New York Times

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘A nutso proposition’: Robert Draper on Trump, Republicans and January 6

      by

      ‘A nutso proposition’: Robert Draper on Trump, Republicans and January 6 The New York Times reporter’s new book considers the Capitol attack and after: the fall of Liz Cheney, the rise of MTG and moreIn mid-December 2020, Robert Draper signed to write a book about the Republican party under Donald Trump, who spent four wild years in the White House but had just been beaten by Joe Biden.‘Devoid of shame’: January 6 cop Michael Fanone on Trump’s Republican partyRead more“Trump hadn’t conceded,” Draper says, from Washington, where he writes for the New York Times. “But the expectation was that he would. The notion of the ‘Be there, will be wild’ January 6 insurrection had not yet taken root. And so I thought that the book would be about a factionalised Republican party, more or less in keeping with When the Tea Party Came to Town, the book I did about the class of 2010.”“All that changed on my first day of reporting the job, which happened to be January 6, when I was inside the Capitol.”The book became Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind. It is a detailed account of Republican dynamics since 2020, but it opens with visceral reportage from the scene of what Draper calls the “seismic travesty” of the Capitol attack.Draper says: “I still get chills, thinking about that day. It’s a Rashomon kind of experience, right? There were a lot of people in the Capitol and they all have different viewpoints that are equally valid.“Mine was that of someone who just showed up figuring I would cover this routine ceremony of certification, ended up not being able to get into the press gallery, wandered around to the west side of the building and suddenly saw all of these police officers under siege, getting maced and beaten. After being there for a while, I escaped through the tunnels and went to the east side of the Capitol, and watched people push their way in.”In their book The Steal, Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague observe that those who attacked the Capitol had no more chance of overturning the election than the hippies of 1967 had of seeing the Pentagon levitate. Draper’s term “seismic travesty” points in the same direction. But he does not diminish the enormity of the attempt, of Trump’s rejection of democracy and the threat posed by those who support him.His book joins a flock on January 6. One point of difference is that each chapter starts with an image by the Canadian photographer Louie Palu, of January 6 and the days after it. Rioters surge. Politicians stalk the corridors of power.Draper says: “There’s a reason why the subtitle isn’t how the Republican party lost its mind, but instead when the Republican party did. It is about a snapshot in time. I happen to think it is an incredibly momentous snapshot, but this is not a dry historical recitation of how the Republican party over decades moved from one mode of thought to another.”“It’s important for me to impress upon readers that this is a discrete moment worth considering, a moment when the Republican party … rather than decide, ‘Wow, we’ve been co-conspirators, intended or not, to a horrific event, and we’ve got to do better,’ instead went in a different direction.“And that to me is a moment when democracy is now shuttered and therefore has to be contemplated.”Draper interviewed most major players, among them Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader with his eye on the speaker’s gavel after next month’s midterms. Asked if the man who courted Trump with red and pink Starbursts and genuflections at Mar-a-Lago is the leader Republicans deserve, Draper answers carefully.“So two operative words there are ‘leader’ and ‘deserves’. It depends on how you define either. He would be the leader in the sense of that they’ll probably vote for him for speaker … but it’s an open question as to whether he really will lead or whether he really has ever led.“The important word is ‘deserves’. And obviously, that requires a judgment on my part. But I do think that what Kevin McCarthy embodies to me is the human refutation to the argument that Donald Trump hijacked the Republican party, because to imagine that metaphor, you imagine the Republican party as an airplane seized by force, without any complicity, and that the plane was a perfectly well-functioning plane before then. McCarthy is here to disprove all of that.“McCarthy has been an absolute enabler of Donald Trump. He has never refuted the kinds of lies his party has embraced. He has winked and nodded along. People have told me that he’s offered to create for Marjorie Taylor Greene a new leadership position. At minimum, she’s likely to get plum committee assignments.”Greene, a far-right, conspiracy-spouting congresswoman from Georgia, was elected as Draper began work.