Moderator: In 2015, Maggie Haberman joined the New York Times where she became part of a team that won a Pulitzer prize in 2018 for reporting on the investigation into Donald Trump's advisers and their connections to Russia.

In her book, "Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America," Haberman reveals a full understanding of the 45th President from researching hundreds of interviews, including Donald Trump.

Maggie Haberman is joined in conversation by Laura Coates.

Laura Coates is a CNN host and senior legal analyst.

As a civil rights attorney, she traveled throughout the United States supervising local and national elections, and led investigations into allegations of unconstitutional voting practices.

She is the best selling author of "You Have The Right: A Constitutional Guide to Policing the Police".

Recorded at the University of Louisville Kentucky Author Forum, this is Great Conversations, Maggie Haberman and Laura Coates.

[audience applauding Thank you.

I am so excited to be here with the Kentucky Author Forum, and I know to have this great conversation, we are definitely going to talk about this book.

But I think you probably know in many respects people want to talk about Maggie Haberman, and understand you as the journalist you are.

And why is it that in the truth telling fact-driven journalism that you do and that you provide, that Donald Trump seems to yearn as so many others do to get your take, to get your ear.

So let's talk a little bit about you.

Well, really a lot about you, Maggie, because there is a misconception that somehow your career began when Donald Trump came down an escalator.

Well, that didn't happen.

First of all, thank you for doing this.

Thanks to our hosts.

I'm really excited about this, and I'm really glad we were able to make this work tonight, and this set is incredible.

It is.

Yeah.

So I've been a reporter for a long time.

I started as a clerk at the New York Post in 1996.

I covered Hillary Clinton's Senate race in 2000.

I covered presidential races.

I worked at Politico for five years before joining The Times, and I worked at the New York Daily News as well.

I've covered Rudy Giuliani, I've covered Mike Bloomberg, I've covered a lot of political figures.

I think that because Donald Trump sucks all the oxygen out of the room, I think that I have become most closely associated with this story in my career, and my career will probably for a time be defined by this story, but it's not my whole career.

How do you feel about the fact that your name is often used in connection with Donald Trump who really tries to use the Press more broadly as his vehicle, as a conduit at times.

It's the gift and a curse he loves to hate.

And yet for you in particular, you're often the person people think of for your bylines or otherwise, what's Maggie say, to actually validate or prove what he has said.

I think that he is focused on me, and which I think has contributed to other people's focus on me, is really an obsession with the New York Times.

And when I say that, there's this look for a hidden but no, what's it really about.

That's really what it's about.

He is uniquely obsessed with the New York Times.

Yes, he knew me before I worked for The Times because I worked for the tabloids, and then I covered him in 2011 when I was at Politico and he was considering running for president and he floated the birther lie about President Obama suggesting he was illegitimate.

And so, he has dealt with me for a while, but really he's obsessed with the paper, and the paper for him represented sort of a form of, A, just he is media hungry and he always has been.

He is not a great businessman, what he is, is a great self-promoter.

And so, The Times was sort of the avatar of elite approval that he wanted, and I'm just the person who covers him more often.

So, I do think that's the main thing.

And yet, you have been often referred to as the avatar of the consummate journalist.

I mean, The New York Times, I know you're being very humble.

I know you and it's very wonderful that you are as humble as you are.

But I bet it's not just the New York Times that he craves, it in terms of their opinion and what they say, it's Maggie Haberman.

And in an era that we are in right now where I remember there's that phrase, in vino veritas, in wine there's truth.

Now it's on Twitter there is truth I'm in Kentucky, in bourbon, there is truth.

[laughing] Hold on, let me make sure I know where I am.

Very, very well done.

Excellent.

I don't know the Latin version of Bourbon, but let's call it Burbonius.

- Burbonius.

- Okay, there you go.

In Burbonius, there is truth.

Now, it's on Twitter, there is truth.

So anytime someone writes something or they call themselves a journalist or they are in print, people assign a level of gravitas to it, and sometimes they want to target the real journalist that is you.

So, everything that people see on Twitter is not all the same.

Everything created on social media is not all the same.

And one of my obsessions in the last six months, I would say, it began when I was writing the book, but really since it was finished and I had it in my hand, so much of the research for this book, looked at failures of the media writ large, not so much 2016, which I know is what a lot of people want to -- There is this desire to act as if Donald Trump just sprang out of nowhere, showed up in 2016 as a "Outsider" when in fact he was about as swampy as you could get based on his time in New York.

But I think that there was a -- I think there were there were two different kinds of media failures.

I think in 2016 -- and I've talked about this before, there was not enough focus on his business ties, his conflicts, his foreign businesses, considering that this has just never happened before, where we had a candidate who was as wealthy as he was with so many business entanglements who wouldn't step back from his business.

And so that should have gotten much more attention than it did.

The idea that enough time wasn't spent showing that he really isn't that successful a businessman, okay, but it's been pretty clear that he's not that successful a businessman since 1991, when he -- basically bought him up and had to be rescued by banks and his father.

And I read about that.

