“Regime Change” co-author Maggie Haberman on MS NOW said she regrets how she and her co-author, Jonathan Swan, were unable to cover President Donald Trump’s health in their new book.
“If there is an area of failure in the reporting for us, it was this, in trying, not mental per se, but just his health, how he is, why he has gone to Walter Reed several times, and they have released less and less information,” Haberman said on “The Weekend.”
He is now 80 years old just at the NATO summit. He talked about the Islamic Republic of Japan, the JCPOC saying to the reporters, do you have a question for President Putin? Had this happened in a previous administration, people would be saying the man is nuts, he shouldn’t be in office anymore.
When it comes to this president, given all the reporting that you and Jonathan have done, should the American people be concerned about the mental acuity of this president?
MAGGIE HABERMAN: Well what we’ve seen over time is that clearly a lot of people do have that concern. You hear from people the same as we do. His health is like a black box inside that administration, much more than almost any other issue.
And if there is an area of failure in the reporting for us, it was this. In trying to, not mental per se, but just his health. How he is, why he has gone to Walter Reed several times and they have released less and less information.
We see what you see, which is he is 80, which is that he is clearly, you know, doesn’t speak with the same crispness that he did 30 years ago, 20 years ago, 10 years ago, as people who turn 80 tend not to. There was nothing, I will say, in our interview with him, which was a fact-checking interview, this the one that Jonathan was referring to, where we were handed the…
EUGENE DANIELS, MS NOW: Which honestly that seems worth the price of the book alone.
CAPEHART: How long was that?
HABERMAN: It was an hour, so actually let me just, let me set the scene for that just for a second. And it does answer your question to some extent. Just in terms of what we know, there was nothing that seemed unlike Donald Trump, of who Jonathan and I have both been around a lot.
We had interviewed repeatedly. There was nothing that felt, oh this is unusual, this is different. It was actually quite the same.
Just, you know, Steve Bannon refers in the book to pure Trump and this was very much pure Trump. But we walked in and after Jonathan was describing what had happened, you know, we had asked him about presidential power. And he had described himself to somebody, a couple of people, that as far as we knew maybe more than that, as the most powerful U.S. president who had ever existed. And, you know, we were in in a new war after he had campaigned on no new wars, so we wanted to hear what he would say if we put that question to him. And what we got was this two-pager that Jonathan referenced, which he described as being written by a historian. A historian who was a friend of Gary Player, the golfer.
He had his aide Natalie Harp, go get that. So she hands us these two pagers, she gives him one too, and he’s just, he’s just reading it. And he’s reading what he describes as the top ten.
And it’s histories, you know, conquerors and monsters, frankly. Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, the Caesars. He says, because there’s more than one Caesars.
Tamerlane. I’m missing someone, but you get the point. You get the point.
And so, and he’s reveling in being in their company, as Jonathan was saying. And that was the part that was so striking to me, frankly, and to Jonathan. It was this extraordinary moment, in particular that the fact that he was talking about Hitler, you know, just again, it was not in a moral component, but often when people have raised a Hitler comparison as a critique of him, which is not infrequent, and you and I, all three of us have seen it, all four of us have seen it, I was surprised.
He gets very reactive. I was surprised to hear him just sort of, you know, reading this way. You know, the coda is that it was not a historian.
It was Gary Player’s former caddy and business associate, who reads a lot. But, you know, the reality is that he wanted us to understand, these folks have power, I have more, and I’m willing to use it. And so that is the constant.
And, you know, Jonathan was making the point that he was more reactive in term one, and that is very much what we, you know, found in our reporting for this book. But there’s a part of this that both of us, you know, and we’ve written this, when he was at Axios, as the Times, some of this is what he was preparing to do in 2020, had COVID not happened. And you are now really seeing pure Trump.
So the mental acuity point is not one that I feel equipped to answer. You know, and I don’t think Jonathan does either. But I think that people can very legitimately question whether 80-year-old people should be president.
“Maggot Hagerman has covered me incorrectly for ten years. Her book is a joke! 90% of it is Fake News. She has made a living off her bad reporting, and will pay the price when our Multi Billion Dollar Lawsuit against The Failing New York Times gets to Court, which should not be that long. I don’t mind bad press, if they are right. I do mind Fake Reporting, like what’s in her boring book, and like she’s done for eleven years, with only one aim in mind, to have Trump lose Elections but, as I sit in the Oval Office and ponder, that hasn’t worked out too well,” Trump wrote.