“I thought she would be just kind of marginalised, sitting at the Star Wars bar of Republican politics, kind of a member of Congress who would be ousted after one term. But in a lot of ways, tracing her trajectory was a way of tracing the trajectory of the post– Trump presidency Republican party after January 6. Now, Trump is without question the dominant party leader, and more to the point, Trumpism is the straw that stirs the drink.”Some in the media say Greene should not be covered. Some say strenuously otherwise. Draper spent time with her.“This is the advantage of doing a book as opposed to daily journalism. It took me a year to get my first interview with her. You have to understand, to her, the mainstream media is, as Trump has delicately put it, the enemy of the American people. She thinks we habitually lie. We merit nothing but disgust, minimum, and contempt, maximum.“And so to get her to kind of cross that psychological Rubicon and be willing to talk to me was a real process. But I do find in journalism and anthropology that people generally speaking want to let the rest of the world know why they are the way they are. They want to reveal themselves. And if you place them in a comfortable zone, where they feel like they can do that, and trust that they will not be made to pay for it immediately, then they often will, if only in increments, begin to reveal themselves. And that’s what happened with Greene and me.”Democracy on the vergeLiz Cheney is in some ways Greene’s opposite. The daughter of Dick Cheney, vice-president under George W Bush, she is an establishment figure who broke from Trump only over the Capitol attack. Ejected from party leadership, she is one of two Republicans on the House January 6 committee but lost her seat in Wyoming to a Trump-backed challenger.To Draper, it is “remarkable that we’re talking about those two female Republicans in the same breath, implicitly recognising these improbable opposite trajectories.“In December 2020, if you and I were talking about Liz Cheney and saying, ‘What’s going to happen to her next,’ we wouldn’t say she’s going to be exiled from the party. And if we said, ‘What’s going to happen to Marjorie Taylor Greene next,’ we wouldn’t say she would basically be a more influential figure in the Republican party than Liz Cheney. It would seem a nutso proposition and yet that’s exactly what happened.“Cheney stood almost alone in her view that not only did the party need to move on from Trump, but that it needed to see to it that Trump would no longer be a powerful force within the GOP. That put her on an island along with Adam Kinzinger and precious few others. She’s paid a heavy political price.”Draper’s previous book, To Start a War, showed how Cheney’s father and his boss sold the Iraq war, citing weapons of mass destruction which did not exist. How did Cheney feel about that?“She said, ‘You and I probably disagree on whether or not it was the right thing to do to go into Iraq.’ I remember saying to her, ‘You mean, I’m not a warmonger like you are?’ And she laughed, but she happens still to believe that was a viable proposition. And I think my book reaches the inexorable conclusion that [it] was a very foolish proposition.“But it’s worth bringing that up, because … the subject at hand was not just Donald Trump, but also the Republican party and its tenuous grip on the truth. And it has been an eye-opener, I think, for a lot of us that Liz Cheney … stands for other things beyond ideology, and among them are the preservation of democracy.”Before the Capitol was attacked, Cheney read Lincoln on the Verge, Ted Widmer’s account of Abraham Lincoln’s perilous rail journey to Washington in 1861.Draper writes: “As the nation teetered on the brink of civil war, Lincoln avoided two assassination attempts on the journey, while the counting of electoral college votes in the Capitol was preceded by fears that someone might seize the mahogany box containing the ballots and thereby undo Abe Lincoln’s presidency before its inception.“Cheney had shuddered to think what would have happened had the mob gotten their hands on the mahogany boxes on January 6, 2021.”Unchecked review: how Trump dodged two impeachments … and the January 6 committee?Read moreWidmer is a historian but plenty of books have suggested that with America deeply polarised and Trumpism rampant, we could be close to a second civil war. To Draper, “tragically it is not out of the question”.“It’s certainly clear to me that when you’ve got a third of the voting public in America that believes that the election was stolen … [that’s] not something that you take with a grain of salt.“America really is beset by fractures that could metastasize into something violent. I hope to hell that’s not the case. But but I’m not gonna look at you and say there’s no way it’ll happen.”
      Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind is published in the US by Penguin Press
      TopicsBooksRepublicansUS politicsThe far rightDonald TrumpUS Capitol attackUS CongressfeaturesReuse this content More