What I think a huge media failure was a significant focus should be the decades where he was myth-building about himself and describing himself as this titan of industry.

And he would do it and it would just get reported.

- He would make... the myth.

- The myth.

He would make these statements about himself that were not true.

His statements were often not checked.

He was good for a quote, not just for the New York Post but for a lot of television stations over a long period of time.

And so, he became this sort of symbol of wealth in the 1980s when so much was this Greed is Good mentality, but he was not the same as these titans of industry, that people were focused on the ones who were losing their jobs or who were losing their businesses, but he built himself as if he was.

And I think that this sort of the long-term consequences of what we do in our business, I think we're not really clear until looking at something like this, because we think about a daily story.

We're not thinking how is this going to look in 30 years when this guys runs for President.

It's a really fascinating point because it was of course, reflectively looking back everyone thought, well, Trump is the media's candidate, and they would look the media and say you've done this.

And so, now the sort of course correction that people expected of journalists was all upon us.

But here's the thing, people I think fundamentally, I wonder if you agree, seem to misunderstand what the role of a journalist is and how often you hear people say, oh, this ought to be a fact check in a confrontational challenge in the midst of an interview.

You don't see it that way.

You see the role of a journalist as the synonym reporter, tell me why.

Sure.

So actually, I think that journalists play both roles.

I just don't think that they're mutually exclusive and I don't think that there's a only one role.

In terms of the media's candidate point that's I think goes back to that 2016 conversation that we were having.

I do think there was too much focus on his rallies, but that having been said, if you listened to what he was saying at the rallies, it wasn't particularly coherent or within a normal frame.

So yes, if you want to argue that literally him being on screen helped him maybe, but he was a pretty well-known commodity at that point.

I do think that there is a role for journalists to challenge people in power when they are in interview settings.

I also think there is a role for journalists to gather information and inform the public.

And I think these things work in harmony and I think too often the people who are criticizing the industry want it all to be sort of a televised moment of a journalist standing up and yelling, "How dare you, sir".

And you're not going to shame somebody who can't be shamed and he is somebody who cannot be shamed.

Yeah.

I think we may have seen that a couple of times.

- A few times?

- A few times.

As long as the rhetorical question, "Have you no shame," it's been answered.

- And therefore there's no way - Yeah.

and I understand that it would make people who are watching television or watching interviews, it would make them feel good and it would make them feel affirmed, but I don't know whose mind is being changed or being newly informed by seeing that.

Many people have been shouting at their television screens for a very long time.

- That is true.

- Hoping that it gets through and there are reporters who do that.

But I wonder in the context of the subject of your book, "Confidence Man," is there a particular technique that of the challenge or that of the informational listener, which is more effective in getting him to talk?

It's a great question.

So, let me answer it this way and then, I'll get to the direct answer.

They offered interviews to literally almost every book writer who was writing a book about him after he left office and there were many.

Which is stunning in and of itself to me.

Right.

This was within weeks after January 6th.

Literally, weeks.

And my immediate reaction was no thanks because I thought I'm not going to get anything out of this.

He's just going to filibuster and yell, and it's going to potentially become a moment for him to just start shouting about fake news, and this and that.

So, I went and I spent much of it talking to him about his history in New York, which was the first half of my book.

And there are questions that while he is an unreliable narrator, as the expression goes -- - [laughing] - There is-- You might have a diplomatic future ahead of you.

There is something about Ambassador Haberman - sounds pretty good.

- That's it, there you go.

He is still the only person who can answer some of these questions.

Questions about his relationship with Robert Morgenthau, the Manhattan District Attorney, which is a key one for him and his past.

His relationship with Giuliani, his relationship with his father, his relationship with power figures in New York swamp.

He was the only person who could answer his perspective on that for me, even if he's not necessarily telling the truth.

So, I actually found it to be a pretty useful interview.

And a lot of it was just him talking and he said things that really surprised me, including I asked him, would you be having the legal problems that you're having in Manhattan if Morgenthau was still in office?

Now Morgenthau retired after '09, stayed friends with Trump and really was friends with him.

I mean part of Trump's whole past is cultivating elected officials, cultivating prosecutors, trying to shut down problems before they can develop.

So I asked him, would you be facing these legal investigations?

And this was when he was potentially getting indicted.

And he said, I'm paraphrasing, but it was "No, Bob Morgenthau was a friend of mine.

He would not have stood for this."

I was -- That was of note.

I was interested in this answer.

And so, after that I asked for two follow-ups.

And at times, I let him talk because at times it's helpful to just let him talk because he'll arrive -- Including in that first interview, he volunteered.

He got himself to this point where he started saying, he was telling us a very long story about how before he was -- He said, "Before I did the Presidency like it was like a show..." [laughing] "So before I did the Presidency, but I was and I was famous and rich, but I had all these friends who were just rich.

They couldn't get a table at a restaurant and they call me and say, 'Hey, Don, can you help me out getting into Joe's Stone Crab in Miami?"

- And then I discovered -- - He was that specific.

Literally, it's like a very detailed story that clearly did not happen.

And then, I discovered that he had told almost the exact same story to Lois Romano at the Washington Post in 1984.

