Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - The Covid Presidency with Maggie Haberman

Episode Date: March 12, 2021

Before joining The Times, Maggie was a reporter at Politico, The New York Post and The New York Daily News. She’s a lifelong New Yorker. According to a profile piece about Maggie, she’s written or co-written more than a story a day, and stories with her byline have accounted for hundreds of millions of page views last year alone. That’s more than anyone else at The Times.  

Donald Trump never understood how many of his voters would take cues from him. Instead, he took cues from them. Welcome to Post-Corona, where we try to understand COVID-19's lasting impact on the economy, culture, and geopolitics. I'm Dan Senor. What was the impact of COVID-19 on the political landscape? What will it mean for elected leaders who governed during this past year? And has COVID-19 changed the way journalists cover those political leaders? Today, we sit down with someone who knows something about covering a president during a pandemic that consumed his presidency.

For the entirety of the Trump administration, Maggie Haberman was a White House correspondent for the New York Times. She joined the Times in 2015 and soon found herself covering Donald Trump's unlikely campaign. She's part of a team at the Times that won a Pulitzer. Before joining the Times, Maggie was a reporter at Politico, the New York Post, and the New York Daily News. She's a lifelong New Yorker. I first got to know her when she was covering local politics here. According to a profile about Maggie, she's written or co-written more than a story a day, and stories with her byline have accounted for hundreds of millions of page views last year alone. That's more than anyone else at the Times.

So we talked to Maggie today about where journalism goes after the pandemic, what the Trump administration got wrong and what it got right during COVID, and where that leaves other political figures, including Joe Biden, Andrew Cuomo, and Ron DeSantis. This is Post-Corona. And I'm pleased to welcome former White House correspondent and currently Washington correspondent for the New York Times to the Post-Corona podcast. Hi, Maggie. Hi, Dan. How are you? I'm good. Thanks for having me. How are you?

You know, all things considered, I guess. Good dramatic pause there. Right. I know. Exactly. I wish it were forced. Okay. So we have a lot to cover with you today. Before we do, I think, as I said in my intro, Maggie Haberman, the byline and the person that has been all over the Trump presidency and the Trump campaigns for the last few years are well known. But what I think for our listeners are less well known, who've gotten to know you over the last few years at the Times, is your origin story, because you really cut your teeth in New York politics. In fact, I think that's where that is where I first got to know you about a decade or so ago, when you were intensely covering New York politics.

But I don't think readers really know the Maggie Haberman origin stories. I'm sure you love talking about that. It's not that interesting. I actually think it is kind of interesting. All right? I can probably tell it better than you. Do you want to take over? Because I'm fine you love talking about that. It's not that interesting. I actually think it is kind of interesting. All right? I can probably tell it better than you. Do you want to take over? Because I'm fine with that.

No, no. Well, here's one interesting fact that I remember you once telling me. You never intended to go into journalism. You want to be a fiction writer. That is true. That is very true. I hadn't wanted to be a journalist in part because my father is a journalist, and he was a journalist at the New my father is a journalist and he was

a journalist at the New York Times for a very long time. And he lived in a different country than my brother and I did for, I want to say it was 12 or 14 years that my mind is not what it once was. But I know how hard journalism can be on families. And so I studied creative writing at Sarah Lawrence, but when I got out of Sarah Lawrence, I couldn't get a job anywhere. And I interviewed at all of these women's magazines and some other magazines, but mostly women's magazines, and no one would hire me. So I ended up becoming a clerk or what was the clerks were called copy are called copy

kids at the New York Post. I was thinking about it the other day, it was it was either 40 or $50 a day salary. And so I was bartending at the same time to pay my rent. I had never, you know, other than my dad's office, I hadn't really experienced newsroom before I had taken what is a copy? What is it called? Copy kid? Copy? Copy kid? Yeah, my mother was one. My mother was one too your job is to is to basically do whatever is asked you are literally a clerk so you back then remember fax machines as the main way that we all communicated you would sort through the you know tip sheets that were getting sent to the city desk you would go xerox copies of the page proofs for the next day's edition you would run errands you would sometimes get people coffee um You know, it was a lot of it was

fairly menial, but they had a program at the Post, and they may still, where once a week, if you wanted to, as a copy kid, you could be a reporter for a day, and you would be on general assignment. And so that's how I learned to be a reporter. So what was the first general assignment you were given? A very memorable one on one of my reporters for a day was I was sent out to Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn because a pregnant woman had been hit by a car. And I got into the hospital. You're not supposed to be able to just walk into hospitals,

but I forget how I got in and approached the woman's husband on the floor. It was very upsetting. But this was a lot of what being a general assignment reporter was in New York City. It's a lot of what it is. It's a lot of, you know, people getting pushed in front of a train or visiting, you know, car accidents or, you know, gunshot victims, or it's a lot of crime. And at this time, by the way, the $40 or $50 a day reminds me of my first political campaign that I worked on in Michigan, which they paid me $75 a week. And they put me up in someone's home, who I'd never met before in their guest room, but who was also involved with the campaign, but $75 a week, so I recall it.