    • 163 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Newsroom Confidential review: Margaret Sullivan’s timely tale of the Times and the Post

      by

      Newsroom Confidential review: Margaret Sullivan’s timely tale of the Times and the PostThe public editor and media columnist is fascinating and unsparing, particularly about the Times’ Trump-Clinton fiasco Margaret Sullivan has written a beguiling memoir which shares many of the virtues of the work that brought her national attention as public editor of the New York Times and then as a media columnist for the Washington Post. The virtues of her columns, excellent news judgment and old-fashioned common sense, are again on display.Unchecked review: how Trump dodged two impeachments … and the January 6 committee?Read moreEspecially in the early part of the book, Sullivan pats herself on the back quite a bit for breaking a glass ceiling by becoming one of the first woman editors of an important regional paper, the Buffalo News. But she is capable of self-criticism, especially for a painful mistake when her paper decided to publish the criminal backgrounds of the victims of a mass shooting. “The Black community was furious” because the paper had deepened “the pain of family and friends who were mourning their loved ones” – and “they were right”. Too often victims of police violence in Buffalo had been described as “no angel”.She quotes Goethe on the benefits of such a mistake: “By seeking and blundering, we learn.”The next phase of her career, when she identified the blunders of editors and reporters at the New York Times, then publicized them in her columns, is the most interesting part of the book.Sullivan quickly learned what I discovered many years ago, when I switched from writing about politicians and prosecutors for the Times to critiquing journalists for Newsweek: reporters have by far the thinnest skins of any public figures. It’s not surprising: a big reason many choose to become journalists is to give themselves a feeling of being in control, so they often feel discombobulated when they are the subject of an interview instead of its progenitor.To her credit, Sullivan offended the sports editor and the politics editor of the Times equally. She showed she had the right instincts with her first blogpost, calling for “rigorous adherence not just to the facts but to the truth, and away from the defensive performative neutrality that some were beginning to call false balance or false equivalence (‘Some say the earth is round; others insist it is flat’ or, more pertinently ‘Some say climate change is real and caused partly by human behavior; others insist it doesn’t exist’.)”She almost never had “a completely comfortable day” as public editor, which means she did a good job: “If the people I worked next to were happy with me, I felt guilty for being too soft on the institution … If they were upset with me – sometimes even furious” she worried she had been too harsh.One of her worthiest crusades was against the vast use of anonymous sources, especially in Washington stories. When Eric Schmitt, a national security reporter, was appointed to a committee on reporting practices, he was astonished to learn that readers’ “number one complaint, far and away, was anonymous sources”. A reader wrote to Sullivan: “I beseech the Times not to facilitate government acting like the Wizard of Oz – behind a curtain.”Although Sullivan was at the paper a decade after its worst modern anonymous sources fiasco – dozens of stories promoting the idea that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were real – she found practically nobody had learned any lessons.The practice was still “vastly overused … not just for ultra-sensitive reporting on the national security beat but also for all kinds of frivolous purposes – in gossipy entertainment pieces, in personality profiles, in real estate stories”. Sullivan inaugurated “AnonyWatch”, asking readers to send examples of anonymous sourcing.Some of the very worst journalism practiced by the Times during Sullivan’s tenure was its coverage of the 2016 election. The paper’s first woman executive editor, Jill Abramson, assigned Amy Chozick to report on Hillary Clinton full-time in 2013. Another press critic, Tom Rosenstiel, pointed out it was probably a pretty bad idea to “perpetuate the permanent campaign” three years before the first primary.Chozick’s first big feature for the Sunday magazine was called Planet Hillary, illustrated by an image of Clinton’s face as “a fleshy globe”. Sullivan agreed with the reader who wrote, “The now-viral image is hideously ugly, demeaning, sexist and completely premature.”Times editors up to Abramson, who approved the image, “couldn’t understand the fuss”. To Sullivan it was an early warning that “when it came to covering Hillary Clinton, Times journalists often took things too far”.Things went steeply downhill in 2015 when the Times – and the Washington Post and Fox News – promoted a book by the Breitbart contributor Peter Schweizer, Clinton Cash: the Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich.How Chozick chose to write about this crude propaganda? “Already the Republican Rand Paul has called its findings ‘big news’ that will ‘shock people’ and make voters ‘question’ the candidacy of Hillary Rodham Clinton”.Things got dramatically worse with the paper’s obsession with Clinton’s emails, and FBI director James Comey’s decision to put them back in the news a few days before the election. By then Dean Baquet was Times editor. He vastly overplayed Comey’s announcement with three big stories, including one by Chozick and Patrick Healey headlined “With 11 Days to Go, Trump Says Revelation ‘Changes Everything’”.Confidence Man review: Maggie Haberman takes down TrumpRead moreSullivan observes that framing must have caused “rejoicing in the GOP camp”. It did.The Columbia Journalism Review reported that in six days, the Times “ran as many cover stories” about Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up the election.Comey shut down his investigation again. But the damage was done.The Times editorial page compensated a little bit for its news coverage by giving Clinton an enthusiastic endorsement. But as Sullivan points out, editorials rarely sway elections while “relentless front-page political coverage can, especially when it’s in the hugely influential New York Times”.“In this case,” she writes, “I believe it did.”
      Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life is published in the US by St Martin’s Press
      TopicsBooksUS press and publishingNew York TimesWashington PostUS politicsPolitics booksreviewsReuse this content More

