Trump's 'Unreality Bubble’ Meets the Midterms: Maggie Haberman

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1:51I don't think that we are likely to see another Donald Trump anytime soon, if ever again. This is a fundamental reimagining of the U.S. presidency. It has shown that the post-World War II order won't stand. Maggie Haberman, whose reporting scoops on the Trump White House just keep coming. The way that President Trump talks about you publicly, including calling you maggot rather than Maggie, I sort of would imagine that anyone close to him would be terrified of going anywhere near you. People tend to have their own reasons for talking to reporters. This is a group of people who actively want to see him succeed.

2:29They believe in him. He was elected more decisively than before. And they are proud of that. From Bloomberg Weekend, this is The Michelle Hussain Show. I'm Michelle Hussain.

2:44It is pretty clear by now that this Trump White House in the second term is run by a much tighter, more loyal group of people than the first time around. Notwithstanding the odd departure, overall, the core team that came back with Donald Trump that is delivering his core plan has remained pretty much intact. And if there's one reporter who has really been able to burrow inside the inner workings of that team and the president himself, who's covered Donald Trump since long before he ever ran for office, it's Maggie Haberman of The New York Times. To give you an idea of just how embedded in this world she has been, back in 2016, she had nearly 600 bylines in the paper.

3:34And since then, she has written many stories and two books, most recently co-authored with Jonathan Swan, Regime Change, Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. One of the key things we learned from that book was all the analysis of what happened in the run-up to and then after the Iran war began. Maggie's work is widely respected. Personally, I marvel not only at her sourcing, but also the volume and the quality of her output. And now with the midterms just six weeks away, I wanted her to take us inside the Trump White House right now to bring us right up to date with the atmosphere. the attitude of the president himself to the fact that the Iran war is not going according to plan, to get a sense of election strategy, what the next two years of this presidency might look like.

4:28What's Donald Trump thinking? What is he doing day by day, even minute by minute? She is the kind of reporter who can tell us that. So here is that conversation with Maggie Haberman. As ever, Bloomberg subscribers can read my notes on this episode. that's the case with all our episodes, you'll find a link in our show notes. And with that, on to Maggie herself, who joined us from her home. Hello, Maggie. Hi there. I want to obviously congratulate you on regime change, but also tell you and show you how much use it has been to me. Can you see all the post-its? Wow, I sure can. That's fabulous. We love to see that.

5:08Thank you. So it's been a resource as well as a read for me, particularly because we have... We had Tucker Carlson on the show a few weeks ago. So all of that was particularly useful. So thank you for your work in more ways than one, essentially. Well, thank you. I'm glad that it was of utility. Most definitely. You know, I've been thinking about how many reporters have observed Donald Trump for as long as you have. And I realized that for you, the story goes back considerably before the 2016 election when you were working in New York. This is before your New York Times days. Tell me about that period and how you saw him like way back before he ran for president.

5:53So I started my career at the New York Post just slightly over 30 years ago to the month as a clerk. And Trump was – think of how to describe this – he was almost etched into the fabric of the place by then. The New York Post had been re-bought and saved by Rupert Murdoch. The paper would have folded without him. But Trump was somebody who people liked reading about. By then, it was very clear that he was an over-leveraged businessman. He had had his near complete personal financial crash of the early 1990s. His marriage had broken up to Ivana Trump. He had married Marla Maples, and then they divorced.

6:35He liked being seen as a playboy. He was somebody who was always available for a quote. He would often provide his own background information to Page Six, the gossip page, as a source close to Trump. And he was often the source. So he was just around. And then in the 2000s, much of my time after the September 11th terrorist attacks was covering rebuilding at the Trade Center site for the first few years, he had no connection to the site. He did go down near the site in the day after or two days after. He had no role, though, in the recovery. He did propose, I think it was twice, rebuilding the original Twin Towers as they were, which was not in the cards.