But here's the thing. Did you, at that point where you're in the newsroom, you're a young person, you're in the newsroom, and it's sort of that kinetic and frenetic energy of a newsroom, no less a New York City tabloid newsroom, which is probably at the time at least a whole other level oh yeah were you ever thinking okay i can't get a job doing fiction writing fiction i can't right now get a job at one of the longer form like women's magazines so i'll just hang my

hat here for a little bit and then figure out what i'm really going to do with my life or when you got into that newsroom you were like uh-uh thisuh, this is it. Like, I want to be a journalist. It was never, this is it. It's not never. It was eventually. But in those days, it was, I really do love this energy. I completely fell in love with the newsroom. That's absolutely true. It was exciting. The New York tabloid wars in the 90s were incredible and intense and interesting. And a moment in history. I mean, that was like a period.

It was a period. And it was also, it was a period in New York City, you know, politically and economically in terms of crime. It was just a moment in time. And it was also, as somebody who had grown up in New York City, I ended up experiencing the city in a very in time. Um, but it, and it was also as somebody who had grown up in New York city, um, I ended up experiencing the city in a very different way. Uh, then I, I mean, I grew up on, on a hundred street in West end. Um, uh, I went to, uh, school in, uh, at a private school in the Bronx. Um, I had not been around the city the way that I ultimately was as a reporter for the Post, and it was fantastic. But as much as I loved it, it was still sort of, I'm just going to see how this goes.

And then at a certain point, it became clear that this was something that matched well. And to be clear, being at a New York City tabloid in the 90s, so that's a different experience than you had, than the other career tracks you had contemplated. But also, it was distinctive from being at a broadsheet. Oh, 100%. I mean, the tabloid was its own thing. The tabloid was its own thing. The broadsheet was distinctly different, not just obviously in terms of physical format, which is why one is a tabloid and one is a broadsheet.

But in terms of what they covered, you know, at the time, Newsday, which was much more present at the time, and the Daily News were different kinds of tabloids, because they were tabloids that tended to cover stories that were more in line with, say, what the New York Times would cover at the time, even though both papers were very heavily working class oriented. But in terms of, you know, the Post, the Post was very, you know, smash mouth, very aggressively covering the wealthy. You know, there were all these jokes in the 90s about how people would hide their New York Post inside their Playboy. You know, but it was, but that is what it was um it just the the type of coverage was just fundamentally different um except you know the post very aggressively covered city hall and i went down to city hall in 1999 it was giuliani's sixth year the beginning of his

sixth year as mayor um and the post was very focused on on the way so pre so pre-9-11 pre-9-11 it was 1999 january 99 is when i went down there just because one of my very first days was his um his state of the city speech where he called for blowing up the board of education um and which feels again like another quaint debate from a dozen years ago. But it was definitional at the time. And the Post was very focused on the relationship between the hub of government power and the rest of the city and other power centers within the city. And that's really the best way that I can define the difference between, say, New York Times Metro at the time versus The Post. The Times was often very adversarial with Giuliani. The Post, you know, through Murdoch was, you know, much more aligned with him.

And that was a big difference, too. Did you, at some point in that period of the kind of late 90s, but pre-911, did it at some point hit you, New York matters in our national politics in a way that's hard to replicate in almost any other part of the country, not being critical of any other part of the country, it's just these personalities coming out of New York are so dominant in our national political coverage that you felt that even though you were covering local politics, you were kind of covering national personalities. Well, so I would answer it slightly differently. The New York Post was a – and frankly, it still is, but it hit a much bigger circulation. And it was much more aggressive in national politics at that point.

The Post was very aggressive covering the final years of Bill Clinton's term. And then remember in 99, what happened was that Hillary Clinton started her exploratory committee for Senate. So we definitionally in New York became a national story. And then there was also just the overlay of Giuliani, you know, like Ed Koch, had a larger than life personality. But all of the media, for the most part, in terms of just what gets blasted out to the rest of the country, it's such a media hub in New York, that the ability of these politicians to position themselves as national figures is different than people in other places in the

country have the ability to. And that was when Giuliani was, was, you know, putting himself out there as a possible candidate for the Senate against Hillary. Giuliani was, I remember going to Cooperstown to cover some speech that Giuliani gave in early 99. And it was, you know, he was still positioning himself as a likely Senate candidate, except that most people around him did not believe that his heart was in it, and did not believe that he would end up doing it. And both of those things were true. Right. And then he, he came up with a reason to get out of the race. And Lazio didn't get until I think May of that year. Well, he got out, he got out of the race, correct on Lazio. Lazio,