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      James Brown’s cape and Rudy gone wild: key takeaways from Haberman’s Trump book

      by

      James Brown’s cape and Rudy gone wild: key takeaways from Haberman’s Trump bookThe former president really doesn’t like Mitch McConnell – and other notable things we’ve learned from Confidence Man Maggie Haberman’s new book, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, was published in the US on Tuesday. As is now customary for books about the 45th president, its revelations have been widely reported.‘She say anything about me?’ Trump raised Ghislaine Maxwell link with aidesRead moreBut thanks to the New York Times reporter’s dominance of the Trump beat – before his time in power, through it and after – the intensity of interest has perhaps outweighed that for any other such book.Here are the key takeaways.Trump’s Waterloo?Trump was long said to be in the habit of ripping up notes from White House meetings and throwing them in the toilet. Haberman published photos. Trump is also in all sorts of legal trouble for taking classified material to Mar-a-Lago, prompting an FBI search. He admitted such to Haberman – perhaps as a result of his comfort talking to a reporter he called “my psychiatrist”. She also shows him being cavalier with national security concerns regarding Iran and Russia.Jared who?Haberman shows Trump relentlessly mocking Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and adviser, for his voice and manner; wishing Ivanka had married the NFL star Tom Brady instead; deciding to fire both of them then chickening out; ranting about Kushner’s Jewish religious observance; and predicting that Kushner would be attacked, even raped, were he ever to choose to go camping. Kushner, meanwhile, is shown as a White House turf warrior who gloried in having “cut [Steve] Bannon’s balls off” – as the Guardian’s Lloyd Green pointed out, they grew back – and tried to inflate poll numbers so as not to anger his father-in-law.Ghislaine Maxwell was a worryTrump fell out with the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and denies wrongdoing associated with him – but nonetheless worried aloud that Epstein’s former girlfriend might talk about him after her own arrest. Trump, who denies allegations of sexual misconduct or assault from more than 20 accusers, also predicted that “the women” would be the source of most trouble once he entered politics. Melania Trump seems to have agreed – Haberman says she renegotiated her prenuptial agreement.Trump was racist and transphobicHaberman’s reporting here is not particularly surprising but it is routinely horrific. Trump thought Black political staffers were waiters. He said he couldn’t afford to alienate white supremacists, because they tended to vote. He persisted in asking if a notional transgender debate questioner was “cocked or de-cocked”.He was also dangerously ignorantWrong-footed by a health official’s uniform, Trump thought the confused apparatchik could organise bombing raids on drug labs in Mexico. “The response from White House aides,” Haberman writes, “was not to try to change Trump’s view, but to consider asking [Adm Brett] Giroir not to wear his uniform to the Oval Office anymore.”Taxes dodge was made up on the flyTrump pulled his “I can’t, I’m being audited” excuse for not releasing