Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America - Softcover

Haberman, Maggie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593653009 ISBN 13: 9780593653005

Verlag: Penguin Press, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

The #1 New York Times bestseller.

“This is the book Trump fears most.” - Axios

“Will be a primary source about the most vexing president in American history for years to come.” - Joe Klein, The New York Times

"A uniquely illuminating portrait." - Sean Wilentz, The Washington Post

“[A] monumental look at Donald Trump and his presidency.” — David Shribman, Los Angeles Times

From the Pulitzer-Prize-winning New York Times reporter who has defined Donald J. Trump's presidency like no other journalist, Confidence Man is a magnificent and disturbing reckoning that chronicles his life and its meaning from his rise in New York City to his tortured post-presidency.

Few journalists working today have covered Donald Trump more extensively than Maggie Haberman. And few understand him and his motivations better. Now, demonstrating her majestic command of this story, Haberman reveals in full the depth of her understanding of the 45th president himself, and of what the Trump phenomenon means.

Interviews with hundreds of sources and numerous interviews over the years with Trump himself portray a complicated and often contradictory historical figure. Capable of kindness but relying on casual cruelty as it suits his purposes.  Pugnacious. Insecure. Lonely. Vindictive. Menacing. Smarter than his critics contend and colder and more calculating than his allies believe. A man who embedded himself in popular culture, galvanizing support for a run for high office that he began preliminary spadework for 30 years ago, to ultimately become a president who pushed American democracy to the brink.

The through-line of Trump’s life and his presidency is the enduring question of what is in it for him or what he needs to say to survive short increments of time in the pursuit of his own interests.    

Confidence Man is also, inevitably, about the world that produced such a singular character, giving rise to his career and becoming his first stage. It is also about a series of relentlessly transactional relationships. The ones that shaped him most were with girlfriends and wives, with Roy Cohn, with George Steinbrenner, with Mike Tyson and Don King and Roger Stone, with city and state politicians like Robert Morgenthau and Rudy Giuliani, with business partners, with prosecutors, with the media, and with the employees who toiled inside what they commonly called amongst themselves the “Trump Disorganization.”  

That world informed the one that Trump tried to recreate while in the White House. All of Trump’s behavior as President had echoes in what came before.  In this revelatory and newsmaking book, Haberman brings together the events of his life into a single mesmerizing work. It is the definitive account of one of the most norms-shattering and consequential eras in American political history.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Maggie Haberman is a journalist who joined The New York Times in 2015 and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on the investigations into Donald Trump’s, and his advisers’, connections to Russia. She has twice been a member of a team that was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, in 2021 for reporting on the Trump administration's response to the coronavirus, and in 2022 for coverage related to the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol. Before joining The New York Times as a campaign correspondent, she worked as a political reporter at Politico, from 2010 to 2015. She previously worked at The New York Post and The New York Daily News.

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“This is the book Trump fears most.” - Axios

From the Pulitzer-Prize-winning New York Times reporter who has defined Donald J. Trump's presidency like no other journalist: a magnificent and disturbing reckoning that chronicles his life and its meaning from his rise in New York City to his tortured post-presidency.

Few journalists working today have covered Donald Trump more extensively than Maggie Haberman. And few understand him and his motivations better. Now, demonstrating her majestic command of this story, Haberman reveals in full the depth of her understanding of the 45th president himself, and of what the Trump phenomenon means.

Interviews with hundreds of sources and numerous interviews over the years with Trump himself portray a complicated and often contradictory historical figure. Capable of kindness but relying on casual cruelty as it suits his purposes. Pugnacious. Insecure. Lonely. Vindictive. Menacing. Smarter than his critics contend and colder and more calculating than his allies believe. A man who embedded himself in popular culture, galvanizing support for a run for high office that he began preliminary spadework for 30 years ago, to ultimately become a president who pushed American democracy to the brink.

The through-line of Trump’s life and his presidency is the enduring question of what is in it for him or what he needs to say to survive short increments of time in the pursuit of his own interests.

Confidence Man is also, inevitably, about the world that produced such a singular character, giving rise to his career and becoming his first stage. It is also about a series of relentlessly transactional relationships. The ones that shaped him most were with girlfriends and wives, with Roy Cohn, with George Steinbrenner, with Mike Tyson and Don King and Roger Stone, with city and state politicians like Robert Morgenthau and Rudy Giuliani, with business partners, with prosecutors, with the media, and with the employees who toiled inside what they commonly called amongst themselves the “Trump Disorganization.”

That world informed the one that Trump tried to recreate while in the White House. All of Trump’s behavior as President had echoes in what came before. In this revelatory and newsmaking book, Haberman brings together the events of his life into a single mesmerizing work. It is the definitive account of one of the most norms-shattering and consequential eras in American political history.

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Prologue

"What do you need me to say?”

It was May 5, 2016, two days after the Republican primary in Indiana. I sat in the back of a yellow taxicab as it rolled down Fifth Avenue, my computer open on my lap and a phone held to my ear.

The likely Republican nominee for president was on the other end of the call. I had reached out to his staff for comment about a fresh round of support he had received from David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and onetime Louisiana politician, who had recently alleged that opposition to the Trump campaign came from “Jewish extremists” and “Jewish supremacists.” The Anti- Defamation League, as it did at other points during that campaign, called on the candidate to “make unequivocally clear” that he rejected Duke’s statement.