I remember his very first event was marching in the, I think in the Memorial Day parade. And he literally, he fell, he tripped and split his lip open, which was a bad instant metaphor. But Giuliani got out of the race for two reasons. One was that he got prostate cancer. And the other was that he was having this very public affair with the woman who was his third wife, Judith Nathan. Okay. So I want to get to the current personalities we're dealing with, but before we,

and the current pandemic we're dealing with, before we do, speaking of a crisis, where were you with the post on 9-11? I was still covering City Hall, but I was also covering Mike Bloomberg's campaign for mayor. And what Mike Bloomberg was talking about on 910 was a book of jokes, quote unquote jokes, that he had said to employees, which were a bunch of misogynistic and in some cases, extremely incendiary comments that were compiled by a former employee at the company. He deployed nondisclosure agreements, so she wasn't supposed to talk about it. And the person who wrote that story, I believe it was for New York Magazine, was Michael Wolff. And I mean, nothing has changed in 20 years. We're all just kind of

on the same carousel. But that's what Bloomberg was getting asked about on September 10th, 2001. And I remember being with him at, I think it was a Bronx senior center. It was definitely in the Bronx. And he was standing, I think on a chair, he's not a tall man. And he was talking to the room and he said, do you know what tomorrow is? 9-1-1. It's a wake up call for the city. And I had that in my head the next morning. Um, uh, it was obviously not, he hadn't, he, he, he wasn't foreshadowing. It's just that the timing was, was surreal given what happened. Um, I was on the Upper West Side voting or attempting to vote. Um, uh, I didn't actually get to vote. Uh, I don't think I got to vote. I was on the Upper West Side. Um, and the, the, there were reports on television about, uh,

two planes hitting. And I remember calling, um, I didn't really, I couldn't get through to anybody. My cell phone wasn't working. No cell phones were working. I called a man named Ed Schuyler, who was a Bloomberg spokesman. I remember Ed. Remember Ed? He was like deputy mayor. He was at one point, yeah. Under Bloomberg.

But then he was the spokesman. And he said that there were a couple, I think it was three, Bloomberg employees who were trapped in one of the towers. And sort of not knowing what to do with myself, I got in a cab. I think it was a livery cab. And we were listening on the radio on the way down the West Side Highway and the first tower that fell, fell. And so we got off the West Side Highway at around Canal Street and no lights were working. Pedestrians were directing traffic. There were lines like seven deep at pay phones. And the guy couldn't get much further than where we were.

So I got out and I started running or walking very fast toward the site. And then a police van came up and over their loudspeaker, one of the, one of the officers literally yelling, if you don't want to get hurt, you have to evacuate now. And people started screaming and they're running up sixth Avenue and, um, or church street. And, um, and I was a smoker at the time, so I couldn't run that fast. And so I eventually just stopped and turned around. For our listeners, Maggie no longer smokes. I don't, I have not not i have not had a cigarette since 2004 but the um but um but i was a very heavy smoker once upon a time and i watched the second

tower kind of sway um and then it and then it just fell and it was the loudest sound i had ever heard um and i remember walking back up to the new york, New York Times, the New York Post newsroom, which is on 6th Avenue. And there were people surrounding cars and listening to radios. There were a bunch of people who were walking up who had clearly escaped the towers and they were covered in debris

and just walking up 6th Avenue. Some man who had been working as some kind of a, I think a fire marshal in one of the buildings collapsed in shock on Broadway. People were trying to help him, but there was no ambulance coming because nobody could get through. And I had tried walking back down to get toward the site and I was stopped and you couldn't see anything. It was just white. Anyway, and then after that I covered, you know, the race for mayor was totally changed.

I covered Bloomberg and I, and I covered for the next three years, I covered rebuilding at the trade center. And I remember, uh, uh, a piece your father, Clyde Haberman wrote, uh, the day after, I mean, it was published the day after 9-11 called when the unimaginable happens and it's right outside your window. And he called back on his time as a correspondent in israel yeah go ahead no i was gonna say he had actually just gotten back uh a few days earlier from a couple of months re-upping stint in israel and i remember seeing him two nights before 9-11, and he was telling us stories about, my siblings and me, stories about

how the new type of suicide bomber that was being trapped in Israel were women, and that that had become very prevalent. And the first line of his column was, do you get it now? And that was also the last line of the column. But it was uh he was talking about the perspective of americans on the dangers in israel yeah no i remember because i remember then and what's striking is so much of new york then started to look at israel as how do we now function and secure our daily lives with this new threat and there threat. And there's a weird thing going on now, where because Israel is a few months ahead of everyone else on the vaccinations, how they reopen their society. You have another, particularly for New York City, which is,

you know, high population density, very dependent on tourism and hospitality and entertainment industry, much like Israel. I do think New York and other major cities are going to look at Israel in terms of it being a model for how it reopens after this pandemic versus after 9-11. So you're covering these big personalities in New York and big events. And I want to fast forward to the last few years. Giuliani was an obvious national political figure. Hillary Clinton was an obvious national political figure. In a sense, Bloomberg was. To most of us, Donald Trump wasn't. And you weren't so sure that he wasn't. At various points during 2016, I wondered if he had a shot in part because his poll numbers were not taking the kinds of hits

that any other politician who had had this series of calamities, you know, self-inflicted and otherwise, and really pretty detrimental news headlines would have dealt with and would have seen their numbers face. But Clinton's numbers with white working class voters in the fall of 2016 were not where Obama's had been in his reelect. And that was of concern to some Democratic pollsters I was talking to. When he left, as his term wound down after he lost his reelection, you at one point said to me, and I think you were saying it in your public commentary, that there were many crises we could experience, but the idea of Donald Trump refusing to leave office on January 20th wasn't one of them. Like there was all this hyper speculation that what if he doesn't leave and there's a constitutional crisis and you thought he would actually leave on January 20th. I did. And I mean, I think in fairness to the people who were saying that they thought that he wouldn't.

