(C) Common Dreams
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Donald Trump “Wants to Demonstrate Absolute Power”: Maggie Haberman on Covering a Tumultuous Second Term [1]
['Natalie Korach']
Date: 2025-06-09 12:00:00+00:00
When it comes to Donald Trump, the seemingly final chapter in his political odyssey tends to become a springboard for the next one. No one understands that better than Maggie Haberman, who tells me, “He’s one of the most regenerative public figures I think any of us have ever seen.”
It’s been over two years since the release of Haberman’s sprawling 2022 biography, Confidence Man, which originally concluded with an epilogue chronicling Trump’s stormy exit from the White House and his political exile to Mar-a-Lago. We all know what happened next. What’s different this time around, says Haberman, is how Trump is “pretty untethered” from previous limitations in office.
To meet the moment, Haberman wrote a new afterword for the paperback edition, which Penguin Books is releasing Tuesday. Haberman, who arguably emerged as the most plugged-in reporter during Trump’s first term, now explores how his conviction in a New York hush money trial propelled a MAGA renaissance and fueled his grievance playbook, which is now taking shape through his policy agenda in a second administration.
“The retribution efforts that he is engaged in are clearly deeply animating,” Haberman tells me, adding that he is operating the presidency how he would have wanted to during his first term. “He has never been especially intrigued by governance,” she says. “He is about power. I think you’re seeing that now.”
Haberman, a veteran of the New York Post and Daily News who is the New York Times White House correspondent, was well acquainted with Trump as a bombastic real estate developer and tabloid fixture before his national political career kicked off nearly a decade ago. She mentions how the Queens-born Trump feels animosity for his former home, where he faced prosecution. “The main concern that Trump had, not just in the last four years, but for the last 50 years, had been being prosecuted, and that was a threat that Manhattan represented in various ways,” she tells me.
In terms of covering his second term, Haberman says that the media writ large has “managed to figure out and separate the signal from the noise at this point,” focusing more on the policy impact than his behavior, which she argues “really obscured what the administration was doing, particularly when it came to immigration,” the first go around. “I don’t think that that mistake is being made this time,” she argues.
Regardless, Trump continues to demonize the news media, often singling out the Times for its coverage. Haberman, however, is undeterred by the president’s gripes. “His views of what our job should be is not the same as what our view of our job is,” she tells me. “He’s a subject who we cover, and I think that we are among the last truly independent news outlets covering him.”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Vanity Fair: Given that it’s been a couple years since Confidence Man was initially released, I’m curious about the choice to release the paperback with a new afterword now. What does that say about the continued urgency of understanding Donald Trump?
Maggie Haberman: The decision on timing was Penguin’s, not mine. It was published in 2022, and it was published actually a month and a half before Trump announced his third campaign as a Republican candidate. The feeling was, Let’s see how the story ends, as opposed to doing something right now. I can make an argument that with Donald Trump, part of the point of Confidence Man is the story never ends. He’s one of the most regenerative public figures I think any of us have ever seen, if not the most. But I do think that seeing how the last two and a half years wound up is significant in terms of a capstone on the book.
One of the things that I think is clear is that there are aspects of what he’s doing now that are how he has hoped his presidency would be the first time. Because of the last couple of years and because of a Supreme Court ruling that gave him broad immunity, he is pretty untethered. So I think that explaining his views of power, which are pretty raw, is important.
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https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/maggie-haberman-covering-tumultuous-second-trump-term
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