even in November that he was likely to be the nominee. And I misread early on, when he first got in, how strong he would be.

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Question:

Besides Trump, is there anything that surprised you about 2016 election?

Maggie Haberman:

Great question. One surprise has been how little super PACs have mattered. Part of that is because they basically are only useful to air ads, and negative ads still have the most currency. But given the hype about how this was going to be the super PAC election, it hasn’t worked out that way.

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Question:

How has reporting changed given the near fact-free environment we are currently in? Facts matter less than ever.

Maggie Haberman:

I don’t think it’s quite right to say facts have little to no impact. But I do think we are operating in a particularly post-truth moment, as my colleague Michael Barbaro wrote a few months ago. In this primary race, direct contradictions to what candidates have said have mattered little to their supporters in many cases.

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Question:

What is the Republican path to victory at this point? If Trump wins, some have already started to mull a third party and many say they won’t support him. Will they just focus on down ballots? Is there any chance of a big name third party run?

Maggie Haberman:

There’s a chance – Mike Bloomberg is still considering it, and there might be others. But a third party run is logistically really, really hard and expensive, in terms of petitions to get on ballots. Trump could have a path to victory but the refusal to disavow Duke on CNN on Sunday — and while I know he said he had an earpiece problem, he answered Jake Tapper repeatedly and showed no evidence of not hearing the questions — will linger in a general, and makes it easier for other Republicans to criticize him.•

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“It Seemed To Me There Would Be A Moment When Reality Sets In”

October 9, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

As I wrote recently, Donald Trump is an adult baby with no interest in actually being President.

He entered the race impetuously, seeking attention to satisfy his deep and unexamined psychological scars, enjoyed an abundance of cameras over the summer when cable stations needed inexpensive content and focusing on the fascist combover was even cheaper than renting a Kardashian. Now with the new fall TV shows debuting, he’s growing restless, hoping his political program will get cancelled, reliably mentioning an exit strategy in every interview. Even the one-man brand himself is probably in disbelief that his prejudiced bullshit and faux populism have catapulted him for this long over his fellow candidates, weak though they are, a one-eyed racist in the land of the blind.

His continuing campaign is comeuppance richly earned by the GOP, with its bottomless supply of shamelessness, the party’s statistical leader going rogue not so much in policy but in language, stripping away the Gingrich-ish coding from the mean-spirited message meant to appeal to the worst among us and within us. He’s muddied the waters and now wants to swim ashore.

From Maggie Haberman at the New York Times:

In interviews this week, Mr. Trump insisted he was in the race to win, and took aim at “troublemakers” in the news media who, he said, were misrepresenting his remarks. “I’m never getting out,” he insisted Friday on MSNBC.

Mr. Trump keeps noting that he still leads in every major Republican poll and is in a political position that others would envy, and he says he will spend the money to keep his candidacy alive. But he conceded in another interview: “To me, it’s all about winning. I want to win — whereas a politician doesn’t have to win because they’ll just keep running for office all their life.”

He said he had not contemplated a threshold for what would cause him to get out of the race. And he noted that his crowds were even larger than those of Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who is drawing thousands to rallies in seeking the Democratic nomination.

While Mr. Trump still leads major national polls and surveys in early voting states, that lead has recently shrunk nationally, and the most recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showed his support eroding in New Hampshire, the first primary state. His recent comments have lent credence to the views of political observers who had long believed the perennially self-promoting real estate mogul would ultimately not allow himself to face the risk of losing.

“Even back in the summer, when he was somewhat defying gravity, somewhat defying conventional wisdom, it seemed to me there would be a moment when reality sets in,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican political strategist who is based in California. “He would not leave himself to have his destiny settled by actual voters going to the polls or the caucuses.”

Mr. Stutzman was skeptical that Mr. Trump would be willing to endure the grind of a campaign needed to amass enough delegates to make him a factor at the Republican convention in July.•

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