I think he has had such a disorienting effect on people because of the volume of lies and falsehoods and gaslighting and, you know, saying that up is down and down is up. So I understand why why people felt that way. But I just, like literally getting dragged out by the Secret Service was not something that I ever believed was going to happen. And I did believe that what did happen was going to happen just in the reductionist sense of he's always going to say that he didn't lose it. I did not envision January 6th. And I did expect that it was going to end in some very dramatic fashion,

but I did not expect a riot at the Capitol. So let's spend a moment on the Trump administration and coronavirus. He rightly gets criticized, at least I believe, for a whole range of ways he managed the response to the coronavirus, including his public messaging, on the one hand and and so he he was seemingly so irresponsible and yet the the the vaccination campaign we're experiencing today however unevenly um implemented it is the fact that we have vaccines this quickly is unheard of in medical history. I mean, it's an extraordinary, Operation Warp Speed is, I mean, don't take, you know, scientists, you know, epidemiologists, I mean, everyone is marveling at the speed with which Operation Warp Speed was executed upon. And you just think about it, it's not just the development of the vaccine, it's getting it to, you know, the distribution of it to close to 100,000 recipient facilities around the country, mobilizing, you know, FedEx and UPS. And I mean, just the whole machine of it and placing all these

bets on these different drug companies that wouldn't have been able, wouldn't be willing to take the kind of risk that they were being asked of, but for the federal government stepping in and saying, we'll buy these vaccines from you now. We'll buy these, and just basically telling them all, you have a guaranteed customer here and, you know, you know, begin, begin development and manufacturing and almost do it in parallel track. And we'll, I mean, it was, it was almost like, like the arsenal of democracy. I mean, the U.S., the federal government stepping in to do arms manufacturing during the Second World War, it required a very heavy and thoughtful federal intervention. How do you square the success of Operation Warp Speed, and it wasn't perfect, I'm not suggesting it was perfect, but I've been studying it pretty closely, and it is,

there's elements of it that, as I said, are, are unprecedented and impressive. So how do you, how do you reconcile that? Like, how did they get that right? And yet get so much else, the uneven messaging on masks, the, the trying to play, play the threat of the coronavirus down. How do you, how do you square these things? How do you get something so right and something so wrong? So I mean, I think I guess I would, I take some issue with describing Operation WorkSpeed as A, entirely responsible for what happened and B, an unalloyed success because it was a little more nuanced, I think, in terms of, for instance, some companies took money for like a portion of their production, but not on the rest.

I think the companies were incentivized to do this because we're facing a global pandemic. And so I don't think it's entirely the government and I don't think it's entirely the drug companies. I think that there were people working within the Trump administration who were health experts and health professionals, and I think that they had a pretty good sense of it. And I think that Donald Trump is not a details guy. So I think as long as it sounded like something he could sell, that was fine with him. I think that it was more than uneven on masks. I think that what the administration did with masks was dangerous. And I think that Trump allowed it to become allowed, encouraged it becoming a cultural war issue. Uh, and I think that once you did that, um, there were, there were, Donald Trump never understood how many of his voters would take

cues from him. Uh, instead he took cues from them. And so he saw that, uh, the, the mask issue was, was, you know, if he was negative about it, it was well received. And so that's where it went. Can I just, but an advisor, one of his advisors commented to me not long ago, imagine if he had actually, to your point, taken the lead on a mask campaign and kind of make America great again masks and told everyone we got to wear these masks to deal with the China, quote unquote, the China virus. And this is how we're going to, but they're trying to destroy our country. And if we wear these MAGA masks, it's our way to prevent their efforts to destabilize our country. I mean, he could have

turned it into a very Trump-esque campaign. Yes, he could have. Yeah, but he didn't like the concept of doing that around a virus. It was something bigger than himself. He was in a constant state of believing that the world was out to get him, and this was just the latest example of it. And so, I mean, that's how I view how they handled it. And I really think that we can't underestimate how destructive some of his comments were publicly from, you know, injecting bleach, which was like the end of those briefings. There was one briefing where he was good. And it was when they extended the guidance on closures at the end of March longer than they had been planning on. And Trump talked about the modeling showing I think it was between 100,000 and 240,000 deaths. And, and he said something like, we're going to go through a lot

of pain. And that was actually candid. That was that was real. And that was the only time I can think of where he really did that. So I think that yes, if we if it's if we reduce it to a binary of he did this, right, he didn't do this, right. Yes, I think you can look at vaccines and say that was obviously a good thing. I just think that it came to be for a complicated reason. Were the Biden people completely candid when they said, you know, we were left with absolutely nothing? No, I mean, Fauci has said that wasn't true. But on the other hand, they didn't do anything like the kind of mobilization that we're seeing now or even talk about it publicly. Trump, after losing the election, never gave in his own words, other than Twitter, any advice to anybody about taking the vaccine. He got his in private. The First Lady got hers in private. And so I think that he