And so, I actually knew that.

Right?

So he tells this whole thing, and then he volunteers and says, "The question that I get asked more than any other is would I do it again," meaning would he run again knowing how he views his presidency?

And I said, "What's the answer?"

And he said, "Yeah, I think the answer is yes."

I'm paraphrasing again, but the answer is -- "The answer is, yes because the way I look at it is I have so many rich friends and nobody knows who they are.

- So -- - So fame - was the ultimate driver.

- So fame was the answer.

And it was -- he got there on his own and that was -- I mean I asked a question to direct a bit, but sometimes just letting him talk is really worthwhile.

Sometimes you can't because you will spend 20 minutes listening to some FOX segment that he heard that he's just repeating to you or some senator called him and said something.

And then there are times where something that he's saying is so preposterous that you have to challenge it.

And so in one instance in the third interview, which was September 2021, also the last time that I talked to him, which I'll get to in a second.

Even as we're sitting here today.

He was not happy with the reporting that I put out in February which was developed for the book, but I put it out eight months before the book came out that he had been flushing documents down toilets, both in the White House and on foreign trips.

That was one of his mishandling of -- It sounds like Haha toilets, but it's actually a significant story about his mishandling of records.

Oh no, we're familiar with the significant story that developed after that.

Do you know the arc of 2022?

Yeah.

So September 2021, he started talking about Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who he's just derided and for people who are unfamiliar with the testimony that emerged from the January 6th House Select Committee, Mark Milley's interview with them, which was voluminous, it's 302 page transcript is one of the most interesting that you will read.

You will read him talking about a commander in chief in ways that are quite blunt.

He was clearly -- and this comes through in all of the books, but it's just in his own words under penalty of lying to Congress.

He's talking about how disorienting so much of that presidency was, but certainly that period right before the election and right after and it's fascinating.

So Trump has been trashing him since his books came out.

And he said to me, for me, there were two Mark Milley's, when he suggested that we walk down to the church in Lafayette Park meaning St. John's church on June 1st, 2020.

In the midst of the Black Lives Matter protest after the killing of George Floyd?

Correct, where there were these crackdowns.

So it's not Mark Milley's idea to go walk to church.

It was ridiculous.

And so, I did push back in real time at that moment because, and then he said, "Well, let's say it was equal".

Okay.

So I mean, but -- [audience laughing] Or let's not and tell me the truth.

Right.

Let's not.

And so you have to-- But he's not going to do that.

And so, it becomes very hard to interview him because you know that you are getting a lot of stuff that you're going to sift through to find what may or may not be useful, but that said, he is still the only person who can answer certain questions.

What I find fascinating about it is, there was this famous interview decades ago that never happened.

And it's the one with Frank Sinatra where journalists comes about famous and I'm here to interview Frank Sinatra, and they say Frank Sinatra has a cold.

He sticks around every single day, hoping that that's the day he'll be able to interview him.

And what comes out is this piece, it's observational and tells you so much about this person he hoped to interview without an actual word or a question being asked, exchanging the two.

I found in reading your book, that there were -- as much as there were those moments where you were able to connect and have those verbatim conversations as meandering as they may have been, that the true real beauty of the observation.

It was understanding what it is he emphasized and why, what he intended for you to extract from it and why, and most, how he wanted to seem to you, and your observations, what was it about what made him tick to crave away to, in some ways, control the narrative that you were receiving.

So thank you for that.

He just survives in these 10 minute increments of time.

He says, whatever he has to say to get through this next chunk in front of him.

And he will say diametrically opposed things sometimes in the same hour if at one moment it has stopped being useful to him.

So you're looking at somebody who is in a constant state of selling and he doesn't do that with everybody.

I don't -- he doesn't do that with his children.

He doesn't do that with a couple of aides.

But he is very capable of saying one thing to this aide, absolute opposite to this aide, and each one of them thinks they're getting the real him.

And so, one of the things that I was trying to show was moments not just in talking to him - Yeah.

- one on one, but over time where he is just in this constant manipulation with his environment and he is constantly trying to tell you that he is something that he is not.

You are dealing with somebody who creates these sort of rooms within rooms in his -- which does not mean that I think that there's some great emotional depth there.

That's not what I'm saying, and that should not be misunderstood.

There's a great, because I don't think there is.

- Yeah.

- I think one of the things that I tried getting at is that, everybody wants to confer on him some sort of -- So much of what we would hear from aides over the course of the four years of the Presidency was, he really feels strongly about this.

No, you think he feels strongly about this and you've decided he feels strongly about this based on whatever he said.

Or you need him - to feel strongly about this.

- Correct.

Or you need him to actually care about whatever this is.

And so, so much of descriptions of his behavior with the exception of him screaming at people, which he is a big screamer, is people adding some filter to how they want him to appear or how it's easier for them to process him being.

Because when you look at the fact that a lot of the behavior leads you down kind of a dark hole where there's not a ton of stuff, that can be hard for people to accept.

That's really fascinating because what comes to mind and the word that springs - is compartmentalizing it.

- Yeah.

