5 MORE Crazy Revelations from Maggie Haberman’s 607-Page Opus — Including When Trump Tried to Shank Ivanka Via Tweet
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Already, even a week before it hits shelves, Confidence Man — the new book on former President Donald Trump by New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman — has yielded a bushel of shocking revelations about the 45th president. And now, new previews out Wednesday contain even more wild, previously unreported details about the former commander in chief.
In a summary of the 607-page tome published by the Washington Post and another published by CNN, reporters Josh Dawsey and Jeremy Herb respectively detail numerous bizarre incidents from inside the Trump White House.
All of them were summarily dismissed by Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich, who told CNN and the Post, “While coastal elites obsess over boring books chock-full of anonymously-sourced mistruths, America is a nation in decline. President Trump is focused on saving America, and there’s nothing the fake news can do about it.”
Here are five more of the wildest reveals from Maggie Haberman’s Confidence Man:
1. Trump nearly fired his own daughter and son-in-law by Tweet
Firing by tweet was not an unprecedented practice during the Trump administration. But according to Haberman, it nearly happened to Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.
From the book:
“In meetings with [White House Chief of Staff John] Kelly and [White House Counsel Don] McGahn, Trump gave instructions to essentially fire the pair. Kelly and McGahn resisted, expressing their fear that he would not back them once his daughter and son-in-law pushed back. At one point, Trump was about to write on Twitter that his daughter and son-in-law were leaving the White House. Kelly stopped him, saying Trump had to talk to them directly before doing so. Trump agreed, then never followed up with the conversation.”
CNN’s preview also notes that Trump regularly mocked Kushner.
“He sounds like a child,” Trump reportedly said, after Kushner testified before Congress in 2017.
2. Trump regularly mocked Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s failing health
Prior to her passing in 2020, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a frequent target of Trump mockery. Confidence Man describes instances where the former president would sarcastically clasp his hands in prayer and say, “Please God. Please watch over her. Every life is precious.”
He would then ask an aide, “How much longer do you think she has?”
3. Trump’s former chief of staff clearly had no use for him
John Kelly, behind-the-scenes, frequently expressed nothing short of searing contempt for his former boss. Haberman reports that Kelly called Trump a “fascist” who was unfit for Office. And CNN described an incident from the book in which Kelly confided in former chief economic adviser Gary Cohn:
Following the 2017 White supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, when Trump claimed there were good people on “both sides,” Trump’s then-chief economic adviser Gary Cohn prepared a letter of resignation. Trump appealed for Cohn to stay. “If you leave, you’re committing treason,” Trump said, according to Haberman.
Cohn agreed to stay through the administration’s efforts to pass its signature tax overhaul later that year. As Cohn left the Oval Office, Kelly whispered to him: “If I were you I’d have shoved that paper up his f**king ass,” Haberman writes.
4. Trump had absolutely no idea how Congress works
One passage of the CNN preview shows an alarming lack of knowledge from Trump about how Congress functions. The former president even talked about filing a lawsuit against Congress ahead of his first impeachment in 2019.
From CNN:
The book shows Trump’s failure to grasp basic policy concepts, such as Trump suggesting in an interview with Haberman that the Senate’s minority party could block legislation by skipping votes. “The vice president’s vote doesn’t count. It doesn’t count. You might want to check this,” Trump said.
When the House introduced articles of impeachment against Trump for the first time in 2019, Trump reacted with a familiar refrain, according to the book: “I’ll just sue Congress. They can’t do this to me.”
5. The Return of John Barron?
In a truly stunning anecdote, Haberman described how former Rep. Debbie Dingell believes Trump may have tried to pass himself off as a Washington Post reporter in a phone call to her on one occasion.
From the Post:
Haberman describes Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) getting a phone call from an unknown number. “When she answered, the man on the other end identified himself as a Washington Post reporter, and said he knew her husband from his investigations in Congress. The name he gave was not one she recognized. The man asked Dingell if she was looking for an apology from Trump. No, she replied, merely that people could be civil to one another. As the man talked, Dingell couldn’t shake the idea that his voice sounded like that of the forty-fifth president.”
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