'Confidence Man' by Maggie Haberman
Donald Trump was never good at keeping secrets—except when it came to himself, his taxes, his dubious business deals. National secrets? As Maggie Haberman reminds us in her forensic examination of the Trump presidency, Confidence Man, he babbled confidential information in public—Tweeting photos, joking around with Russia’s foreign minister. “Some saw nefarious ends in this behavior while others believed he was operating with the emotional development of a twelve-year old, using the intelligence data to get attention for himself.” Both explanations plus his generally sloppy handling of governance, might explain the cache of documents he illegally hauled to Mar-a-Lago.
Haberman was part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times team that reported on Trump’s links to Russia, but her coverage of Trump began before his election. Confidence Man is a great doorstop of a book, its nearly 600 pages a record of incompetence, duplicity and erratic behavior. With a masterly command of her subject, Haberman carefully weighs her sources and composed a highly readable, believable account of Trump from childhood through his petulant Mar-a-Lago exile.
Trump understood authoritarian personalities such as Recep Erdoğan and Vladimir Putin, perhaps because he was raised by one in an atmosphere where backs were slapped and money changed hands in deals that were vulnerable to scrutiny. He became heir to the New York real estate fiefdom developed by Fred Trump and from the onset, in the ‘70s, “his aspirations were flashier than his father’s.”
The routine corruption of the Trump administration was rooted in the corruption that was his inheritance. To cite one of Haberman’s examples, the president and his entourage stayed whenever possible at Trump-owned hotels, renting the best rooms for staff and Secret Service and sending the bill to the federal government i.e. the taxpayers.
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Fred Trump taught his son to win at all costs, and that deeply engrained emotional reaction to failure guided his actions after losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden. “Trump was willing to speak with almost anyone he thought could offer him a solution to the worst predicament he could imagine: being turned into a loser by the entire country,” Haberman writes. According to her, he told an audience, “I’m just not going to leave” the White House. Trump’s sycophantic chief of staff, Mark Meadows, obstructed the normal pace of transition to the incoming Biden administration. Fortunately, others in his administration covertly frustrated his ambitions, especially Vice President Mike Pence. Concerns were voiced over Pence’s safety, even before the traitors stormed the Capitol calling for his death.
On January 6, the dry tinder of the conspiracy minded MAGA mob was lit by inflammatory remarks by Trump and his cronies. Watching the melee on TV, Trump “told aides that perhaps Pence should be hanged.” Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi and her GOP counterpart, Kevin McCarthy, as well as Mitch McConnel, were rushed to Fort McNair until the insurrection was finally put down.
As Biden took the oath as president, Trump shuffled off to Florida from Joint Base Edwards. As he requested, a military band played “Hail to the Chief” as he boarded the plane but in the cold weather, some of the instruments froze. Epilogue: “Donald Trump began his attempted comeback, as he had all of his previous ones, by refusing to concede that anything was wrong.”
