CNN’s Maggie Haberman Twists the Knife on Trump’s Failed Whipping for Speaker: ‘He Appears Weak And He Didn’t Have To’

New York Times correspondent, best-selling author, and CNN analyst Maggie Haberman twisted the knife on Ex-President Donald Trump’s apparent inability to influence the Republican election for speaker of the House.

Outgoing House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s tumultuous bid to become speaker amid a revolt from House conservatives has dominated the news this week and has thus far resulted in six votes in which McCarthy failed to secure a win. A major facet of the story has been Trump’s late-stage whipping for McCarthy after a period of waffling and its failure to gain votes for his candidate of choice.

On Thursday night’s edition of CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, anchor Anderson Cooper asked Haberman to weigh in, and she portrayed Trump as a “diminished” figure whose new whiff of weakness is self-inflicted:

COOPER: Maggie Haberman, I want to go to you. I mean, what’s interesting about the backdrop of this is you’re have the former president, Donald Trump, making a public endorsement of McCarthy today, saying he supports McCarthy. And what he doesn’t support is allowing this chaos to continue. That doesn’t seem to have changed any minds. In fact, Congresswoman Lauren Boebert, who, you know, has been down to Mar-a-Lago and is kind of a creation of Trump world in many regards, dissed him, essentially, saying that he has it all wrong.

MAGGIE HABERMAN, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: That’s right, Anderson. There is an element of a fear factor that’s just not present right now for Donald Trump with these members. You know, it’s worth recalling, Anderson, that this energy, this House Freedom Caucus energy, grows out of the Tea Party, which predates Donald Trump, that Donald Trump seized on it and Donald Trump capitalized on it and fueled it and benefited from it and found common cause with these folks. But he didn’t create this kind of energy in the House, and I think that he believes he did. I think he believes that these are all just people who like him and will do whatever he wants. They’re not seeing it that way right now. If anything, McCarthy actually lost one vote after Trump reissued his support this morning.

Now, look, if McCarthy ends up getting a deal and becomes the speaker, Trump will claim credit. He will say he was there all along. If McCarthy loses support, Trump will be quick to support whoever looks like he’s going to be the winner, because that’s how Trump behaves. He goes, you know, where he sees the wind blowing. It’ll be no different. This says more about McCarthy than it does about Trump, what’s happening in the House right now. But it’s not a good sign for Trump. He appears weak, and he didn’t have to. He jumped into this.

COOPER: He also appears just isolated in a beach resort, a golfer club in Mar-a-Lago. I mean, he’s not part of this at all.

HABERMAN: No, look, he is part of it to the extent that he’s been making calls. Actually, my colleagues and I reported a couple of weeks ago that he was making whip calls on McCarthy’s behalf, and he was surprised —

COOPER: Lauren Boebert said that she got a call from him.

HABERMAN: Right. He was surprised that he was finding that he wasn’t actually getting anywhere with folks. Now, I think initially he wasn’t doing that hard to sell, but he got there and did do a stronger push on McCarthy’s behalf. He has been running, you know, some — a campaign that has looked nothing like anything we’ve seen him do before. He announced his candidacy in November, right after a midterms that were a disappointment for Republicans. Even when they won the House, it was by a very slim majority. They are now proceeding to make Nancy Pelosi the person that Republicans reviled over the course of the last more than a decade. They’re highlighting why she was able to get stuff done and why she was effective. This is the opposite of where Republicans want to be, and Trump, you know, makes everything about himself. Yet, to your point, he’s been doing nothing. He is something of a diminished presence.

Now, again, he’s the only declared Republican presidential candidate right now, so we can’t say he’s off the stage entirely, but he is not commanding at all the way we have been used to in Republican politics over the last six years.

Watch above via CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360.