his tax returns out of thin air on his campaign plane – and rolled it out to reporters apparently without legal advice. Those who knew Trump in New York pre-politics suspected his returns would show he wasn’t as rich as he said. Haberman also reports alleged dodgy practices including a parking garage lease payment made with a box of gold bars.Trump was no diplomatAmong multiple diplomatic faux pas, Haberman shows Trump asking Theresa May why her mortal rival Boris Johnson wasn’t prime minister instead and speaking crudely about abortion, and calling the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, “that bitch”. Trump’s apparent affinity with or interest in Nazi Germany – widely reported but now at issue in a lawsuit against CNN – contributed to one chief of staff, John Kelly, deciding the president was a fascist years before Joe Biden said the same. In terms of delicate domestic situations, Haberman shows Trump sarcastically praying for the health of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, the liberal supreme court justice who died in late 2020.Trump hates MitchTrump’s disdain for the Senate minority leader is no secret, but he gave it pungent expression in interviews with Haberman. McConnell said Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for the Capitol attack, though he voted to acquit at Trump’s second impeachment trial. Trump told Haberman: “The Old Crow’s a piece of shit.”Foiled Covid Superman stunt was inspired by James BrownThis bit is as weird as the subhead suggests. Haberman recounts familiar aspects of Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic but also thickens out the tale of how Trump wanted to present his own recovery. She writes: “He came up with a plan he told associates was inspired by the singer James Brown, whom he loved watching toss off his cape while onstage, but it was in line with his love of professional wrestling as well. [Trump] would be wheeled out of Walter Reed in a chair … dramatically stand up, then open his button-down dress shirt to reveal [a] Superman logo beneath it. (Trump was so serious about it that he … instruct[ed] an aide, Max Miller, to procure the Superman shirts; Miller was sent to a Virginia big-box store.)”Capitol attack officer Fanone hits out at ‘weasel’ McCarthy in startling interviewRead moreTrump wanted to refuse to leaveTrump denied to Haberman that he spent most of 6 January watching the Capitol attack on TV and refusing to stop it, as congressional witnesses have described. Slightly more surprisingly, Haberman reports that Trump told aides – including the guy who brought the Diet Cokes – he simply wouldn’t cede power. In his quasi-legalistic efforts to overturn the 2020 election, he also told his personal attorney: “OK, Rudy, you’re in charge. Go wild, do anything you want. I don’t care.” Giuliani proceeded to go wild.Some aides tried to rein Trump inHaberman says William Barr, Trump’s second attorney general, told his president: “People are tired of the fucking drama.” But it seems the publishing industry is not – Haberman has followed Baker and Glasser, Woodward and Costa, Rucker and Leonnig and many, many other authors to the top of the bestseller charts.TopicsBooksDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS politicsRepublicansPolitics booksNew York TimesfeaturesReuse this content More

