A Newsletter With An Eye On Political Media from The American Prospect
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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

Maggie Haberman's New Book Puts Trump in Context

The surprisingly good Confidence Man actually makes sense of Trump's
rise and his ability to twist the media to his will.

Like I imagine many Altercation readers, I have been an eager consumer,
though not a fan, of Maggie Haberman's access-based reporting on
Donald Trump and company in The New York Times. Her scoops were often
eye-popping, but they often lacked the necessary context to explain why
they mattered. The "he said/she said" pattern of daily journalism was
partially to blame. But even more so, it was the Grey Lady's
commitment to an outdated notion of objective journalism that shoveled
almost all political reporting inside an inappropriate "both sides"
framework, one that had the effect over time of normalizing Trump's
most egregious (and sometimes insane) behavior.

I did not expect much from Haberman's much-anticipated tome, as almost
all books by political beat reporters are terrible. Yes, they save a few
nuggets from their readers so that their publicists can promote the book
as news, as Peter Baker and Susan Glasser did for their recent Trump
book
.
But these can be gleaned from news reports that pick up on them without
slogging through, say, 752 pages of journalese that did not matter on
the day after it happened and is certainly without consequence years
later.

But lo and behold, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the
Breaking of America

turns out to be a pleasant surprise. It's not merely a primary source
for future historians but also, as both Sean Wilentz

and Joe Klein

noted in their respective reviews, a contextually reported story of
Trump's rise that actually helps make sense of Trump, and shows how he
bent both the Republican Party and the mainstream media to his will.

I have an imperfect memory from 1984 or 1985 of attending a "Master's
Tea" at Yale, in which Maureen Dowd and another reporter gave a talk and
were asked (by me, I guess) about what was then a remarkably generous

**Times**

**Magazine** Trump profile. They did not pretend that the story was
accurate in the larger sense. Rather they explained that their subject
had ended up getting something of a free pass because nobody had any
interest in going on the record about someone so hypersensitive,
vindictive, and unrestrained by truth or even the law.

Those of us who make our living in even remote proximity to the New
York/Washington/politico/media/corporate world of back-scratching (and
backstabbing) all expect a certain amount of personal corruption to go
unmentioned to the great unwashed. This can involve killing stories as a
personal favor (or writing them), or not looking too deeply into matters
that might complicate one's life or one's job or interfere with a
favor one either needs now or might one day. Almost no institution is
immune.

[link removed]

Trump's career has, from its infancy in his father's racist
shadow-and the backing of his dirty money
-stretched
the limits of allowable corruption beyond any previously known borders,
and done so in more directions than one can even keep track of. He is
(OK, allegedly) a compulsive liar, a poisonous racist, an admirer of
Hitler, a rapist, a con man, an idiot, and by the way, a terrible
businessman ... I could, as always, go on. But by having a genius for
both the weakness of institutions, the needs of the people who ran them,
and above all, the audacity that total shamelessness can give a person
in American public life, he not only somehow got elected president but
may have put himself in a position to lead what may be a fatal attack on
American democracy.

Haberman does not tell this larger story, but she helps you-especially
people unfamiliar with the New York tabloid media culture that
facilitated Trump's rise-understand how it could have happened.
She's got a thesis and a context for her anecdotes. As Wilentz
explains, Trump was a product of the "late 1970s and 1980s New York
demimonde of hustlers, mobsters, political bosses, compliant prosecutors
and tabloid scandalmongers," and today "he swaggers and struts and cons
on the world's largest stage, much as he did when gossip columnists
fawned over him as The Donald."

Like her fellow daily journalist book authors, she is guilty of holding
back some of her best stuff from readers of her newspaper. But let's
face it, there's nothing anyone can report about Trump that would
shake the faith of his cult, nor free Republican politicians from the
fear that leads them to cower at his every tantrum. That doesn't make
it right, but it does make the complaint rather beside the point.

Haberman writes regarding 2016: "The media writ large was unprepared to
cover a political candidate who lied as freely as Trump did, on matters
big and small. Even those of us who had covered Trump for years
struggled with how to handle the gush of falsehoods that dotted his
sentences. The word 'lie' was infrequently used by mainstream
outlets, which tended not to write more than they felt they could glean
about a politician's motivations."

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I didn't see any books at all listed in Haberman's notes and there
is no bibliography. If she had, however, consulted one book, say, Lying
in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse

by yours truly, it could have enriched her discussion of this point. In
the first instance that Trump, as president-elect, was caught in an
obvious lie-when he said, "I won the popular vote if you deduct the
millions of people who voted illegally"-here is what I wrote:

[O]nly the

**New York Times** crossed the line and employed the word "lie" in its
headline. The rest ranged from: "Trump Wrongly Blames ..." (AP) to
"Trump Falsely Tells ..." (

**Chicago Tribune**), "Trump Still Pushing Unconfirmed Claims ..." (

**New York Daily News**), "Trump Repeats Unsupported Claim" (

**Wall Street Journal**), and "Without Evidence, Trump Tells ..." (

**Washington Post**). At least two allegedly neutral sources, CNN and

**The Hill**, also repeated Trump's lie without any qualification:
"Trump Believes Fraud Cost Him Popular Vote" (CNN), and "Trump Continues
to Insist Voter Fraud Robbed Him of Popular Vote" (

**The Hill**).

The problem with so many of these headlines was that they took no
position on whether Trump's boast was true or not. The CNN and

**Hill** headlines positively encouraged the lie. These news
organizations apparently felt themselves helpless in the face of a
phenomenon they had never faced before: a president who was an
unapologetic, pathological liar and did not care who knew it. And yet
the word "lie" remained off the table for most media institutions. As

**New York Times** executive editor Dean Baquet would argue, "If you get
loose with the word lie, you're going to look pretty scurrilous.
Right? It's going to be in every story."

Other journalists also worried about alienating Trump voters by telling
the truth about his lies. "Every time he lies you have to point out
it's a lie, and there's a part of this country that hears that as an
attack," wrote

**New York Times** media columnist Jim Rutenberg. "That is a serious
problem." And so Trump's lies, the scale of which had no precedent in
American political history, were treated like politics-as-usual.

It took nearly four years and more than 30,000 lies for the members of
the mainstream media to wake up to the reality of the Frankenstein
monster they had helped to create. As Haberman correctly concludes,
"When the tide sank, all boats were lowered. Trump had proven that the
majority of Washington Republicans who had initially opposed him were
exactly as craven as he had said they were, as he bent them to his will
because they saw personal opportunity or necessity for survival, even
after the Capital riot." She reports that she texted the

**Times**Washington bureau at the moment of Trump's election: "You
have no idea what is coming
."
They no longer, however, have that excuse.

The real question that Trump's rise raises is: How in the world did we
become a country where 70 million-plus people ever thought that this
dangerously evil lunatic should be trusted with the most powerful job in
the world, and apparently still do? Haberman's narrow focus on
Trump's career tells that part of the story more fully and
comprehensively than you'll find anywhere else.

But given that Donald Trump is as much a symbol of what's wrong with
this country as he is its cause, we're going to need a great deal
more. And given their investment in the system that gave rise to Trump
and helped to invite the abuses that led us to our current, precipitous
moment, you can bet we are not going to get those answers from the
mainstream media.

Here 's a
notice for one of the Zoom talks I'll be giving for my forthcoming
book, We Are Not One: A History of America's Fight Over Israel
,
this one via the Nazarian Center at UCLA; and here

is Bruce giving us a tantalizing 2.24-minute preview of his new album of
soul covers,

**Only the Strong Survive**.

And Let's Go Mets!

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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