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THE TRUMP SAGA
THE ULTIMATE EGOTIST Donald Can’t Quit Maggie ... the boundlessness of Trump's self-regard. Original article: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/29/opinion/donald-trump-maggie-haberman.html? Peter Burgess COMMENTARY Peter Burgess | ||
Frank Bruni
OPINION
Donald Can’t Quit Maggie
A Times reporter’s new biography of Trump shows the boundlessness of his self-regard.
Sept. 29, 2022
Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times
Written by Frank Bruni
Frank Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.
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Maggie Haberman’s forthcoming book about Donald Trump, “Confidence Man,” is chockablock with fresh anecdotes and insights, just as her reporting on him over the years has been. He tells her, for example, that he’s glad for his turbulent time in the White House because so many other rich men have tiny or nonexistent public profiles, their bank accounts bloated but their names unknown. For him, the presidency was Page Six on the Potomac.
But perhaps the most revealing aspect of the book, to be published next week, is that Trump gave Maggie, a Times reporter since 2015, three interviews for it. This is the same Trump who vilified her on Twitter, called her names and cast her as the personification of “fake news.” Maggie just pressed on, asking the right questions, getting the right people to answer them and seemingly trusting on some level that Trump would never wholly cut her off. She can recognize a performance when she sees one. And she can hear in a narcissist’s self-regarding soliloquies the aching need to babble on.
Their relationship says so much about Trump — some of it long obvious, some of it less so. It proves his awareness of the lies he tells: If he really believed, as he publicly claimed, that Maggie was a fabulist, he’d deem it pointless and potentially ruinous to talk with her. He’d stop. But he clearly respected her, even as he trashed her, the ugly act of which confirms the void where a moral person’s conscience resides.
He’ll do anything to survive. And he’ll do anything for an audience. Maggie (a friend of mine) and the other journalists whom he publicly insulted but privately indulged were, to him, reserves of precious attention, their discerning gazes trained on him, their busy thoughts dedicated to the puzzle of him, their notepads and audio recordings and television cameras a conduit to ever greater fame. There was danger in letting them in, peril in having them around, but the alternative was worse. They might give prime real estate on the evening’s newscast to some other circus act. They might write books about a lesser clown.
“He had an almost reflexive desire to meet with nearly every author writing a book about him,” Maggie noted in an adapted excerpt from “Confidence Man” that appeared recently in The Atlantic. Of course he did. Part of that is surely a matter of confidence — the double entendre title of her book is sagely chosen — and his belief that he could maybe win over those authors just a bit and reshape the narrative ever so slightly in his favor.
But more of it is a glutton’s insatiable hunger to be listened to and looked upon.
We journalists are rightly dissatisfied with the paucity of interviews that President Biden gives, and we fairly note that the person at the Resolute Desk must be held accountable — and must communicate with voters — to a degree that’s not possible if the news media is kept at too distant a remove. Biden’s reticence is also fuel for his detractors, who present it as evidence that he’s mentally wobbly and afraid of misspeaking.
But it does at least suggest the kind of discipline that Trump lacks. It also demonstrates that Biden’s vanity, unlike Trump’s, has limits.
To Trump, all of us in the news business and all of the people at his rallies are mirrors, assembled into a fun house where every room, every wall, every corner shows him the visage that he relishes more than any other: his own.
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| The text being discussed is available at | https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/29/opinion/donald-trump-maggie-haberman.html? and |