7:18And they had already moved on with planning. I think he was very critical of the design. And then in 2010, he decided that he wanted to become more involved in national politics. I had just started at Politico that year, and I had a blog about New York, and he was hosting a fundraiser for the Republican Governors Association. And I think that was October. And that was the avatar that he was getting more serious, or I should say the warning sign that he was getting more serious about national politics. He had flirted with running before many times. But in 2011, he did make moves that one would make if they were running.

7:52He had a number of conversations. He went to New Hampshire. This was also when he started fanning the flames of birtherism, which predated him, but did not have this kind of a mainstream injection into media coverage before that because the media was in part, we were fact checking him, but it just made it go further. Amplifying the lie about Barack Obama not being born in the United States. Correct. But so that's my arc of watching him. And it's been a while. I'm interested that you did take this move towards running for office in 2011 seriously, given that he was an overleveraged businessman whose ideas like, you know, rebuilding the Twin Towers weren't taken seriously.

8:35Why did you take him at his word at that point, even though that That was not the year he ran for president in the end. It wasn't, but I could see from my trip to New Hampshire following him, putting aside the press conference that he did about Obama's birth certificate in an airport hangar. But he went to a diner. He walked around. I can't remember which town it was. It's in whatever story I wrote. There was true interest in him that went somewhat beyond celebrity. And the reaction that he got at the – he gave his first real speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference. and he was incredibly well received.

9:10And he gave this speech that he could have given it at any point in the last 15 years, frankly, except for actually the last year where he's been much more pro-war. But he talked about China. He talked about the U.S. losing its edge. There was this sense of sort of national injury that in the post-fiscal collapse, U.S. had a lot of appeal to a lot of voters. And I can't really actually explain it other than the fact that he was able to punch through in a way that clearly the operative class was taking more seriously than I had expected. But massively helped by the fact people knew him from TV by this time.

9:47No question. The Apprentice has been running for many, many years. But I think you're saying there was more than that. He did have some kind of touch beyond that. I am saying that definitely the celebrity played a role and definitely the fact that The Apprentice, which was not a real representation of his business or his business acumen, And it was a reality show, but it gave people the ability to see him in this high-backed leather chair looking leaderly. They could envision it in a way that I think they might not have been able to otherwise. It certainly introduced him to people's homes in a different way.

10:21But there was a receptiveness to him on a political level that went beyond just the, hey, can you give me an autograph, sir, that I was struck by. And then, as you correctly say, he pulled back and he re-upped with The Apprentice. And it was right after the White House Correspondents Association dinner where President Obama roasted him. Yes. And while this current President Trump will continue to claim that he loved it, he did not love it. So I know, Maggie, in this conversation, we're bound to go back and forth in time a bit. But I kind of want to go right up to the present day because here we are talking six weeks away from the midterms.

10:59that popular touch that he had at that point. What, if anything, has changed in recent months? Like in regime change, you chart the run up and the early period of the Iran war. His approval ratings are very low. The war's not going as planned. Voters have concerns that he doesn't seem to be responding to. So has he lost some of that? That's the question that we're all wrestling with right now, that if he goes out on the campaign trail, as his advisors have been promising, he's just on the verge of doing for most of this year, and it hasn't quite come to pass that way. If he does consistently go out to a number of different states, that is what we are going to be testing.

11:41But so far, he seems more interested in talking about the credit he is being denied, in his view, media coverage that he wishes that he could get, and a list of grievances that go back a while. Now, we'll see whether he is able to gin up enough fear among voters. And you are seeing a really expansive amount of Islamophobia across the party right now. And that does actually relate to 2011, too. But that may be enough because it is not a presidential election, because it is much more state and candidate based. But yes, the main concern, and his own advisors know this, is that the amount of monetizing of the presidency is on a scale we have never seen, which is not to say there is no president that has ever made money after or had a family member who is controversial.

12:27This is just something fundamentally different. We keep being told by the White House, it's all very transparent. It's done without his knowledge. And it may be, look, to your question about whether he still has that touch, one of the things that Jonathan and I, my co-author, write about in Regime Change, and you know this because you've read it, is just how cloistered he has been in this White House. And there are some reasons for it. There are legitimate security concerns. There are ways to deal with it, though. And he is surrounded by such a small group of advisors. The decisions that are made in this government are made by a handful of people in the Oval Office with him.