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Trump Files a Defamation Suit Against CNN

      by

      The former president has a history of threatening, and occasionally filing, lawsuits against media organizations whose coverage he deems unfair.Former President Donald J. Trump sued CNN on Monday, claiming that the network defamed him and demanding $475 million in damages.Over the course of his business and political career, Mr. Trump has frequently threatened to sue media organizations over news coverage that he deems unfair or disrespectful. Although he rarely followed through, his attacks on the media became a staple of his political messaging and have often been cited in fund-raising entreaties in the run-up to this year’s midterm elections.In 2020, his re-election campaign sued The New York Times and The Washington Post over opinion articles that linked Mr. Trump to Russian interference in American elections. His suit against The Times was dismissed; the suit involving The Post is pending.Mr. Trump’s complaint against CNN was filed in U.S. District Court in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The lawsuit alleges a “campaign of dissuasion in the form of libel and slander” that, Mr. Trump asserts, has recently escalated “as CNN fears the plaintiff will run for president in 2024.”The 29-page suit cites numerous times when CNN hosts and guests criticized Mr. Trump over his policies and his questioning of the 2020 presidential election result. It also laments that some guests have invoked Adolf Hitler and the history of Nazi Germany in criticizing Mr. Trump’s behavior. Among the on-air guests cited as having defamed Mr. Trump is the singer Linda Ronstadt.A CNN spokesman declined to comment.A footnote in the lawsuit shows that Mr. Trump’s representatives contacted CNN in July to give notice of prospective litigation and request that the network stop referring to Mr. Trump’s comments about the 2020 election as “lies.” According to the suit, CNN declined Mr. Trump’s request and replied, “You have not identified a single false or defamatory statement in your letter.”In 2019, Mr. Trump threatened CNN with a lawsuit over “unethical and unlawful attacks.” CNN called that threat “a desperate P.R. stunt.” A suit never materialized.In Monday’s suit, Mr. Trump’s lawyers justified their demand for $475 million in damages in part by alleging that CNN’s coverage has caused the former president to suffer “embarrassment, pain, humiliation and mental anguish.” More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      The Latino Voters Who Could Decide the Midterms

      by

      Diana Nguyen and Rachel Quester and Marion Lozano and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherLatino voters have never seemed more electorally important than in the coming midterm elections: the first real referendum on the Biden era of government.Latinos make up 20 percent of registered voters in two crucial Senate races — Arizona and Nevada — and as much or more in over a dozen competitive House races.In the past 10 years, the conventional wisdom about Latino voters has been uprooted. We explore a poll, conducted by The Times, to better understand how they view the parties vying for their vote.On today’s episodeJennifer Medina, a national politics reporter for The New York Times.Dani Bernal, born in Bolivia and raised in Miami, described herself as an independent who’s in line with Democrats on social issues but Republicans on the economy.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesBackground readingTwo years after former President Donald Trump made surprising gains with Hispanic voters, Republican dreams of a major realignment have failed to materialize, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Jennifer Medina More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Kushner camping tale one of many bizarre scenes in latest Trump book