So often people have asked the question of how people have remained in his orbit, how they have maybe not spoken up about, and you can pick any number of examples from, there's good people on both sides to conversations around who he's having dinner with - recently.

- Yep.

And that's a huge span of time without even having to go beyond - the last several years.

- Right.

That's right.

And in that -- And you write about it in the book so poignantly the idea that craving of people to almost justify their association by elevating moments of humanity and kindness.

That's normal human behavior.

- Right.

I'd say it's baseline.

- Yeah.

- it's baseline behavior.

- Yeah, like, hello, how are you?

Oh my God, he said, "Hello, how am I".

He didn't scream at my child.

I mean that's like that's kind of right.

He met my kid and he shook his hand.

And then, he didn't spit on me it was so presidential.

Presidential.

But they elevate that over, Maggie, everything else.

And one thing that comes around of course is even within his own family, which is equally as fascinating to people to study and you talk a great deal about those, but not just those who are appointees and advisory, but his own family.

The rise of anti-semitism, the seemingly perpetual rise.

And in times we live in, he has not been as vociferous and condemning as one ought to be.

You begin the book by saying the question he asks is, "What do you need me to say?"

- "What do you need me to say?"

- About David Duke.

-I mean that was the question.

- About David Duke, right?

And you wonder about Jared Kushner or others, can you speak a little bit about that compartmentalizing within his family?

Why has there not been the desire, this compulsion to condemn?

So, I would answer a couple of ways.

I think that specifically on anti-semitism, there's a few answers, one relates to him.

He has and I document this in the book.

He has a history of making anti-Semitic comments.

He is -- Somebody asked me in a radio interview in 2015 about him, he had just declared his candidacy.

And I can't remember who I said it to, but I described him as Archie Bunker with a bank account.

- [laughing] - And that is -- - That's a t-shirt.

-That is [laughing] Heard in here first.

But so that I think is, he is trapped in this moment of deep ethnic stereotyping except there is a lot of hate behind it with certain groups, some more than others.

There's a reason that a lot of Jews around him opt to see him as philo-semitic as praising Jews as opposed to using anti-Semitic tropes.

And so he says -- Somebody who's close to him said to me, "What he sees Jews as good with money" and they were just expressing and saying this as if this was some "See, this is praise" as opposed to this is actually a biblical stereotype.

And so, he is not animated about Jews as a group in a way that say we have seen him be about immigrants, particularly immigrants from Latin America as we have seen him be about Black people, as we have seen him be about, depending on the circumstance about women who criticize him or cross him or oppose him.

As to why there's not more condemnation, it goes back to what I just said about this person who was explaining to me, this person who said this was Jewish, by the way.

A person explaining to me, and I'm Jewish as well so just to note that, but this person was explaining to me that Trump really -- He really thinks Jewish people are good.

There are people around him for whom actions in relation to Israel are the single thing they are voting on and making decisions on, and everything else gets washed away in their view.

And so, I think that Kushner is one of those.

I think that Kushner is more than content playing the family negotiator on a lot of issues relating to Jews.

I think the reason you're not hearing Kushner and his wife speak out now, although you didn't hear them speak out before either.

But I think now they feel like "Oh, we're done, we don't -- It's not useful for us to be attached to this anymore" whereas I think they found utility in it before.

But none of this is noble.

I mean, just fascinating to think about the way that people justify their own pursuit of power and proximity what you write about in the book, at least one figure who was so just horrified by there's good people on both sides comment referencing the Charlottesville horror that took place and had the resignation letter written and it was going to bring it and had a very mad men vibe that you write this letter and people use a pen of some kind and they writing and they're bringing in they're holding their hand, and they take -- Gary Cohen.

They take it back again and not ended up using because they had an agenda that was separate than this.

The idea -- I still have to look at the tax reform issues.

And so, if I stay the course, and we often heard in the press, people talking about, well, you need an adult in the room.

So it's almost a magnanimous gesture that I've got to stay in spite of how I feel for that very reason.

And I just think about when you're looking at the sourcing and the people you're speaking to, there is a theme of people being miserable.

I mean miserable, around and within the orbit so much so that you write about they believe almost akin to some of the viewpoints surrounding Castro "a natural solution" to their woes.

Well, yes.

I write at the beginning of the book that there are a number of people who are basically around him who believe that he is going to hold all of these folks hostage until the end of his days.

Now, a lot of people are being held hostage by their own design.

There are also people who have decided to stay with him because particularly after January 6th, 2021, they can't get jobs.

The broader issue here is just how much self interest drove so many decisions.

I think that for all of the areas that didn't get focused on in the press in 2016.

And yes, there was volume of coverage around him.

I don't think it was particularly flattering or positive.

The bulk of the coverage was about racist statements, anti-Semitic statements, the Access Hollywood tape, wanting to ban a religion.

I mean that really has almost become a footnote and it's kind of astonishing.

He wanted to ban Muslims from entering the U.S.

It's astonishing the level of demagoguery that we have seen with him, we've never seen anything like it at such a high level.

So, it was pretty clear to everybody who this person was or at least what he was willing to say by the time he got elected.