13:00And if the rest of the government is not in the room, they can often have no idea what's happening. And he gets this positive feedback loop from Natalie Harp, his ever-present aide, who's been called the human printer by her colleagues, by people who call him supportively. It's hard to break through that unreality bubble with him. And again, this is why being out on the campaign trail will be a big test. Six people running the administration. So - Give or take, but yes. Okay. So hang on, take us through them. Stephen Miller, Susie Wiles, Natalie Harp. Are you saying the woman who sits in the corner?

13:36No, Natalie Harp is not a decision maker. She is a direct influencer, to put it sort of gently, in terms of her constant printout of information to him. Susie Wiles, Stephen Miller, John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense slash war, Dan Cain, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marco Rubio. So depending on the issue, you can have, you know, Scott Besant there or Chris Wright there, the energy secretary and treasury secretary. But just to that point, and as we write in the book, in the meetings in the lead up to the first strike on Iran from the U.S. on February 28th, Besant and Wright, the two people who are going to have to manage the biggest global energy shock in history, and that is what has happened, they weren't even in the room.

14:25They were not in these meetings up until the final moment because this White House was so afraid of leaks. Information is a commodity that a huge premium is put on and secrecy. You didn't put J.D. Vance in that very close group. I should put J.D. Vance in there. I apologize. Well, I wondered if anything has changed between him and the president because of, you know, J.D. Vance voicing his opposition to the Iran war to the president. So one of the things that we showed in the book is how Vance was the only one early on in these lead up meetings about Iran who was actively against it in front of others with the president.

15:04Now, there might have been one offs where other people told the president they didn't think this was a great idea. But Vance put some capital on the line and it cost him with the president. The president got very irritated with him. I also just want to point out that it's to your question, you know, I think they're in a perfectly fine place. That does not mean the president's going to rush to endorse J.D. Vance or to get involved in the 2028 race. I'd be shocked if he does anytime soon. But it's not actually helpful to Vance to have the headlines out there about how he opposed Trump. His whole political life rests on Trump being behind him, to your question.

15:44But that is where they were. Ask me in a month where they might be. Yeah, well, because obviously the key thing is whether what's happened in the last few months might pivot him further towards Marco Rubio being the chosen successor rather than J.D. Vance. Yeah. And look, in terms of Rubio, just to be clear, Jonathan and I have no reporting suggesting that Rubio is actively looking at a candidacy. Now, he could scale up pretty fast. There are things he can't do as the secretary of state. He would really have to step away. I don't know what the constituency is in this party for Marco Rubio. He's very popular with neoconservatives, with some Republican donors and with some West Wing staffers.

16:25But J.D. Vance is actually much more representative of where the GOP is right now. One of the many things that's fascinated me about the book and your reporting with Jonathan Swan and on your own is the fact that in this much tighter White House, exactly the kind of circle you're describing, very different to the first term, you still have your sources. There are still people who tell you things. I mean, you must see how curious that sounds. No, I mean, I certainly understand the question. Look, to be clear, just a couple of things can be true at once. This book was the hardest work that either Jonathan or I have ever done, in part because it is such a closed circle, as you were saying, in part because this information environment is so difficult.

17:17It's don't trust and then try to verify, you know, and then anything you can't verify goes to the side. That should seem pretty obvious in reporting, except that we have to make sure that every single account, all corners of every single account line up. If there was a 5 % of doubt in anything that we had, it went aside. And you will notice that there really haven't been denials. Maybe there's been the broad denials from the president. It's all fake, et cetera, et cetera. but there have not been individual denials from people in this book. And I think that's a testament to the reporting. Jonathan and I have both covered his world for a really long time.

17:53And so there are some advantages to being old in the news business. That's one of them. There aren't many these days, but that is one. But look, it doesn't mean that, you know, I'm sure there are people who are upset about the book and that might make certain aspects of our jobs harder, but we're still going to do them. But the people in the circle who are talking to you, are there motives that they're wrestling with internal politics. And that's why they want to talk to you. Because the way that President Trump talks about you publicly, and I'm sorry to repeat this, but including calling you maggot rather than Maggie.

