The Episode of White House Apprentice Where Mark Meadows Bursts Into Tears
A reflection on Maggie Haberman's new book about Donald Trump, "Confidence Man"
Happy election day, friends. Please vote, and do remember as the results start coming in: it could take as long as two weeks for all the races across the country to be resolved. I will open a chat tonight so that this community can keep in touch as the results come in. You also might want to consider following me on Mastodon, where I established my turf as a backstop against whatever might happen next on the Bird Site. You can find me @clairepotter@mastodon.social.
And if you know someone who would be interested in this post, please:
Back in the spring of 2017, as I embarked on the process of writing Political Junkies, my editor gave me a piece of advice. He urged me not to write a book that sought to “explain” the election of Donald Trump as a phenomenon of alternative political media history. Rather, he urged me to let my story about the making of a political junkie culture stand on its own, even if that history naturally ended in the flood of disinformation, lies, and social media chaos that tainted the 2016 election.
It was sound advice, and I took it. As my editor imagined, it made for a better book with a longer tail, a book that campaign memoirs and insider tell-all accounts wouldn't supersede. But something else my editor said at the time, which I will paraphrase, has also stuck in my memory: the 2016 election would pass, and so would the Trump presidency. So soon, no one, he said, would be signing any more Trump books.
This prediction was staggeringly wrong, in a way that we were all staggeringly wrong in early 2016. Everyone was persuaded that somehow—as it had with Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush—that the GOP would surround Trump with advisors and ensure a recognizable, conservative presidency. As we know, this did not happen. Efforts to make Trump an establishment politician failed partly because of who Donald J. Trump was, partly because of the opportunistic, right-wing political operators who moved into the White House with him, and partly because the GOP decided that Trump, if they could stomach him, provided a path to potentially endless power.
It was, of course, harder than they imagined. So many establishment Republicans and military advisors churned in and out of the White House in the next four years that working for Trump practically became a subset of the American economy. Even crazy John Bolton, who had wanted to be national Security Advisor for his whole adult life, only lasted 17 months.
Meanwhile, our public culture was overwhelmed by podcasts and books about the most inarticulate, uneducated, egotistical, and spiteful president in American history. Since January 2017, excluding self-published volumes, a staggering 80 books have been published about Trump, and it’s hard to believe that all of these were under contract when I lunched with my editor in early 2017. If you genuinely want your head to spin, dig this: there is even a book about the books about Donald Trump, Carlos Lozada’s What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era (Simon and Schuster, 2020.)
If I had just guessed randomly, I would have told you that I read about a quarter of these volumes, but that isn’t true: this just goes to show how having every media outlet saturated with Donald Trump creates all kinds of illusions. In addition to the many podcasts I have listened to, documentaries I have watched, and newspaper and magazine articles I have perused, I have only read eight books about the Former Guy. They include three written by sensational journalist Michael Wolff, one by a niece, Mary Trump, and the most recent volume to hit the stands, Maggie Haberman’s Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America (Penguin, 2022.)
And I am here to tell you definitively, after reading these 511 pages, excluding the citations and index: Except for the published findings of the January 6 Committee, we don’t need even one more volume about Donald Trump. Not. One. More.
Ever.
Many of you will be familiar with Haberman’s work in the New York Times since she has been on the Trump beat almost since the 2016 campaign began. Most notably, she has bird-dogged the tax evasion allegations against the Trump Organization that are a keystone to New York Attorney General Letitia James’s $250 million civil suit against the Former Guy, his children, and their company. But Haberman’s credentials run deeper than that. A veteran political reporter, she was weaned on newspapers (her father is veteran journalist Clyde Haberman) and grew up in New York City during the 1970s and 1980s, years when Trump first became prominent as a developer and almost came to define the city’s resurgence from near bankruptcy.