undermines his own claim on this about what he got right, because it's not as if just developing the science is the only part of this that matters in going back to early march so march 1st of 2020 you mean march 1st of 2020 my gosh i know just checking yeah march 1st of 2020 march 1st of 2020 was the day that the it was the first reported death of an american from coronavirus or at least it was the first one that became known to us. Dr. Fauci was not a household name. And the big news of that day was that Mayor Pete had suspended his campaign. So, you know, kind of political, you know, political journalism was focused on the end of the Mayor Pete campaign. Where were you around that time and thinking, huh, this could be a pandemic and this could consume the Trump presidency

the way, say, 9-11 wound up consuming the Bush presidency? So it was clear that it was going to become an all-consuming matter, I think, pretty early on, because what I was hearing about in March was Trump wanting to continue doing rallies and being told by his advisors, you really can't do that. That's not something that's possible. And so it was very clear to me early on, not just that at that point, actually, that's not even that early, January would have been early. It was clear to me at that point that he wasn't going to easily, if at all, do what needed to be done in terms of his own behavior. And that was clear to you then,

and you didn't think it was going to change? No, because when has he ever... I mean, look, he is capable of modulating his behavior if he thinks there is a danger to himself. So I would give you a for instance of... It usually has to be in the vein of either losing an election or an investigation. When he fired Comey,

that was a hot stove that he touched that kept him from, say, firing Jeff Sessions for another 18 months, right? He waited until after the midterms, which is what they were warning him and warning him. For some reason, he was never able to connect up. If you perform well at this virus that is real and that is not some witch hunt, quote unquote, an effort to harm you, you will do better in the election. He just could never get there. And I will say that, Dan, he was, this is separate from grappling with the reality of a pandemic, but he was just sour for most of 2020. He was angry. He was not enjoying himself. There wasn't, I wrote a piece about, it was not clear that he

actually wanted a second term. And I'm still not sure he really wanted a second term. I think he just didn't want to lose. But he was never able to sort of connect these two things. So fast forward to Friday, October 2nd, it becomes public that the president and the first lady have tested positive for coronavirus. That also, so, so like covering a president during a pandemic is something that modern journalism has, it's not something that modern journalism has to do in terms of, you know, staying close to the White House. And then you add in the actual, the president having this life-threatening virus. I mean, the only comparisons i can think of are you know the reagan assassination attempt in terms of modern journalism having to cover um cover a white house

during that period or even after 9-11 while we soon soon learned that president bush his life you know it became clear in the days after was not going to be, uh, under immediate threat, but, but the whole government kind of, you know, the access that journalists had to government changed because, you know, the country was on a, on a Homeland security footing and an international war footing. How was the president getting sick in your mind? I mean, you've been a journalist around for a long time. How did it instantly change the way you did your job in terms of, you know, a president is sick in terms of access to information you had, you know, access to these facilities, the buildings, the White House? How did your life as a journalist change? So just on the, let me answer backwards on the physical question. Things had already changed in terms of how journalists were accessing the building, because we weren't just allowed to just,

you know, all of us come into the room anymore. Right. So, and at the times, we were very concerned about people getting sick. You know, we had had colleagues who had gotten sick, um, during coverage and nobody wanted that. So, um, so that was not an issue. Access to information, um, has been a problem with this administration, you know, was a problem with this, this, that administration, the old administration for, um, you know, the entirety, but it got quite bad in the in 2020. The White House Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows was constantly trying to prove himself with Trump by, by doing Trump's favorite activity, a leak hunt. And, you know, there were sort of other more pressing matters in 2020 that were significant. There were a couple of people who tried very hard to keep reporters aware of what was happening. I would put Judd Deere, who now works for Senator Haggerty at

the top of that list of people who was trying to be helpful, or at least just trying to be, you know, provide information, but, and responsive um, and, and responsive, but what, uh, you know, I remember not sleeping because it was such a tricky virus because of the president's age, because of pre the former president's age, because of preexisting conditions that the former president had, um, among them, his weight, um, he had had some on one of the medical reports that one of his, one of the white house doctors said he had had some evidence of heart disease. Um, you know, those were the kinds of patients that people were worried about. And, um, and the fact that he was taken, I knew on Saturday by Saturday morning, I don't, I don't remember specifically when I

learned it, but I knew on by Saturday morning when Sean don't, I don't remember specifically when I learned it. But I knew on by Saturday morning, when Sean Conley, the White House doctor, was giving a press briefing, and trying very hard not to answer the question of whether he had been on oxygen. I had information at that point that he had been on oxygen. And I made that public on Twitter, because Conley wasn't answering the question. Um, he was quite sick that Friday. Um, and this is a, you know, one of his advisors said to me, do you have any idea what it takes to get this guy to go to a hospital? He hates hospitals. So it just spoke to how sick he was. And then he ended up on these steroids that, um, clearly helped him, um, but are, are known for some side effects in terms of, uh, in terms of behavior. And so, um, the way it changed my job was just, I mean, look, we were all,

the Trump presidency always involved being incredibly plugged in, incredibly online, incredibly connected, um. Talking to everybody. Talking to everybody. That didn't change. I wouldn't say that it changed the actual behaviors. I would say that it changed the intensity and the frequency because, I mean, I... But weren't you working with a lot of sources in person? I mean, before the pandemic. Before the pandemic, I was working with a lot of sources in person. After the pandemic, it became harder to work with sources in person. And so that was a change that we had already been experiencing. But it was complicating given the sensitive nature of what we were talking about, which was the president's health. Right.