And yet a lot of those folks went in anyway and told themselves that they were going to tame him somehow.

And I do think that they stopped certain things from happening.

I think that he was -- Look, he didn't understand the government.

- He didn't understand... - Well, he did the Presidency.

- That was a phrase, right?

- He did the Presidency.

- He did the show.

- He did the show.

- Sorry, there you go.

- He did not understand how-- He had not run for Dogcatcher before.

He did not understand how the presidency worked.

And so, he was proposing all kinds of things.

Like my new colleague, Jonathan Swan reported when he was at Axios, he was talking about using nuclear weapons on hurricanes.

He was talking about shooting migrants crossing the border.

I mean he was saying things that it wasn't just that they were norm-shattering, they were actually international law shattering.

- And so... - What about the nuclear against hurricanes is not norm or a lie.

- That's neither.

- That's just cuckoo.

- That's just... - That's just wrong.

not going to happen.

Mel Brooks wrote that somehow in some movie that may come out one day, I don't know what it is.

And so, I think that -- I think that there was a need to try to keep people around him who were going to keep certain things from happening.

It's just that at the end of the day, he is the President.

There's only so much babying you're going to do of the President.

And one of the things about that whole dynamic with the staff is that it allowed each group of staffers, and they're constantly fighting.

And I read about this in the book that one of the hallmarks of anything Donald Trump has ever run is that everybody working for him hates each other - and that was... - By design.

Correct.

He wants it that way.

He wants everyone fighting all the time.

And what's the motivation behind that, to just have a singular source of loyalty or direct target of loyalty?

Part of that it is, part of it is that he really likes drama and he really, really does.

I try to have a highbrow approach to that just now.

There's -- think more sort of Hunger Games than anything else.

He loves having everybody duke it out for his approval and fight for him.

And there was a moment in 2017 where Steve Bannon and Hope Hicks had a fight.

This has been written about in at least one book and they were standing in front of the resolute desk, which is about this size and they're over there and one is on one side, one on the other, and Trump is watching like he's at a tennis match.

I mean this is -- that is part of the allure for him.

And so, Liz Cheney had a great line in one of the public hearings which is that, Donald Trump is not an irrepressible child.

He's actually a grown man making these decisions.

And I think that he uses these staff fights and the knowledge that people start to pick up on that maybe he doesn't know what he's doing, and then they convince themselves, it's really just if he'sstaffed better and I can be the one to save him, I'm the one.

And because part of that is that there is a human instinct to give people the benefit of the doubt.

And he exploits that instinct just as he exploits aspects of journalistic process, so forth and so on.

It is fascinating to think about, and you are right.

I am always a little bit tickled by the epiphanies that people profess to have later, "Oh, I had no idea," and they've changed their mind.

I believe everyone has an opportunity and right to change their mind and change their thoughts as information becomes available.

But when it's based on the already readily available information before, I have a cynical approach to those types of epiphanies.

And when you speak about it from the personnel point of view, you earlier spoke about how he would have two different people, telling them two very different stories and both thought that they understood and knew him.

We are at a time of thinking about at the beginning, it was, he doesn't know enough.

He's an outsider, give him the benefit of doubt collectively elected and Press.

- and Press.

- Benefit of the doubt.

But now, he's running again, as we know we're talking in January - of 2023... - I would say, he's walking.

He's walking the Presidency.

This is not -- So far this is not an energetic campaign.

Not going to have a lot of caffeine, and yet however... And it might.

I mean and they get there.

Let me ask you about that because has he learned from that?

I mean the idea of he understood the role of the presidency, but personnel, he seemed to master in that respect.

I don't think mastered, but I certainly think that he learned that there were things that he could do and people he could put in certain jobs that he had been told he couldn't, and I think he realized that he can, because you can as the President.

There are non-senate-confirmed jobs.

There's actually a lot you can do within the West Wing.

Personnel has been a big focus of -- It was a huge focus when he was President.

It's been a big focus of this interregnum between when his presidency ended and his new campaign and a lot of conservative groups or allies of his are working on ways to make sure that they can keep people they want in certain jobs or to make it easier to fire civil servants or, and so forth and so on.

Now those -- This I think is important and it gets missed.

These plans could be used for any republican president.

It wouldn't necessarily have to be Donald Trump.

There's, this desire to treat Donald Trump as if he, as I said before, he sort of grew out of the ground, right?

And was suddenly this huge force and that if he's gone, then his movement goes.

His movement in some ways predated him.

His rise coincided with the rise of a lot of right wing politicians around the globe.

And he, what I wrote in the book, he fueled it and accelerated it, but he didn't create it, but he is willing to use it and use his movement in ways that we've never seen before.

There's now a question of whether that movement has to some extent started to move on from him and we're going to find that out in the coming months.

Well, we will see.

I mean, whether the Frankenstein will be as problematic as one envisions.

But let me ask you, in terms of this book, what I found fascinating is it really is the origin story, but it's a multi-generational origin story of how we got to this person and who he is.

And the culmination, normally you think about a singular event that's going to be the fork in the road that dictates how someone will spend the rest of their lives.