      by

      Kushner camping tale one of many bizarre scenes in latest Trump book Confidence Man by Maggie Haberman reveals racism, transphobia and ignorance from ex-president’s time in powerIn a meeting supposedly about campaign strategy in the 2020 election, Donald Trump implied his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, might be brutally attacked, even raped, should he ever go camping.Trump asked May at debut meeting why Boris Johnson was not PM, book saysRead more“Ivanka wants to rent one of those big RVs,” Trump told bemused aides, according to a new book by Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, before gesturing to his daughter’s husband.“This skinny guy wants to do it. Can you imagine Jared and his skinny ass camping? It’d be like something out of Deliverance.”According to Haberman, Trump then “made noises mimicking the banjo theme song from the 1972 movie about four men vacationing in rural Georgia who are attacked, pursued and in one case brutally raped by a local resident”.The bizarre scene is just one of many in Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, which will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.The book has been extensively trailed. Headlines drawn from it have concerned Trump’s racism (he thought Black White House staffers were waiters); his transphobia (he asked if a notional young questioner was “cocked or uncocked”); and his belligerent ignorance (he mistook a health aide for a military adviser because he wore uniform, and asked if he could bomb Mexican drug labs).Trump’s undiplomatic crudity has also been put on display. According to Haberman, he asked the British prime minister, Theresa May, to “imagine if some animals with tattoos raped your daughter and she got pregnant” and called Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, “that bitch”.In other shocking scenes, Trump is reported to have said he could not afford to alienate white supremacists because “a lot of these people vote”, and to have been called a fascist by John Kelly, his second chief of staff.Haberman also writes that when the liberal supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg was battling cancer, Trump sarcastically prayed for her health and asked: “How much longer do you think she has?”Haberman even reports that Trump may have called a Democratic congresswoman, pretending to be a Washington Post reporter and angling for comments about himself.The story about Trump mocking Kushner’s suitability for outdoor pursuits, meanwhile, is of a piece with other scenes in which Trump is shown to mock and belittle his son-in-law.According to Haberman, Trump criticised Kushner for observing religious customs (“‘Fucking Shabbat,’ Trump groused, asking no one in particular if his Jewish son-in-law was really religious or just avoiding work”) and for being effete.“He sounds like a child,” Trump is said to have commented in 2017, after Kushner spoke to reporters following an appearance before a congressional committee.In a scene which echoes the former Trump aide Peter Navarro’s description of an abortive campaign coup against Kushner, Trump is also shown resolving to fire Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, by tweet – but being talked out of doing so.Trump’s political career has generated a stream of books by Washington reporters and tell-alls by ex-White House staffers. Nonetheless, Confidence Man is eagerly awaited, touted as “the book Trump fears most”.Haberman has covered Trump since his days as a New York property magnate, reality TV host and celebrity political blowhard. Known in some circles as “the Trump whisperer”, she was even seen taking calls from the then president in a documentary about the Times, The Fourth Estate, which was released in 2018.Having written countless scoops about the Trump White House, Haberman has continued to cover a post-presidency in which Trump has maintained control of the Republican party while seemingly plotting another campaign, having escaped being brought to account over the January 6 insurrection.The Divider review: riveting narrative of Trump’s plot against AmericaRead moreLike other authors of Trump books, Haberman draws on interviews with the former president. As with other authors, Trump appears to have enjoyed the process. At one point, Haberman writes, he “turned to the two aides he had sitting in on our interview, gestured toward me with his hand, and said, ‘I love being with her; she’s like my psychiatrist.’”But such comfort may have prompted Trump to reveal more than might have been advised.In one exchange that has excited widespread comment, Trump admitted taking classified material from the White House – a decision now the source of considerable legal jeopardy.In light of the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago on 8 August, some observers have questioned whether Haberman should have reported Trump’s admission immediately or even alerted the Department of Justice.Most of Haberman’s reporting, however, has been greeted with familiar glee, not least the opening salvo of her pre-publication campaign: a picture of presidential documents torn up and put down a toilet.TopicsBooksDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS politicsUS press and publishingNew York TimesNewspapersnewsReuse this content More

    • 50 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Making Sense of Polling