I don't know if that answers your question. Yeah, it does. And so and so then going forward, you know, you say you have to be plugged into everyone, you have to be talking to everyone, just in general, leave the president's health out of it, just covering this administration, as a journalist, yep, day to day, when you can't really see anyone. It was complicated. I mean, I did a bunch of day trips to DC and I would drive because, um, I didn't want to get on a train. This was all pre vaccinations. Um, I, you know, there were some people who just wouldn't talk over the phone. And so that was what I had to do. Uh, and DC was obviously a very different place, um, in terms of the pandemic and then in terms of the unrest that had happened, um, during the summer. Um. But yeah, I mean, the pandemic changed how we did our jobs, less him getting sick. Okay, so let's talk about that.

So the pandemic changed your job, meaning you cannot, I mean, you just don't have the physical access. You don't have the physical access. You can't just go, you know, sort of hang out in a building. You can't, I don't want to sit outside with most sources. And so that, you know, you couldn't sit inside. So that was, it was just difficult. Assuming we get out of this thinking some version of post-corona, do you think the way in the near term journalists cover the White House, do the job that you did. Will there be some aspects of it that outlive the pandemic, that the nature of the job has changed because of the pandemic,

and some of it won't go back? So I don't actually think so. And I've thought about this a lot. And I do assume we're going to make it out of it. I think that the vaccination levels are very encouraging. I agree. And I think that, you know... Schools are going to reopen. Eventually. But the... I'm a parent, so... Full disclosure. Right, right, right. But I do... So I just want to be clear that I'm very optimistic about this year, and much more so than last year. But I do... I don't think it changes it permanently, because I still think that at the end of the day, people are people. The nature of people is to want to interact in a certain more personable format. And that is not a Zoom call. So,

you know, I think that, look, the pandemic delayed everything. It delayed responses to FOIA requests. It has delayed efforts to get documents from various places. I don't think that's going to change. I think there's going to be a hunger for resuming that. Do I think that this has shown that maybe reporters don't need to, or news outlets don't need to spend as much on their travel budgets? I think that's possible. But that's a conversation that's been going on since 2000, I want to say 2008, when there started being a lot of live streams of events. Yeah, John Dickerson, when he was on this podcast, made that point that news organizations spend a lot of money sending journalists to cover rallies. That's right. So they schlep all over the country to cover rallies. Correct. And he made the point, first of all, I'm not sure how valuable having, you know, 30 or 50 journalists at a rally was.

A, B, you wind up talking to people at the rally to try to kind of get a feel for what's going on in the campaign. But that may give you a very narrow input into what's actually really going on in the campaign. And he thinks, I mean, he was arguing that, you know, journalists, it's not like journalists should not go to these events at all, but maybe time better spent watching them on live stream, as you said, and then, you know, spending time, you know, calling around. And I mean, it just, this could be a vector change.

It could be. I mean, look, and I think that I do see value in talking to people at rallies. I certainly did in 2018 when I was doing a bunch of them during the midterms, and I did in 2016, although it's funny, I have this memory of, um, I think it was 2015 when Trump was a relatively new candidate. And I wrote a story off of one of his rallies from the live stream and he didn't like something I had said. And so he, you know, did that thing with the Sharpie where he took my story and he scrawled on it. How would you know you weren't there? Um, and sent it to me. And so,

um, you know, so I, I do think that there is, there is something to be gained by being in person. And it's not about whether you would get a, get a nasty gram from Donald Trump. It's just that I think that there is a difference being in person, but I do think that especially say with the Trump rally as the template, there was a sameness to them, right? And so at a certain point, is it worth spending, you know, a couple thousand dollars to get a reporter there and then whatever? I do think that that is going to have changed.

I think that in general, I think that the working from home protocols for companies will have changed. And I think that bosses have discovered that we all work a lot from home. And so I don't know what that ends up meaning for the future. But I was working a lot of hours already. And yet I found myself working more when the pandemic started. Right. In terms of our politics, the sort of crack up in politics that we seem to be experiencing on left and right. So it always felt to me that Donald Trump's election, you may not have been able to draw a direct line from the global financial crisis to the election of, so basically from 2008, 2009, straight to 2016, it was sort of like an indirect line in that

post-global financial crisis, there was a sense that I think among big swaths of the electorate that it was never really resolved. We never really dealt with it. Things just kind of went back to normal. And because of the Fed's near 0% interest rates, there was lots of free money you know swashing around uh wall street and you know lots of speculating and a lot of people getting rich again and the banks you know as as powerful as ever and nothing really changed and i and it just felt to me like there were big chunks of the electorate that said you know that's not okay and it was sort of bubbling and bubbling and bubbling and bubbling. And again, I don't want to say Donald Trump's election is directly a result of that, but I don't think it

