Maggie Haberman Calls Trump Out for Avoiding ‘Harder Questions’ With ‘Tabloid’ Strategy

CNN commentator, bestselling author, and New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman called out President Donald Trump’s “New York tabloid” strategy to avoid “harder questions” from the press.

Haberman has been on a months-long leave of absence while working on the book “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” which is co-written by Jonathan Swan and comes out in June.

But as the drop date nears, you can expect to see a lot more of Haberman — on the air and elsewhere.

Recently, Haberman and Politico’s Alex Burns sat down with moderator Jeff Greenfield at the 92nd Street Y to talk politics and Trump.

Greenfield started off asking if it’s more “reasonable” to be alarmed this time around in Trump’s second term. Haberman pointed out several differences, including the Trump strategy of calling up journalists for phone chats in lieu of press conferences, which he has done often since the start of the Iran War:

POLITICAL ANALYST JEFF GREENFIELD: Look, it’s a cliché, almost a consistent one, that Washington is in a state of disarray, it’s crisis, it is a constitutional crisis.

But given what’s going on now, is it more reasonable than otherwise in the past to say, yeah, we’ve really got some pretty serious, strange, worrisome stuff on the agenda?

NY TIMES JOURNALIST MAGGIE HABERMAN: I feel like we’ve had a version of this exact conversation in iterations, literally the three of us for the last eight years, I think it is, maybe nine.

But look. What’s happening in Washington, and Alex is there full-time. I split my time between New York and D.C., but it’s certainly not anything that I’ve experienced before.

But I think that it’s, I don’t know what it looks like going forward. There’s a couple of different aspects.

One is, you know, we’ve never had a White House that communicates the way this one does. We’ve, as much as, President Trump was on his cell phone in term one. This is obviously quite different.

And it’s funny because I keep thinking about something when I was at Politico with Alex in 2011, another of our former colleagues, Ben Smith, and I did a piece about Trump in April of 2011 when he was looking at running for president.

And John Avlon, who I suspect many of you know, at the time was at the Daily Beast, and he gave me a quote about how Trump was trying to force the national media to play by New York tabloid rules and it wasn’t working.

Well, it’s working now. I mean, he just gets everybody to call him for a couple of minutes, and that’s a way to not answer harder questions.

But I just, in terms of the checks and balances aspect, which I think is part of what you’re asking, or mostly what you were asking, the courts have actually pushed back on Trump quite–.

Not the Supreme Court that often, but other federal courts, including Trump appointees.

The administration is ignoring some of their orders, and that gets us into a different question.

But when Congress just turns over its power to the president, that’s a little different than, I think, what you’re describing, which is a smash and grab.

This is sort of, here you go, you don’t have to smash, you don’t have to grab, sir, we’re just gonna give this to you.

And I think Democrats are still, Alex would again have a better feel for this than I do, but I think that Democrats are still figuring out where they are after 2024.

Watch above via the 92nd Street Y.

New: The Mediaite One-Sheet "Newsletter of Newsletters"
Your daily summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting. Subscribe now!