And because, as Haberman surmises, Trump so sincerely wanted the approval of the New York Times, she became one of a half-dozen journalists he alternately insulted and wooed throughout his presidency. Even as Trump disparaged the New York Times as “failing” and “fake news,” he viewed Haberman’s reporting on his presidency as a basis for a personal relationship. In perhaps one of the most widely quoted lines in the book, during one interview at Mar-A-Lago, Trump turned to an aide, gestured at Haberman, and said: “I love being with her, she’s like my psychiatrist.”
In a dry aside, Haberman informs her readers that it wasn’t an exclusive position. She describes a Trump Organization and a White House in which being Donald Trump’s psychiatrist was part of everyone’s job description, from his lawyers, to his children, to his rotating Chiefs of Staff (four in four years), to the aide that brought a Diet Coke every time Trump hit the red buzzer on the Resolute Desk.
But honestly? I am surprised that Confidence Man is doing as well as it is because I, at least, learned almost nothing new from it. And certainly, the Axios blurb on the back cover—"This is the book Trump fears most”—seems like unlikely speculation since nearly everything in it is well known. But perhaps I am just the wrong audience. I live, eat, and breathe politics, so I am unusually well-informed about everything Trump.
And anything I don’t pick up, my mother, who has probably not despised another politician with such intensity since Richard Nixon, is happy to pass on in our numerous phone calls. Yet, I would be surprised if there were more than one or two items in the book that are not already in the public record, from Haberman’s reporting someone else’s, or those 79 other books.
For example, Haberman documents that Trump occasionally mistook African American staffers in the West Wing for waiters. While I am not sure I knew this particular factoid, is it surprising? Of course not. Trump has been widely accused of racism in his business dealings. He was—along with his father, Fred Trump—sued for racism in his business dealings. As a businessman, candidate, and president, Trump publicly said too many racist things to count. Most notably, he was accused by former TV Apprentice and White House aide Omorosa of using the n-word—on tape. So the fact that Trump habitually did something that, frankly, upper-class white people do all the time? It may be a previously undocumented fact, but it wasn’t much of a revelation.
Perhaps the only factoid I learned from Haberman that I was unaware of is that chief of staff Mark Meadows (who also presided over the Oval Office during the MAGA insurrection on January 6, 2021, and did nothing to stop it) once cried, so overcome was he by his love for Donald Trump. While berating Alexa Henning, the White House broadcast media director, Meadows confessed: “I care about this man so much!” and his eyes began to leak. But even that did not surprise me, as I once saw Meadows, then a Congressman from North Carolina, cry in a nationally televised House committee hearing when Premilla Jayapal told him it was racist to surround himself with Black staffers while making a racist speech.
It’s also possible that Haberman was not interested in surprising her readers but rather in assembling a factual, clear, and well-written political narrative. She has succeeded. One might almost imagine Confidence Man as the beginning of the end of an almost seven-year horror show in American political history and the beginning of another horror show that will be defined less by Trump and more by the institutionalization of Trumpism.
Future historians will also thank Haberman. Confidence Man is the most comprehensive book about Trump to date, the most weirdly dispassionate account of Donald Trump’s life to date, and is relentlessly factual. This quality, which used to be characteristic of journalism, makes it exceptional in an era of disinformation, rumor, speculation, and highly personal story-telling. And because Haberman eschews most of the psychologizing and circus-like atmosphere that characterized the media coverage of the Trump White House, it is also the clearest, particularly regarding cause and effect.
At the same time, Confidence Man leaves out some of the juiciest factual material that does explain behavior on the part of a businessman and president that might otherwise seem just psychotic. Readers who want to delve more deeply into who Trump is as a person will have to turn to niece Mary Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man (Simon & Schuster, 2020), consigliere Michael Cohen’s Disloyal, A Memoir: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump (Skyhorse, 2022), and Michael Wolff’s trilogy Fire and Fury, Siege, and Landslide. (Henry Holt, 2018, 2019, 2021.)
None of these volumes hew as closely to sources and facts as Haberman’s: they are simply a different animal. Yet Haberman has also taken some hits for this book. Not surprisingly, on his media platform, Truth Social, Trump, has blasted Haberman as “a head case” who has written “Another Fake book…supposedly very boring.” At least one reviewer accused Haberman of hewing too closely to Trump’s version of events, while another, primarily positive, review conceded that Confidence Man was full of irrelevant details that “stale faster than a Christmas fruitcake.”
