Maggie Haberman on the Making of Donald Trump

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, HOST: Now, immigration plagues every world leader. And President Donald Trump was no exception. Following President Obama who was known as deporter in chief for a while. Trump actually campaigned on overt hostility to migrants. To understand former president’s motivations, Pulitzer Prize winning Maggie Haberman chronicles Trump’s life in her new book, “Confidence Man”. And she joins Walter Isaacson to discuss his rise and life post-presidency.

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WALTER ISAACSON, CNN HOST: Thank you, Christiane. And Maggie Haberman, welcome to the show.

MAGGIE HABERMAN, AUTHOR, “CONFIDENCE MAN”: Thank you for having me.

ISAACSON: Well, congratulations, your book comes out this week. And it’s already making a big splash. One of the things that interests me is you’re long-standing, odd, relationship with Donald Trump. I mean, you were in the “New York Post” covering things in the 1990s. He once called you his psychiatrist. Tell me about why he gives you so many interviews when you’ve been such a strong and tough reporter about him.

HABERMAN: Well, Walter, Donald Trump doesn’t experience press coverage the way other politicians do, or really almost any other humans does. You know, I have covered him as I have any other subject over a very long period of time. And yes, he did his line in our third interview for this book that I’m like his psychiatrist. He treats everyone as psychiatrist. So, I don’t think this is specific to me or special to me and I think it was meant to flatter. But I think that he is so craving attention, and so desiring of media coverage in holding the media’s gaze that he does not experience coverage that other politicians would consider negative or unflattering. It just doesn’t always affect him the way it would somebody else. So, he keeps coming back to people. And part of his fascination, really — I mean, with me, in part, most of it is about “The New York Times”. He is really obsessed with the paper and has been for many decades. I’m just the reporter that covers him most often.

ISAACSON: You had three interviews, you just said. You went down to Mar-a- Lago, Bedminster. What’s it like when you go into his presence and have to interview him?

HABERMAN: The first time that I saw him was in March of 2021. And he was in sales mode. He was charming. He was engaging. Now, remember, Walter, this was, you know, just over two months after the January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol. And he was trying to almost undo that stain on his legacy and on the underpinnings of democracy in this country. When I saw him again a few weeks later, he was not in a good mood. I think for a variety of reasons that had nothing to do with our interview but it came out in the interview. He was cranky. He was complaining again about 2020 in a way he really hadn’t been in the previous interview. And he was clearly going backwards in his fixation. By the third time I saw him, he seemed happy to be engaging with a journalist for any length of time. I felt like it could’ve been anybody. And he was just happy to be talking.

ISAACSON: You asked him almost out of the blue, did you take documents? This was before the big revelations that he had documents stashed in Mar-a- Lago. What was he thinking then?

HABERMAN: It was an interesting moment. I asked him on a lark whether he had taken documents because he was so obsessed with things like those letters from Kim Jong-un and other world leaders, depending on who they were. His first answer to my question which was, did you take a memento documents? I used the word, memento. And he said, nothing of great urgency, no. Which we now know was not true. But then he seemed to want to brag. And he, sort of, leaned in and said, you know, we had the letters, the KJU letters. And I said, oh, you got to take those with you? And he kept talking. And I said, ha or wow or something like that. And he clearly registered my surprise. And then he said, no, no. Those are in the archives. But we have great things. So, he went from quick denial, immediately, to seeming to want to brag. And then when he saw my reaction, pulling back.

ISAACSON: You know, one of the rules from biographers of — especially, of strong men is that it’s all about dad. To what extent is that true of Donald Trump?

HABERMAN: Donald Trump is no exception to that biography rule. So much of his problems and his particular set of issues begin and end with his father, with Fred Trump, whom he admired, and resented, and feared, and appreciated. All of those emotions. But Fred Trump was known as a particularly aggressive, undermining father. Ivana Trump once described him is brutal in her biography. And that she had, sort of, take a stand against that father in that marriage and that family. And I think that how undermining of his own children, Fred Trump was how tough he was on him. In part has driven this lifelong need of Donald Trump to have a protector. He is singularly focused on people protecting him and fighting for him. Roy Cohn was that. And then he spent the entire presidency looking for another Roy Cohn.

ISAACSON: You talk about the funeral in the book. The funeral of Fred Trump. And it’s so odd because Trump can’t help talking about himself. And relating in terms of — even Giuliani sitting there is saying how weird this is. Tell me about that.