Donald Trump greeted me and then cut quickly to his point. “I’m here with my two Jewish lawyers,” he said, appearing to refer to David Friedman and Jason Greenblatt, both of whom handled matters for his company, the Trump Organization.

“I have a statement. Are you ready?” he asked. I waited, my fingers hovering over the keyboard. “Antisemitism has no place in our society, which should be united, not divided,” he said, as I typed his words. Then a pause. A pause that went on a beat too long.

“That’s it?” I asked.

Another pause. Then Trump asked, “What do you need me to say?” Trump was notorious for seeking cues that would help him please his audience, but in this context, his uncertainty threw me. Knowing what to say to show you wanted to separate yourself from the nation’s most famous white supremacist should not be hard. I reiterated what I had told his campaignaides, that I was seeking a response or reaction to Duke’s antisemitic remarks about “Jewish extremists”; Trump seemed to realize why his initial statement was deficient, and added that he “totally disavows” what Duke said. A few seconds later, we hung up.

What do you need me to say?

In some ways, it was the question that informed all Trump had done as a businessman, where success had made him a recurring character in New York City’s tabloid newspapers. Young Donald Trump had been athletic as a teenager, and then aspired to a career in Hollywood. He ultimately fulfilled his father’s desire for a successor in the family business: real estate. But what the son really always wanted was to be a star.

So that question guided Trump to cast himself as he preferred to be seen—a take-charge billionaire in a leather-backed seat on the reality television show The Apprentice. He was usually selling, saying whatever he had to in order to survive life in ten-minute increments. He was also guided by a belief in repetition; over and over he would convey to employees and friends a version of the same idea: if you say something often enough, it becomes true. Together these instincts helped him to evade public and private danger over the course of nearly fifty years, and then became the foundation for his approach to politics, as a candidate and then a president and a former president.

Though some of his confidants held out hope that the weight of the presidency would change Trump, that was never a likely outcome. Over the years, those who got closest to him and chose to stay there often suggested they had been sucked in by a version best described as the “Good” Trump. The Good Trump was capable of generosity and kindness, throwing birthday parties for friends and checking on them repeatedly when they fell ill, calling the daughter of a political ally who was suffering from breast cancerfor a surprise chat from the White House. The Good Trump could be funny and fun to be around, solicitous and engaged, able to at least appear interested in the people in his company. The Good Trump could heed advice from aides hoping to curb his self-destructive impulses and could seem vulnerable. That version of Trump won the loyalty of many people over decades. Being close to Trump was like “being friends with a hurricane,” one long-time friend told me. “It was very exciting, but you kind of don’t know which way the wind was blowing.”

In the White House, those who met Trump for the first time were often disarmed, seeing someone not at all like the angry voice of his Twitter feed or the fuming boss portrayed in innumerable news accounts. In some respects, he benefited from that media coverage and social media persona; he was often calmer in person in initial interactions, leading people to question the veracity of what they had read. (The all-capitalized tweets that projected anger were sometimes sent while he was laughing about the same topic.) He is charismatic and can be charming, and in those initial encounters, he woulda sk people questions about themselves, zeroing in on them, giving them the sense that they were the only person in the room.

But even those who rationalized staying close to him acknowledged that a “Bad” Trump always revealed himself. That was the man who made racist comments and then insisted people had misunderstood him, giving his allies cover by which to defend him. He was interested primarily in money, dominance, power, bullying, and himself. He treated rules and regulations as unnecessary obstacles rather than constraints on his behavior. He lost his temper suddenly, and abusively, directing his ire at one aide in a roomful of others, before moving on from a burst of anger that instilled fear in everyone that they could be its next target. Occasionally, he would recognize that he had gone too far, but instead of apologizing, he would be effusive toward his target the next time they saw each other. He sought an endless stream of praise, prompting a range of aides to offer it in his presence or on television. He created an environment perpetually beset by rivalries, where those in his circle became fixated on tearing down whoever had begun to win his favor.

He disregarded the advice of long-serving government employees and business professionals and his own lawyers. He encouraged people to take risky actions in his name, and demanded they prove themselves to him over and over; many were so eager for his approval that they obliged. His thirst for fame seemed to grow each time he tasted more of it, and his anger at being wounded, which was often met only with an outsize reaction against the person he blamed for the injury, was always there. Trump almost always foreclosed few options until the last possible minute and modulated his behavior only when he had to; more often than not, he waited out people and institutions who posed resistance, ultimately bending them to his will through inertia. That version of Trump was the one who was most often seen in the eight weeks leading to the violent aftermath of his 2020 loss on January 6, 2021. After he left office, some of his closest aides and supporters privately described themselves and his political movement as having been held hostage to his refusal to cede the stage; independently, those people said the only thing that would change the situation was Trump’s passing.

Trump did not produce the intense polarization that has riven the country since at least the 1990s, when President Bill Clinton and Speaker Newt Gingrich were pitted in a zero-sumpartisan conflict amid increasingly virulent culture wars. A sequence of traumas followed: impeachment trial, close presidential election decided by the Supreme Court, catastrophic and world-altering terrorist attack, two seemingly endless and costly overseas conflicts, a devastating hurricane that lay bare racial disparities, a fiscal crisis that left millions in financial ruin with no one...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593653009
• ISBN 13: 9780593653005
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 608
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland