Maggie Haberman Roasts Trump on MS NOW Over Bombshell Hitler-Golf-‘Historian’ Revelation

New York Times journalist and bestselling author Maggie Haberman roasted President Donald Trump over a bombshell passage from her book in which Trump revels in a comparison to Hitler and others, describing the “jarring” conversation.

For weeks, Haberman and co-author Jonathan Swan have been dropping bombshells from their book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump — released on June 23 — which have been chock-full of splashy revelations.

One such exchange involved Trump regaling the authors with a paper that claimed he is more powerful than a murderer’s row of totalitarian historical leaders. Trump has since publicly embraced the premise.

On Tuesday morning’s edition of MS NOW’s Morning Joe, co-host Mika Brzezinski asked Haberman what she learned about Trump’s “state of mind” while writing the book.

A clearly amused Haberman described the meeting with Trump in detail, including the “jarring” moment he rattled off the names:

MS NOW’S MIKA BRZEZINSKI: I’d like to hear from both of you is your conclusion about Donald Trump’s state of mind and the ability of his team to do enduring damage Maggie.

NY TIMES JOURNALIST MAGGIE HABERMAN: I don’t fancy myself a psychiatrist. I don’t know about his state of mine in terms of you know sort of.

MS NOW’S MIKA BRZEZINSKI: What do you conclude after working on this book?

NY TIMES JOURNALIST MAGGIE HABERMAN: The same thing that we’ve been saying, really, which is that this is somebody who is uninhibited. Who is is operating on pure gut, who sees himself as this world figure.

So one thing that I do want to talk about on a specific, if I can, just to make that point, when we had this interview with him on March 16th, which was at the end of our reporting process, and we had asked for an interview several times because he is the subject of the book, but the reporting was done.

We wanted to fact-check with him. We did not want to just sit and have sort of an open mic night. And when we went in, first he greeted us with pictures of maple trees, which was what he was looking at.

And the amount of time that he is spending on decor and sort of remaking the White House, Washington, in his image and sort trying to make sure that people can’t take his name out of commission the way it happened before.

So that is one thing he’s very focused on.

And then we asked him a question about power and how he sees his own power, because we knew that he had been talking about this with confidence, and we wanted to see what he would say.

And we were a few weeks into the war at this point. And he tells Natalie Harp, who is his ever-present aide who sits on the side of the wall in the Oval Office in almost every meeting.

“Go get the printouts.”.

And then he says, “Do you know who Gary Player is?”.

And we weren’t really sure where this was going, because Gary Player is a… A golfer and a very well-known one, yes, and so she comes back with these sheets of paper and she hands each of us a two-pager.

And he tells this story about how Gary Player introduced him to a historian and a historian had this theory of the case about Trump, and this paper begins that “Donald Trump is the most powerful person who has ever walked the Earth,” more than Mao. Stalin, Hitler, Napoleon, the Caesars, yeah, he calls them the top 10. These are the top ten. Top ten. Top ten, yeah.

Yes, and the people he’s naming are the Top Ten of sort of the well-known influencers of history, so to speak. And that Trump is more powerful than any of them because he has the might of the U.S. Military, because there’s social media, because he’s got reach.

And Trump is just sort of reveling in this, you know, he’s reading, he is reading the names and I wasn’t reading them along with him, I don’t think Jonathan was either, and hearing him say it out loud was actually sort of jarring.

Of Hitler, Mao, Stalin. It turned out that this was not a historian, this was– Jonathan went down a rabbit hole and tracked him down, we were asking what the name was, David King.

He was Gary Player’s business associate and and caddy.

MS NOW’S JOE SCARBOROUGH: Almost almost a historian.

NY TIMES JOURNALIST MAGGIE HABERMAN: Right. And and but but there was no moral assessment here of who Trump was happy to be in the company of.

MS NOW’S JOE SCARBOROUGH: Right.

NY TIMES JOURNALIST MAGGIE HABERMAN: It was about power and how it was being exercised. So that is my takeaway from all of this about his state of mind

Watch above via MS NOW’s Morning Joe.

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