had nothing to do with it. It felt like there was like a delayed reaction in our politics to this seismic event, which was the global financial crisis. And I'm wondering if we're going to experience something similar as a result of the lockdowns and the coronavirus and just different political leaders reactions in terms of how they dealt with it and I think you saw some of this play out by the way in the 2020 election where outcomes are all over the place on one hand Biden got elected on the other hand there was no real debt the Democrats didn't do as well as they had thought they would down ballot. It was like this very quirky outcome. And I'm just, what do you think in terms of the lasting, not permanently lasting, but the near middle term kind of lasting effects of the government's response at every level to the pandemic in our politics? So I have a slightly different take on what happened in 2016,

which is, yes, I think that the fiscal crisis was part of it, but I actually think there was a continuum of an arc that started probably even before this incident, but certainly on 9-11. Because so much of the animating force of Donald Trump's success in the primary in 2016 was an anti-Muslim sentiment. And it's

not something that people want to talk about, but it's the reality. I do think that the fiscal crisis was a big portion of it because I think it accelerated the lack of trust in institutions. There was a feeling among a lot of people that nobody went, nobody, nobody was punished, meaning governmentally for the fiscal crisis. And I think that that he capitalized on that. I think he capitalized on anger over the wars. I don't know what it will look like. I mean, it's obviously a question that's getting debated a lot. To your point, I don't see something that is a clear linear through line in terms of how voters have responded. And I don't see anything that is a clear linear through line in terms of how voters have responded. And I don't see anything that's a clear linear through line that's partisan, even despite Donald

Trump attempting to make it that way, because say, Governor Mike DeWine is a Republican, and he handled things really aggressively in terms of restrictions and in terms of measures. It was in stark contrast to say, Ron DeS, who the governor of Florida who handled things very differently. So I just don't know. I know that Republicans think that the issue of school closures is going to be a big animating force for 2022. And they may be right. I do wonder how much of that is driven by the fact that, you know, a lot of Republican consultants and pollsters live in the areas in Virginia where there have been severe issues with the school districts. Fairfax County. Yeah, exactly. And so I don't know how much of a direct line there is versus – I do think it will be an issue. I don't know that it will be definitional. But you mentioned DeSantis. So at the beginning of the crisis of the pandemic,

the first phase, second phase, he was excoriated by many observers and analysts, including big parts of the media. And a prominent Democrat, who I won't name, but elected Democrat said to me recently, you know, I don't like DeSantis at all. But at the end of this pandemic, he's gonna have a pretty good story to tell. Meaning, and this was this office holder's words.

He said, look, at the end of this pandemic, there will be more businesses that will have relocated to Florida. More wealthy people contributing to the tax that will have relocated to Florida, more wealthy people contributing to the tax base of the state moving to Florida. And yes, Florida was lighter on lockdowns, but they don't seem to be any worse off relative to states like New York and California, which were much more aggressive on lockdowns, or Ohio for that matter. You mentioned DeWine. And I mean, I have a couple of these stats here. So Florida's death rate among seniors is approximately 20% lower than California's and 50% lower than New York's.

And yet employment declines in Florida relative to New York and California were about half. So, you know, if this Democrat is right, like, first of all, DeSantis may have a relatively easy path to reelection in 2022. But why? I mean, you could be critical, you know, people can be critical of DeSantis, but still recognize that his approach may have been more thoughtful, which was isolating the elderly and kind of let the rest of the economy stay relatively open. And yet he was demonized. I mean, demonized in contrast to people like Cuomo and Newsom. There are so many nuances there that I don't feel like I can speak to because I'm not familiar enough with each state's specific data sets on either employment or

cases or and so forth. I mean, I obviously know in broad strokes that there was a lot of criticism of DeSantis back in the day. And there was a lot of praise for Cuomo. Separately, I do think that if DeSantis wins re-election for 2022, I think he's in extremely good shape for 2024 if he decides to run for president to the point of that good story to tell, which I assume is what the Democrat you were talking to was referring to. I do think that so much of the reaction to governors was in part based on what people were seeing at the federal level or not seeing in terms of Trump. And so much of the politics over the last four years have been defined by how somebody stacks against Trump.

And I think that there was this desire, I'll take the case of Cuomo, in part because I live in this state and in part because he's obviously having a lot of controversy. In the news these days. He's in the news. He's in the headlines. And he's in the headlines, Dan, for something that now has actually receded, which was because of the the Me Too questions around him, but the nursing home issue, which I think is, is a potentially dangerous one for him. I don't think that he is. I think that a lot of the lauding of him was because he was being compared to what Trump was doing. And I think that in the desire

to have some kind of a counterweight to Trump, some in the media, not everyone in the media, I cannot stand when it gets made as everybody in the media, some in the media and certainly some Democrats were willing to lionize people without necessarily giving them a full vetting. Now, Andrew Cuomo has been on the scene forever, so he's obviously a much more known quantity. But among those known aspects of his personality is that he has a reputation for being

very aggressive, some would say bullying, and people decided that they were fine with that in that context. You know, not dissimilar to how people were okay with Rudy Giuliani immediately after 9-11, right? But I think that there has been a desire to anoint somebody as the counterweight, whether it was Andrew Cuomo, or before that, it was Robert Mueller, and before that, it was Michael Avenatti. I think some of that was the energy behind the reaction to Cuomo, which couldn't just be, hey, he's doing some things right, and he's addressing the public in a more thoughtful way than Trump know, not specific to coronavirus. I think we could point to a number of instances where that's happened over the last four years. Are you surprised that Cuomo has so few allies right now coming to his defense?

