The New York Times Pulitzer Prize winner Maggie Haberman opened the door into the dark reaches of Donald Trump’s childhood through recent history. In her new book, the journalist wrote about the neighborhood “terror.” And that was just the beginning.
The White House correspondent for The New York Times and a political analyst for CNN appeared in a new GBH Boston Public Radio interview where she said:
‘He did not have a great reputation in the neighborhood as a kid.’
Haberman tells of one instance when a mother heard her child screaming. The baby was in a backyard playpen at the time they lived next door to the Trumps. She rushed out only to discover the future president of the United States throwing rocks at the baby:
‘She starts hearing the baby screaming, and she comes outside and a roughly five year-old Donald Trump is throwing rocks at the crib. guess you can allow that, maybe, initially he didn’t realize that there was a baby there, I don’t know.’
The author’s book Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America was released on October 4 and jumped to the “top of the New York Times” nonfiction bestseller. It included one-on-one interviews with the former president, some specific to Haberman’s book.
The author was not put off her writing task even when Trump called her “not legit” and “a third-rate reporter:”
‘He frankly can’t quit the mainstream media, as much time as he spends complaining about all of us. [Trump is] uniquely focused on the [New York] Times.
‘He interacts with media and processes media unlike anyone else I have ever covered, probably unlike anyone else any of us have ever covered. He so badly wants attention, and so badly wants news coverage, and it’s just a narcotic. It’s the attention he craves on some cellular level.’
BGH’s hosts Jim Braude and Margery Eagan asked her about when she first saw that Trump was a serious contender for president. The journalist remembered the moment well. She was at a Trump rally in Dubuque, Iowa in 2016:
‘I was going up to people asking a pretty leading question, which was basically “Are you here because the spectacle is going to end?’’And one after another, people told me they were going to caucus for him. One guy looked at me like I had eight heads. … When I asked him “Why are you gonna caucus for him?” I watched him run his business.’
Then Haberman continued, explaining:
‘He meant The Apprentice, she said. That was something of a lightning-bolt moment for me, of really the degree to which this divide [between how New Yorkers viewed Trump] versus elsewhere — it was so pronounced.’
As a child, other kids made fun of Trump. And as an adult, the previous president could never make the “A’ guest list in New York City. People still made fun of him. However, the TV show The Apprentice changed how others perceived him. Apparently, they did not understand that the “successful billionaire’s” boardroom was comprised of props.
None of that small fantasy was real. The author said that people’s opinions of him changed in that fake reality:
‘People who either tracked him in the 1980s when he made himself as a brand synonymous with wealth, or who watched ‘The Apprentice,’ they viewed him as this hyper success. That was obviously not true, but that really solidified the view of him outside.’
The faked Apprentice reality made Trump a household name and a force to be reconned with. But Haberman claimed that the former president was “confusing [and] lonely:”
‘[Trump] believes in dominance and intimidation, and yet he is: there is this side of him that is a people pleaser, and that is afraid of one-on-one interpersonal conflict. And that is lonely. It is just a fundamentally strange and often disorienting thing for people around him to experience.’
Haberman even wrote about the ex-president taking payment in gold bars in lieu of lease payments, according to CNN:
‘[A] leaseholder once sent Trump a box of dozens of gold bricks to cover the cash portion of the lease on the parking garage in the General Motors building in Manhattan, which Trump purchased in 1998.’
It is lonely at the top — or the bottom.
Featured image is a screenshot via YouTube.
Christie writes Gloria Christie Reports & Three White Lions Substack newsletters and a Three White Lions podcast available on Apple, Spotify, etc. She is a political journalist for the liberal online newspaper The Bipartisan Report. Written in her own unique style with a twist of humor. Christie’s Mueller Report Adventures In Bite-Sizes a real-life compelling spy mystery (in progress). Find her here on Facebook. Or at Three White Lions her book on Amazon Kindle Vella and the Gloria Christie Three White Lions podcast on Apple, Spotify, etc.