He didn't have a singular fork.

He had a path which he had between his father or even mayor Ed Koch.

I mean, there was conversations in terms of, you mentioned a few, Rudy Giuliani, et cetera, but you could think about his relationship and watching politics and the inner workings of real estate investment more broadly.

Informing how he thinks the rest of the functioning bureaucracy works.

Tell me about that origin story as to how it is if he was so shaped formidably and it took time to evolve into who he is now.

So I do think that some of this is just he's to the manner born this way, right?

I mean some of this is just how he arrived on the earth in terms of how he handles people.

But a lot of it was his father who was a much more effective businessman and built real middle-class housing in New York City, and also knew how to cut corners and believed in using government to his advantage and I think passed that on to his son.

And had all kinds of tax schemes that we've seen that my colleagues have reported on extensively.

His father was, in the words of Ivana Trump, a brutal father.

That's how she described him in her autobiography.

And by all accounts, he was.

That he did not trash his son in front of others.

Always talked him up.

Everything Donald touches turns to gold, is always the line.

And sometimes you could hear Trump's own children use that line because he clearly needs to hear it.

And he then discovers in 1973 this avatar/protector in Roy Cohn, and Roy Cohn was willing to do basically anything.

But he also introduced Trump to a whole new world of society in New York because Roy Cohn was Trump before Trump was Trump.

He was the person who was known for really reprehensible tactics.

He was Joe McCarthy's right hand.

He helped lead the lavender scare, which was a purging of gay officials from the government.

He was gay and died of AIDS and claimed until the end that he wasn't and that he had liver cancer.

And that became a model that Trump sought for the rest of his days.

And Trump develops these very intense relationships with these protectors.

And there's been a series of them over a long period of time and I read about them.

Before there was Michael Cohen there was a man named Richard Fields, and before there was Richard Fields, concurrent with Richard Fields, there was Dino Bradlee who wasn't quite the same because Dino Bradlee wasn't a lawyer.

But he -- And Dino Bradlee who was Ben Bradlee's son the Washington Post editor.

This is a model that Trump has found his whole life.

And he came up in an era in New York City where corruption touched almost every aspect of life.

It touched the real estate industry, it touched city government, it touched aspects of the media industry.

There's a great line in Wayne Barrett and Wayne Barrett was the precursor to us all.

He was the muckraking village voice reporter who first really investigated Trump.

And what I think about with Wayne who passed away the night before Trump was inaugurated, what I think-- in 2017.

What I think about with Wayne all the time is there's this desire, and I write about this, people can't separate out their desire to make fun of Trump with the need to take him seriously.

Wayne always took him seriously.

Wayne took him seriously as a power player and that is actually ultimately how you have to look at him as somebody who is a force.

Now, he does clownish things, there's enormous tackiness around his properties, and his plane and the interior or whatever, but he is willing to do things that other people are not and he's willing to try to find power wherever he can.

And Wayne understood that.

And Wayne had this line in his book about Trump which published in the early 1990s, quoting a friend of Trump's saying that I'm paraphrasing, but it was like, "Donald doesn't like doing anything unless there's a little moral larceny in it".

And I think that that is where you have to start out with him.

It occurs to me, you say that old phrase of "Go ahead, underestimate me this will be fun" and the ways in which it seemed he capitalized on being dismissed, no one saw coming in a way until it was too late for some and right on time for others.

I want to talk about the norms though because I often think about the former President in line with that old box we often see in any room you go into, in case of emergency break glass.

And the expectation is when there's an emergency and you break glass, something's inside to actually help you.

Like the emergency gets dealt with.

- That's right.

- If something happens.

In Washington, D. C. when you break the glass, sometimes dust just pops out, the poof.

And what comes out is a gentleman's handshake that says, this is the way it's always been.

So just inertia should not have been enough to keep things going.

When I think about the Trump presidency and the way it's been talked about and you write a great deal about this in the book, the idea of no one ever seemed to anticipate coming a person who would not simply follow the inertia and the norms.

I had a democratic operative say to me in 2016 during the transition during that very brief interregnum where Trump was doing "normal President", - the... - When was that period of time?

I was about to say, it was very short.

Okay, okay.

I think it was the end of November, but this person said -- [laughing] Of 2022.

- No.

Of 2016.

- Okay.

This person said to me, the country is about to find out how much of our system is norms and not laws and that was exactly right.

This is a system that is generally the honor system and that means -- one of the funny things about Trump's obsession with golf is that golf is an honor system game.

And there have been all kinds of stories written and books written about Trump's less-than-honor system practices with golf.

Is there a golf ball coming out of the pocket, going right next to the hole.

What's happening?

I don't understand enough about golf to know why it is that these are things that he's doing that he shouldn't be doing, but it's moving balls where they shouldn't be and taking extra shots, positioning it.

He showed how porous our system is and that it takes -- It can take one person who doesn't want to follow tradition to say it's not a law.

And so much of what he does is -- I mean, the standard by how his world operates is is he getting criminally charged or not?

I mean, literally, that is not just right now.

