Encryption | “Dr. Maggie” and Mr. Trump

(New York) “I love being with her. She’s like my psychiatrist. »

Richard Head
Special cooperation

Donald Trump made the comments to advisers in the middle of one of three interviews he gave to reporters. The New York Times Maggie Haberman for her highly anticipated book, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.

The 600-page book, which was released last Tuesday, features sections that have been hotly debated in the media scoops The former president’s double-edged praise of the Trump era was immediately tempered.

“The truth is that he treats all his interlocutors as his psychiatrists,” writes the 2018 winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the highest award for American journalism.

But there is only one Maggie Haberman “D^D Maggie” by one of Donald Trump’s former bosses because of his unique gift of inspiring confidence from sometimes shocked members of Donald Trump’s entourage.

Don who served The New York Times : In 2016, the newspaper published 599 articles with Maggie Haberman’s signature, either alone or with other journalists.

Over the years, we have owed this 48-year-old New Yorker, married and mother of three, immortal images: Donald Trump spending his evenings in a dressing gown watching cable news channels; Donald Trump sought refuge in a White House bunker during a protest against racism in Washington; Donald Trump flushes official documents down the toilet.

Compliments and criticisms

Many of his colleagues have immense admiration for him. But she also has critics who say a certain complacency or myopia about Trump and his entourage prevents her from giving her specifics a broader meaning.

His book is not an answer to his criticisms, but it contains many scoops Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump about being nearly fired by Donald Trump via Twitter, or about the “drug labs” the former president considered bombing Mexico.

In the first half of the book, Maggie Haberman offers historians clues to understanding the extent to which Donald Trump shaped 1970s and 1980s New York, with its corruption, its dysfunction, its racism, its characters, and its tabloids.

Maggie Haberman is well equipped to tell this story. Born in Manhattan to parents who met in a newsroom New York Post. His father, Clyde Haberman, had a long and distinguished career The New York Times. His mother, Nancy Haberman, worked for decades at Rubenstein, the public relations firm that represented the Trumps and the Kushners.

Maggie Haberman got her start in journalism working for two major New York tabloids. Mail And this Daily news.

Who influenced Trump?

In a striking scene from his book, he describes a second meeting between Donald Trump’s former lawyer Roy Cohn, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s right-hand man and Roger Stone during the “witch hunt” against Communists. The younger one became the future president’s political mentor.

“Seated at the end of a long table, shirtless under a silk robe, Cohn looks at the food with his fingers. It features a seated figure to his left, identifying him as ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno,” Haberman writes, referring to the former head of the Genovese Mafia family.

After the introductions, Cohn mentioned to Stone the name of another client of his who helped find a complex for Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign headquarters in New York: Donald Trump.

Roy Cohn, who Trump often lamented after his election to the White House, Haberman recalled, died in 1986 after a life-long battle with AIDS. Stone is still part of Trump’s entourage, as is another New Yorker at the time, Rudolph Giuliani.

Other characters straight out of a Tom Wolfe novel influenced Donald Trump, Haberman argues. George Steinbrenner, the former owner of the Yankees, is one of them, who gave Trump a certain idea of ​​masculinity, especially by firing his managers all the time. A property developer has invented a catchphrase that contributes to the success of a reality TV show Trainee : “You’re fired! »

Trump borrowed from former New York Mayor Ed Koch, who, loudly before Eternal, said his penchant for throwing epithets at the heads of his opponents, “ Lightweight (light weight), which he accepted after wiping himself.

Haberman goes for another bold compromise: Like black preacher Al Sharpton, he is in many respects a “mirror image” to whom Donald Trump has refused to step aside after scandals involving his integrity or decency.

The New York tabloids helped him by convincing him that there was an insatiable public interest in stories about him, whether it was his divorces, his bankruptcies, or his “comebacks.”

New York’s racial divides, according to Haberman, imbued him with an idea he never wavered from: “Hatred should be a civic good. »

‘I want to hate these murderers,’ Trump wrote in 1989, calling for the abolition of the death penalty in New York state in a full-length ad that ran in local newspapers after the attack on a white female jogger in Central Park.

“The dynamics that defined New York City in the 1980s have stayed with Trump for decades,” writes Haberman.

“He’s often frozen in time. “D” diagnosis^D Maggie” seems about right.