Yet, for some time, I have longed for something else entirely, and the aftermath of the 2022 election will make me want it even more: a book, or books, that explain how and why the Republican party tied the fate of the country and its future to a dangerous, erratic, ignorant, and bigoted man. What were the turning points at which mainstream Republican leaders became willing to seize power at the cost of populating their party—at all levels—with candidates that are some lesser (and in some cases, crazier) version of Donald Trump? When did one of America’s two major parties decide that they weren't turning back regardless of the violence, lies, and corruption? And what primed the mainstream GOP for a takeover by its lunatic fringe?
And I fear that we will never know that story unless publishers do not take the spotlight off Trump, a focus that protects all of the other figures that brought us to this terrible place.
You are invited:
On Monday, November 14, 2022, from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m., Mike Amezcua, Assistant Professor of History at Georgetown University, is lecturing at The New School about his new book, Making Mexican Chicago: From Postwar Settlement To The Age Of Gentrification (Chicago, 2022.) You can register here.
Cheer up:
Dolly Parton performs “Jolene” at her Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction accompanied by Brandi Carlile, P!nk, Judas Priest, Duran Duran, Sheryl Crow, Annie Lennox, Pat Benatar, Neil Giraldo, and Zac Brown Band. The sound quality is not terrific, but it’s a historic moment. (YouTube, November 6, 2022)
Short takes:
Over at The Liberal Patriot, John Halpin says that democracy will survive the 2022 midterms, but “It’s the social fabric we really need to worry about. In the absence of any consensus views about governing—and more sustained cooperation between the political parties,” Halpin warns, “the American people will continue to suffer as the country’s biggest problems go unaddressed while the political class fights its self-absorbed and inconsequential culture wars.” (November 8, 2022)
Dave Wasserman at The Cook Political Report sez: watch the races with third-party spoiler candidates tonight. “The freakiest situation is in Minnesota's 2nd CD, where for the second straight cycle, the Legal Marijuana Now party nominee has died less than six weeks before the election. But as in 2020, the late candidate's name will still appear on the ballot, potentially draining progressive votes from Democratic Rep. Angie Craig and boosting GOP Marine veteran Tyler Kistner two years after Craig eked out a 48%-46% victory,” Wasserman writes. “The most frustrating situation for Republicans is in Maine's 2nd CD, where Republican Bruce Poliquin could plausibly finish ahead of Democratic Rep. Jared Golden initially, but the state's ranked-choice voting law could rescue Golden if neither hit 50% and Independent Tiffany Bond's votes are reallocated in Golden's favor. The same scenario played out in 2018 when Golden overtook Poliquin 50.5%-49.5%.” (November 6, 2022)
It might not be all bad news in these midterms unless it is. “Democrats are bracing for a possible red wave as the national mood has shifted and surveys increasingly show voters seeing economy and inflation as the top issues heading into the election,” writes Caroline Vakil of The Hill. But here are five races where Vakil thinks that a Democrat might pull off a surprising upset: The governor’s races in Arizona and Oklahoma, the Senate races in Ohio and Wisconsin, and the congressional race in Montana-01. (November 6, 2022)
Excellent piece, Claire, particularly the questions you pose at the end. Why, indeed, did the GOP tie itself to this maniac? I am tempted to posit the answers: Because the GOP is a fundamentally white supremacist organization and liked his shamelessness. Because the GOP is even more deeply embedded in the pockets of Big Pharma and Big Oil and needs a sideshow to keep us occupied while they despoil the environment and rob us of any hope of decent healthcare or a liveable environment. Mitch McConnell has made it clear: If the GOP takes power today, they will shut down the government and impoverish Social Security and Medicare and we should believe him. Maybe the GOP just wanted to break this Democracy. If that's their goal, they picked the right man to do it.
Election update: Democrats are holding their own.