I mean that's how it's been for years.

That's his only standard of fear.

That's the fear standard.

If I'm going to be criminally, so the civil litigation or civil prosecution, for example, would not be something that would make him shake in his boots at all.

It will make him angry.

I mean, he's being sued by the New York Attorney General for a lot of money in a fraud case, and she has made all kinds of allegations about his company that makes him angry from the promoter standpoint, the PR standpoint.

It can make him angry from the bank account standpoint.

He doesn't like parting with money.

But it's -- Criminal charges are kind of the delineation.

And so, the number of people in his world who have said to me at various points on say, the investigation into the classified documents he had at Mar-a-Lago, they'll say, he's not getting charged.

None of this matters, he's not getting charged and they have no idea.

I mean they're wish casting obviously, you know that better than me, but it tells you where their mindset is.

Is there a true red line that he won't cross though?

If the only fear is criminal prosecution, that opens a six-lane highway.

I mean... [chuckles] It's impossible for me to answer that question whether there's -- Here's the thing that he will not do.

I think he will take things as far as he can take them.

And I think that the -- in almost every situation, the evidence of that is January 6th.

Did you observe that he was cognizant in speaking with you about, I sound like a lawyer just now, sorry.

Did you observe-- I was going to say you had the hand gestures too.

I did and I had it.

I leaned in and I had a-- We're at a partner's desk.

Let's lean into this conversation.

[laughing] But it seemed that there was a bit of a formula where he would be cognizant at times that what he was saying was either surprising to you, was doubted by you, or would be challenged more broadly.

It's almost a formula of deny then perhaps clarify and withdraw, or deny then brag about it, then withdraw if it registered your surprise.

You're thinking about the classified documents comment or that Kim Jong-un letters comment.

That's what you're thinking about, right?

Because actually, I should correct myself.

It was not a classified documents conversation.

So there were times where he would, and I'll come back to the specific.

There were times when he would brag about something.

- Yeah.

- So for instance -- There were a lot of times when he would brag about something, Maggie.

Mark Milley came up with going to the what?

So that wasn't a denial.

That was a misdirection, right?

And then, he kind of walks it back sort of.

The moment you're thinking of and unlike the first interview that we did, which was at Mar-a-Lago in March of 2021 where he was -- he seemed so shrunken.

I don't really know how to describe it.

And look, all presidents do when they're not in office anymore.

The White House is the biggest set piece in the world, right?

So when you're not there anymore -- Not every President has Bush's reaction which is to get out of town as quickly as possible, W. Bush, or Obama who went parasailing had a huge smile on his face because he was so happy not to be seen anymore.

[laughing] I would say that Trump in a weird way reminded me the most of Bill Clinton in terms of the reaction.

Bill Clinton was really -- had trouble parting with it, and part of it was because his whole presidency had been a war of fighting with Republicans, a war fought on the fronts of policy, but also his personal life.

There were things that I think he wanted to get done that he didn't think he could get done.

In Trump's case, it was just, they went after me in some broader headline that way.

Which obviously seemed to Trump.

Even the accomplishments he did have in office, he was focusing on what he did not achieve, which is a second term.

Correct.

And I write about that.

I just don't -- That was the prize that mattered the most, what he had actually gotten done and I'll give you a for instance.

He did push the government for vaccine development during COVID.

Now, it's not as if the vaccine-- as if the pharmaceutical companies were just going to sit back and not respond to a pandemic, a global pandemic, but he did take a risk and he pushed ahead with it.

And you know what happened when the vaccine didn't happen before his election, it was approved right after?

He lost total interest in it.

Wouldn't discuss it, wouldn't promote it, got his own jab in secret.

And that's I think says a lot right there.

So I asked him in our third interview, which was the September 2021 interview if he had taken any memento documents with him.

And I asked it because he was notorious for waving these letters from Kim Jong-un around at people.

I mean, literally waving them in the Oval Office.

And I'm not sure what the classified status of those were at the end of the day.

But I asked him did you take any?

And because, also, if you go to his office in Trump Tower which I have, he's got this -- He likes trophies.

He's got this shelf of tchotchkes that people have sent him like here's Shaquille O'neal's shoe.

He gave me this.

So it was -- It's probably this.

It's probably wider.

- It was more... - [laughing] - Very, very big.

- Yes.

[laughing] Very big.

So I asked him this question and he said, nothing of great urgency.

No.

And then he said, we have -- I'm paraphrasing it.

It was like, we have great things, the Kim Jong-un letters.

And I said, oh, you were able to take those with you?

And he clearly registered my surprise and he started talking over me, and I said, huh or wow or something; and he said no, no, I think those are in the archives but we have so many great things which it's mush, It's not saying anything.

And so, my read on it in hindsight once we learned that he not only had the KJU letters, but a bunch of other stuff at Mar-a-Lago was, I asked him a question, he denied, to your point, then he was so excited to talk about something, and then, veered away from it again.

Do you think that the comments surrounding the tossing or disposing of papers in the, I'm assuming, a kind of golden toilet, that's my vision.

It was not gold-- It doesn't matter, it was golden in our minds.