HABERMAN: There is in Donald Trump lore for people around him over a long period of time, people who had attended that funeral or people who heard about it later, the funeral was a seminal moment because Donald Trump got up at this funeral and talked about himself. He talked about, you know, how things have been going so well for him. And he has just been reading a story in the newspaper about how well he was doing or something positive about himself when he learned that his father had passed and how tough this was on him. It was just — not just that he was in competition with his father. But that his father’s passing was only through the lens of himself. And it was so distortive that people in the church were stunned. And Giuliani, in particular, could be heard uttering in expletive in shock by people in nearby pews.

ISAACSON: Tell me about a Ivanka and Jared. First of all, what was Trump’s opinion of them when they’re in the White House? There was something I read in your book about him wanting to get rid of them, his own daughter, from the White House.

HABERMAN: So, part of the concern that Trump had about them being around was in 2017 when the Mueller investigation, special counsel investigation and tip (ph) possible conspiracy between Russians and the Trump campaign in 2016 was really heating up. Jared Kushner was getting a lot of unfavorable attention. Donald Trump never likes when anybody gets negative headlines in his proximity. And there were discussions about having Jared leave. There was no chance that Jared was going to leave and Ivanka Trump’s was going to stay. So, this became a discussion about how they would go. And Trump would complain to other people privately that she had taken on a lot of negative attention for it. He, eventually, came to see John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, and Don McGahn (ph), House counsel, as vehicles to do what he did not want to do, which was to get rid of them. And at one point there was a twit drafted and John Kelly stopped it. Essentially saying, you can’t do this to your — you can’t do this this way. You have got to talk to them. And that conversation does not appear to have ever happened, the tweet was never sent.

ISAACSON: One of the stories about Ivanka Trump in the book is her, a good-looking bible. I mean, Trump didn’t seem to have his own bible. And even when he walks across the square to St. John’s Church during that period, when he’s holding up the bible, he can’t even side it correctly. Tell me about that incident both, you know, Ivanka and for that matter, General Milley and others in that incident.

HABERMAN: That incident, which was June 1, 2020, became a seminal moment in the Trump presidency in that final year. It really helped define much of what happened after in terms of Trump’s relationship to the military. The relationship to the military leaders. And the way that he was perceived by the electorate in his relationship to force. So, that was the day that there were protests that had become very aggressive, around the country but particularly in Washington. A barrier had been pierced near the Treasury Department, the Friday night before that. And this was all in response to the police murder of an unarmed black man named George Floyd in Minnesota. There was a decision made, it was a suggestion by Ivanka that Trump should walk across Lafayette Square, to St. John’s Church where the basement had been set on fire the night before. Now, it’s not clear what he was supposed to do once he got there but she felt that it would be a good visual. Someone then suggested that he should take a bible and he could read from some scripture. So, a hunt was put on for a bible. Someone suggested it should be a pretty bible, that’s what was chosen. The way that its aesthetic was seen as very important. And Trump corralled his cabinet officials and the chairman of the joint chief of staff to walk with him. Many of them did not realize what was happening or what they were doing until it was too later, particularly Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs and Mark Esper, the defense secretary. And Milley, realizing that this was going south as they’re walking, utters a curse word to an aide and departs. But everybody else was caught up in this swarm and Trump has them all posed for a photo-op. but when he takes out that bible, does not read the printed scripture sections that have been given to him. And instead holds it up as if it’s a trophy. And I think upside down. And in order for that photo-op to take place, and you know, officials have insisted there was no causation to this. But prior to Trump walking across the park, protesters were pushed back very aggressively. And the images on TV were very distressing.

ISAACSON: You spoke with more than 250 aides and advisors of Trump. What portrait do they paint of him? I think your report that some of them called him a sophisticated parrot. His chief of staff, Kelly, called him — I think it was, as a fascist, right? Tell me about the portrait that they paint.

HABERMAN: One of the things that is really difficult about capturing Donald Trump is how he compartmentalizes various relationships and acts differently with different people. Now, the public persona is pretty visible is people want to see it. But there are aides who are either, because they are sycophants or because they feel very invested in him, they choose only to see the positive. The sophisticated parrot line was something that people used to say about him in the 2016 campaign because he would just take something he heard, and he would add a little gloss to it or a little something else and he would re-package it as if it was his own but without checking. Without doing any sort of stress testing a bit. In terms of Kelly, Kelly told people that he believed that Trump was having a staffing issue. I mean, Kelly also told people that in the spring of 2017 that Trump would call him all the time and ask his opinion on issues that Kelly knew nothing about. But I think Kelly believed, and Kelly deeply cares about public service. Believed that this was going to be a manageable situation with the right people. And he clearly came to see by the end of 2018 that such a thing did not exist.