18:26I've heard it before. I sort of would imagine that anyone close to him would be terrified of going anywhere near you. So without getting into sourcing and who we speak to, people tend to have their own reasons for talking to reporters. And I don't think there's any exception to that in this current government. Sometimes it's because people know the reporters, sometimes it's because people are sort of working something else out in their own head and are just talking. I would say that in this government, unlike Trump 1.0, where you had a lot of people who were sort of using a huge array of reporters as almost therapists, you know, what do you make of this?

19:05Why is he doing this? Because he didn't know most of his government and vice versa when he came to Washington. This time, this is a group of people who actively want to see him succeed. They believe in him. And they're generally quite proud of what they've accomplished, both in terms of coming back. You know, it is a historic win in 2024. I don't mean by the margins. I don't mean by his vote count. I don't mean that he had a majority of the popular vote. But what I do mean is that the country elected a convicted felon who had been indicted repeatedly. There is not a single person in this country who has not heard some aspect of Trump's character or his business past or his behavior.

19:45And he was elected more decisively than before. And they are proud of that. And so they are proud of the work they're doing. And frankly, most of them don't see much wrong with how they're conducting a lot of their most controversial behaviors. Well, in 2021, I think even he didn't think he had a political future when you went to see him for that series of interviews at Mar-a-Lago in the wake of January the 6th. And I think at one point you were talking about the future and he's like, what do you mean 2024? Well, it was actually, I looked at that answer slightly differently. It was, I wanted to talk about the future and he just wanted to talk about the election that had just happened.

20:20And I don't think that it was so much that he didn't think he had a future. I think he was so stuck on proving, quote unquote, that he really won in 2020, that that was where his focus was more than anything. And he really did believe, or at least appeared to believe, he had a real chance of getting reinstated that year in 2021.

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22:39Maggie, then let's look beyond the midterms. Let's say the Democrats do manage to take the Senate as well as the House. Let me ask first of all, how likely you think that is? I always hate making predictions because I'm often wrong and then I'm on tape being wrong. if the climate is today i can see a scenario where the democrats win plus two maybe plus three senate seats um uh there are such individual races in the senate it's a little different the house it is hard to see the republicans holding it's just the margin is the question so i just wonder what you think the next two years will be like if the democrats are in a position where they're chairing committees and they can send out the subpoenas and at least try and compel people to come and testify.

23:31What do you think that's going to be like for the administration? So normally when we get to this point in a lame duck presidency, I can see what will happen after the midterms just with some level of reliability. But I look past this November and it's a black hole because, you know, we've seen administrations not respond to subpoenas before, not just this one, but others. I don't know what it looks like when potentially an entire government slow walks or just ignores subpoenas. And I have every expectation that they will try to delay as much as possible if they engage at all. I think that you will see a lot of subpoenas sent to people outside the White House, but I think those subpoenas will get slow walked too.

24:12And I also think that Democrats can't decide exactly what targets they want to go at right now. And that is a struggle they're having. So explain why you say that, why you're not sure about the Democrats, as in you're not sure how they would use that power if they had it. I think they are not sure how they're going to use that power if they have it. And to be clear, there is a debate right now about whether to try to impeach him again. It would be a third time. There is a real lack of appetite for that at the highest levels of the Democratic leadership because they're concerned that the voters are just going to sort of roll their eyes and think this has been done before.

24:50The chances that Trump gets removed from office are pretty low, even if they get a conviction. And it wouldn't be a two-thirds majority, almost certainly in the Senate. There's a lot of voter anger at government broadly. Many voters feel as if the majority changes and nothing changes for them. And their cost of living is very, very high. The other point that I would just mention, and we say this in the book, we wrote this in the book, reported it. Trump has promised any number of people, you know, he has said that he's going to pardon, you know, anyone who's come within a certain radius of the Oval Office.