Now, in her new book Regime Change, written with Jonathan Swan, she examines how Trump has wielded power in his second term: his relationship with loyalty, his desire to shape history, and the people around him who help drive his decisions.
On this episode of The Fourcast, Krishnan Guru-Murthy speaks to Maggie Haberman about Trump's ambition to be remembered as one of the most powerful leaders in history, whether he is considering a third term, and what his presidency reveals about his character.
Donald Trump has frequently dismissed Haberman for writing false stories about him, which she rejects.
Is Trump changing the presidency - or trying to make the presidency about himself?
It's been a busy few days for a formerly obscure Russian blogger and veteran of Moscow's war on Ukraine who calls himself Aleksandr Lunin.
On June 25, he posted a video in Instagram in which he described what he called widespread torture of soldiers in the war zone by their own officers and demanded a live, on-air meeting with President Vladimir Putin and warned that if it did not take place soon, "the army will turn its weapons against the Kremlin."
The milestone called for the epic vision of a JFK or the soaring oratory of a Barack Obama. read more
More than 4.7 million people nationwide have lost their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits ... read more
Gen. Chris Donahue, commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa, submitted his paperwork to retire after a little over a year in his position, a Pentagon official told The Hill. read more
"And that was put into such stark relief at this really remarkable moment when Jonathan and I went to the Oval Office uh on March 16th of this year to see him.
At the end of our reporting process, we we had been asking for an interview. We we had fact-checking questions.... but we didn't want to, you know, sort of have an open mic night with him. We wanted to ask specifics about our reporting. And we did.
But at one point, we asked about power and how he was seeing himself in the context of power just based on things he had been saying to people in public and elsewhere. And it was an astonishing moment.
He had his omnipresent adviser, Natalie Harp. He said, "Go Natalie, go
get the the thing from the historian." I'm paraphrasing. She comes back with these two printouts that she says were were from a historian, words by a presidential historian.
And she hands them to us and the start of the document says essentially Donald Trump is the most powerful person who has ever walked the face of the earth.
And then he proceeds to tick off what he describes as the top 10.
Mao, Hitler, Stalin, uh, Tamarlain, Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, the Caesars, you know, some of the great monsters, and conquerors of history.
And he was making no moral distinction at all between, people who had had murdered and people who had conquered or people who had, you know, had built empires.
It was that they had power and they were willing to use it and that was how he was seeing himself.
The the punchline here was that it turned out that the person who wrote it was not a historian.
It was Gary Player, the golfer's former caddy and business associate... but that didn't matter a great deal.
I mean, the key thing to the people around him is is, you know, is the advice he's getting.
A a president has to have people who will tell him when he's wrong. and and if you look at his foreign policy record, it doesn't look like he's got that."
(early excerpt... there's a Transcript)