ISAACSON: You’ve covered Trump for a long time. What surprised you most that’s in this book that comes out this week?

HABERMAN: I still come back to, Walter, the fact that — you know, when I turned my attention to the book in a real way after his second impeachment trial which ended in early 2021, I think it was February. I — and then I learned that he had been telling people he wasn’t going to leave several —

ISAACSON: He wasn’t going to leave the White House —

HABERMAN: Not going to leave the White House.

ISAACSON: — even on inauguration day.

HABERMAN: And I often wonder, had the riot at the Capitol not happened, what the following two weeks would have looked like. It just remains to me that the peace that I — I can’t quite believe because it was clear that he was thinking in a very, very, dangerous way. And as happened so often with his aides, a bunch of them tried to ignore his comments hoping that he would drop it. Hoping he wouldn’t pull them in further. But it was pretty clear early on that this was going to spiral to a bad place fast, and it did.

ISAACSON: One of the questions about a book such as yours, and it goes way back to when Woodward and Bernstein were doing books like this, is why do you hold things for the book when there are time you should have printed in “The New York Times”?

HABERMAN: Books take time. I wanted this to be a complete picture. A more complicated picture, a more complex and fuller look. And that requires revisiting events that happened. That requires talking to sources again. There are also people who will say different things in the context of talking for a book that they will for a daily news story. I remember specifically asking a while ago before my own book, asking an official who I knew had spoken for a bunch of books, why do people do this? What is the — you know, you wouldn’t tell me this. Why are you — why will you say it for a book but not for a news story? Then the person said, because there’s no immediacy to it. It’s coming out in the distance. I don’t have to think about it. And I found that to be very illustrative of how a lot of people view this. If I have information that is confirmed and reportable, my goal is to get into print as quick as possible. But books take time.

ISAACSON: Mitch McConnell is somebody in the news right now because Trump, just this very weak, has done a scathing attack on Mitch McConnell. Put that in the context of the Mitch McConnell relationship you have in the book and what’s going on this week?

HABERMAN: A relationship that had just, you know, been a marriage of convenience for a very long time that ended when Donald Trump, you know, refused to take responsibility for January 6th and McConnell delivered a speech after the second impeachment ended, which McConnell did not vote in support of convicting him but did excoriate him for helping to create the events that happened at the Capital, which resulted in deaths. That — the relationship has been over since then. McConnell is a useful foil for Trump. He thinks it excites his base. He knows it will get attention, Walter. If he writes racist menacing things on his social media websites, and it has. And he just doesn’t experience these things in a way other people do. So, he has no problem saying something like this because he doesn’t really care about the condemnation. He just cares about getting in the headlines.

ISAACSON: Well, let me read what Trump put on social media — his own social media site this week about Mitch McConnell. Because if you unpack it, which I’m sure you’re better able to do than anybody, it is so revealing of Donald Trump what he says. About how it’s all about him. He said, is McConnell approving of all of those trillions of dollars worth of democrat sponsored bills without even the slightest bit of negotiation because McConnell hates Donald J. Trump? That’s Trump referring to himself in the third person and saying it’s all about him.

HABERMAN: Yes, and in his mind, it is all about him. And in his mind, everything is up or down referring to himself. It matters only in terms of how it relates to him. I’ll tell you, Walter, I don’t talk about this in the book. But one of my memories of covering him that it was so vivid, and this relates to Kushner as well, and Chris Christie, is I was interviewing Trump in the Oval office with colleagues in 2019. And Chris Christie had just published a book that was very critical of Jared Kushner. And I asked Trump about it, you know, your son-in-law got really attacked in this book. And he essentially said, well Christie said nice things about me. And I said, but he didn’t do about your family. And he said, yes, but did you see what he said about me? And that’s ultimately all it comes back to.

ISAACSON: Wow. I know it is hard to tell but go through Trump’s mind on whether he might run again.

HABERMAN: I think he has backed himself into a corner where he has to run again. I think that given all the investigations he’s facing, given the fact that he loses the ability to fund-raise, to instantly be in the news the way he is now and lose attention, I think he has to run. I just don’t think his heart is in it. And maybe that’ll change. But right now, he does not seem as entranced by electoral politics as he once did.

ISAACSON: Maggie Haberman, thank you so much for joining us.

HABERMAN: Thank you.