Laura, I had pictures.

It was not gold.

It was just a regular toilet.

Somehow that meme of is the dress white or blue, the toilet white or gold came out again.

- I don't know.

- Fair enough.

I envisioned a gold one.

And thinking about that, was that the straw that broke the back, and do you think that he is truly not going to correspond with you again?

Well, he issued a statement calling me a maggot.

- So, I thought that was... - [audience laughing] Yeah.

It was...

He's been insulting in the past to be fair.

Not like that.

This was -- I don't usually get garbage pail kid names and there's been lots of intentional misspelling of my last name in truth social posts.

But no, no door is ever closed with him.

I mean that's the whole story of the book is, he is a person who is constantly trying to avoid foreclosing lanes and options for himself.

So if he thought there was some reason to engage, he would.

There's been some criticism more broadly about the books that have been written about the former President and the timing of it.

And frankly, the criticism is not just about the subject matter of Trump.

There was criticism around John Bolton for wanting not to testify in front of the impeachment hearing discussion but instead would say save it in the book.

People have spoken about the timing at times of what is contained in a book and why not released immediately when the news comes and the reporting is there.

Talk to me about how you respond to the timing of some of the disclosures in your book that are looking retrospectively.

Sure.

So listen, it's a valid question, but it is also one with an answer.

And people can either accept that it's the truth or not the truth, but there's nothing I can do about that.

The two things that got the most attention in terms of disclosures in the book after the fact were the toilet paper documents anyway, not actual toilet paper, which I reported eight months before the book came out.

And then, the other was Trump saying to people that he wasn't going to leave the White House, which he started saying within the first two weeks after the election.

And in both cases, these are things that I learned well after he left office.

They were not going to impact the course of events.

They were also things that took time to confirm and report out.

And so, books take time and they are a process of going back to sources and learning new information and they offer new details.

And my goal is always to get confirmed, reportable information out as quickly as possible but it takes time.

And I think that there is a -- I think this is part of the problem with social media is there is sort of a belief that all information should appear the second reporters learn it, but we can't just put every single unverified anything on Twitter.

That's bad.

So, it takes time to report.

Well, you fall into a journalistically deadly trap that would be exploited against you, right?

You would feed into the perception he'd hoped to create many others about so-called fake news and in the 24/7 news cycle-- That's exactly right.

It becomes chum for him.

- Yeah.

- That's right.

Speaking about timing sitting here today and I know that he's walking for President at this moment in time and he very well may be, but I do wonder there's a piece and it's in your ending and it's so poignant if not frankly pretty sad to think that.

I'm going to read a little bit from that.

I'm not going to do a Maggie Haberman - voice impression.

- [laughing] I could not do you justice.

So it'll be my own voice, Maggie, but it'll be dramatic reading nonetheless.

- Okay.

- Okay.

And so it says, there is Trump at Andrews Air Force base.

None of his schemes worked.

None of the election denial came to fruition.

The PA system is blaring Frank Sinatra who was singing, My Way.

Cannons have been arranged to blast in the background.

Fireworks and Hail to the Chief is playing for the last time.

Air Force One sitting there again for the last time.

Trump has staged all of this.

One of the first times in his life he just couldn't pull off what he thought was due him no matter how hard he had tried.

You so aptly point out, his net was gone.

What did that mean?

There was no Fred Trump that none of his catches were there.

Fred Trump who had saved him, the banks, his customers, voters, his supporters, his power of positive thinking, None of that worked.

And he had fallen to the ground at least for a time.

At least for a time, does that mean you think that the second bite at the apple is one that will satiate him?

It means that I think that the need to make sense of him and what we have seen in this country because we are not a country that thinks of itself as a place where autocratic demagoguery works, but we've seen that it does.

And I think that's something that this country has to really grapple with, and why so many voters are receptive to what he is selling.

I think the way of trying to grapple with that has meant people wanting a clear conclusion.

He's over, this is over.

A friend reminded me yesterday that he had texted me when the documents story first broke about the Mar-a-Lago documents, and he said, this is the end of him.

And I wrote back, we'll see.

And we don't -- Your friend texted you, not Trump?

My friends sent -- No, Donald Trump doesn't text.

Yeah.

[laughing] But the friend said this is the end of him.

And I wrote back, we'll see.

And we do not know what the endpoint is with Donald Trump.

I only know we have not reached it and we will know a lot more in the coming months.

Unfortunately, we have reached the end point of this conversation, and it has been wonderful.

And, Maggie, we will soon find out whether it was indeed the end, whether it was for a time, and at what point in time we may see whether he begins to walk, then run, or maybe trot, yet again, we are in Kentucky after all.

- So true.

- We'll see the gallop.

Churchill down style will happen in some form or fashion.

I want to thank you so much for your journalism, for your integrity, for being such a vital source of information, and never losing sight of what I think that people generally need, which is the information, and you give us all intellectual credit to provide it, and allow us to find out and figure out for ourselves.

- Thank you.

- Thank you so much.

We have really come to the end of this beautiful and wonderful conversation.

[audience applauding]