      by

      The Times’s chief political analyst, Nate Cohn, wants his newsletter, The Tilt, to be like a “cooking show for polling.”Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.The lead-up to the 2022 midterm elections is packed with dizzying statistics. Voters are regularly inundated with polling numbers: There are conflicting data points, varying sources of information and different lenses to interpret it all. The Tilt, a subscriber-only newsletter from The New York Times that started this month, tries to make sense of the electoral whirlwind.The goal is to do “the best job we can of honestly appraising what we know and don’t know,” said Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, who writes the newsletter. Using polling data collected by The Times and other outlets, as well as surveys and electoral trends, The Tilt examines the historical context behind the numbers.The Tilt is an evolution of Mr. Cohn’s “polling diary,” a 2020 analysis of daily election polls. In an interview, he discussed what readers can expect from the newsletter. This conversation has been edited.What is the difference between The Tilt and the “polling diary”?I thought that the 2020 polling diary was a success, but it really tried to cover every base possible: It tried to tell readers about almost every poll that came out on a given day and how to make sense of all of it.In a presidential election, I do think there is a demand from a certain segment of readers to have every last data point interpreted. I don’t think that’s necessarily true in a midterm election when there’s a little less interest, and I think it’s a little harder to justify, given how poorly the polls have done over the last few cycles. We need to step back away from the data as often as we need to be in it. The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.A Focus on Crime: In the final phase of the midterm campaign, Republicans are stepping up their attacks about crime rates, but Democrats are pushing back.Pennsylvania Governor’s Race: Doug Mastriano, the G.O.P. nominee, is being heavily outspent and trails badly in polling. National Republicans are showing little desire to help him.Megastate G.O.P. Rivalry: Against the backdrop of their re-election bids, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida are locked in an increasingly high-stakes contest of one-upmanship.Rushing to Raise Money: Senate Republican nominees are taking precious time from the campaign trail to gather cash from lobbyists in Washington — and close their fund-raising gap with Democratic rivals.So The Tilt moves beyond the numbers?We’re going to talk a lot about our own work here at The Times, whether it’s in terms of our own polling or election night modeling. We’re also going to have the opportunity to talk about historical precedence and the other factors that underlie the way that we analyze elections.Take this midterm election, for instance: One of the biggest reasons people believe Republicans will regain control of the house is because there’s a long history of the party that’s out of power doing well in midterm elections. Diving into that history, and whether what we’re seeing this year lines up with the past or something different, is the thing we can do that’s different from just adding and subtracting the latest polls.How will The Tilt pull back the curtain on the process?I sometimes think of cooking shows as an analogy. If you step into a kitchen, or you watch a cooking show, you get to see how it all gets made. You come away with a different level of respect for the chef, even if it’s not the food you would have made yourself. We can be a little bit more of a cooking show for polling.There are plenty of reasons to look at the recent track record of polling and be a little skeptical of just how accurate it can be. But to the extent that readers can at least understand all the work that goes into it and why it is what it is, and where it can go wrong, they will be better prepared to make sense of it.Why should voters be invested in polling?Polling is sort of the lifeblood of our democracy. You may not like it that way, but in a democratic system, the responsibility of our elected officials and the political candidates is to represent the public, and the role of citizens is to engage in the democratic process. Polling is one of the major ways that all of the political actors I just mentioned make sense of public opinion, and then choose how they want to engage with that system.When the polling is bad, that’s really bad for the system in important ways. If the polls aren’t accurately representing the public’s attitudes, then elected officials don’t make decisions that reflect the will of the public.We don’t have very many other ways to measure the attitudes of the population without this. Otherwise, we would assume that our own prejudices about what ideas sound good or don’t sound good are probably held by other people. Or we might assume that the rest of the country looks like the places where we live. We’ve learned over the last decade that that’s almost certainly not true, even if we had deceived ourselves into that view beforehand. More

    • 175 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      El Times respalda a Dan Goldman para el distrito congresional 10 de Nueva York

      by

      En el saturado panorama de personas con éxitos consumados que compiten por representar al distrito congresional 10, recientemente trazado, destacan dos candidatos: Dan Goldman, quien fue el abogado principal de los demócratas en el primer juicio político contra Trump, y el congresista Mondaire Jones.Goldman, quien fue fiscal federal, ha vivido en el Bajo Manhattan durante 16 años. Su inusual experiencia —en especial su conocimiento sobre la supervisión del Congreso y la vigilancia del Estado de derecho— podría ser particularmente importante en el Congreso en los próximos años. “He estado en la primera línea liderando la lucha en el Congreso contra Donald Trump y su Partido Republicano, y tratando de proteger y defender nuestra democracia, nuestras instituciones y nuestro Estado de derecho”, dijo en una entrevista con el comité editorial. More