It's like crickets. It's crickets. No, but Dan, I would tilt the question a little differently, which is that there's actually far fewer people calling for his resignation than those saying, let's just let the investigation play out. And I think that that is something that people are missing because that I think that number one, the praise that he got for the pandemic last year gave him some antibodies, certainly on social media with the left. Um, and I've, I've watched it as some of these allegations have surfaced, but, um, but I also just think that people have seen him serve a, people have seen him survive previous scandals, whether it was over the Morland commission that he was accused of meddling with, um, that was investigating corruption or what have you. And I think that people, um, are, know that Andrew Cuomo's personality is, uh, is one to kind of ride out the scandal and not just go away. He did that once in his career, which was 2002,

when he stepped down, when he was in the primary with Carl McCaul for the Democratic nomination for governor. And then he went and diligently stuck to a script. I don't think he wants to do 2002 again. So I don't think people want to be the one jumping out ahead saying resign when they assume he's not going to. So you think he digs in and fights this out and runs for fourth term? Well, I don't know. I mean, I'm not willing to say that. I do think he digs in and fights this out and runs for fourth term? Well, I don't know. I mean, I'm not willing to say that. I do think he digs in and fights. And I think that if the facts set stays as it is now, then I think that's really what he does.

But whether even with that being the case, does he run for a fourth term? I don't know. I think that's more in question than it was a few days ago. So wrapping up, I want to come back, actually, with this particular topic, Ron, to where we started, which is your roots in New York politics. I mean, New York is a one-party town. New York City is a one-party town, effectively, New York State. Albany is a one-party town. It's striking these one-party states, New York, California, for the Democrats, states like, say, South Carolina for Republicans. And yet these places tend to be where you have some of the most corruption.

You have the worst, nastiest, internecine fighting among political figures. What is it? I mean, even when New York wasn't a one- one party, I mean, even, I'm sorry, even when the one party nature of the town was on the other side, like Giuliani versus Pataki, when they dominated New York politics, it was, it was, there was, there was a lot of ugliness in the state's politics. And I'm, I'm just wondering, what is it about these one party states that, that give us this, what we're learning right now about the way Cuomo has governed. So I want to say that it was Alex Perrine at the New Republic who just did a piece,

a very good piece about this and pointing out the duality of the fact that this is a bipartisan, you know, single partisan issue in different states. I can't speak for states I don't live in or didn't cover that deeply. I can speak for this one about this one, which is I just think that it's meaning New York. I think it's less about the single party ecosystem, although I do think that is certainly problematic, because what it just means is there's not a natural, you know, tension point. I think, frankly, until the rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the congresswoman from Queens, you did not see a real counterweight to Cuomo. You had Cynthia Nixon run against him in a primary a couple of years back,

and that was not a race that went very well. What I think it is is that certainly New York is very much about machine politics, and I think that's less about the party and just about the machines themselves. And so Pataki oversaw the Republican machine and Cuomo has been overseeing the Democrats machine. And, you know, it was it's it's true of, of New York city politics in terms of citywide elections. The registration edge, I think, is six to one in New York, Democrat versus Republican. And yet there are all of these various nuances

in terms of how members of the party deal with each other. And a lot of it comes, it used to come down to, do you have the support from the Democratic party boss in Brooklyn or Queens? And then you put together a coalition, do you also get the unions? Or do you get one union? Do you get SEIU 1199, which recently endorsed Maya Wiley for mayor? I think it is much more about machines than it is about the single parties. And I think the existence of a strong machine political system in this state lends itself very well to problems.

And I also think the hollowing out of local news coverage in state capitals. No question. No question. So these politicians are subjected to very little oversight. Correct. There's no counterweight. There's nothing to hold them accountable, or very little. And then the few news organizations that do make an investment in state capital coverage, then you throw in coronavirus, back to your point about how hard it is. So then you have Cuomo just holding these press conferences every day that were televised nationally.

So what is a reporter in Albany really who can't get access because of the pandemic? And no one can accuse the governor of not being transparent because he's holding a national press conference every day. So he's out there. Well, and he's also, I mean, look, I mean, there was this question about the nursing home data, right? I mean, that was not data that I think was being provided. And I'm a little outside of my area here. But my understanding is that this was not data that was widely available to people. What made that issue come to the fore was that the governor's advisor was caught acknowledging to people that they had, I think she said that we froze in the face of a DOJ investigation by the Trump administration and that there was this issue with nursing home data. And so that was

by their own hand. I think that, I just think that, I agree with you that I think that the coronavirus has had a deleterious effect on the ability of news organizations at local outlets, and in some cases national, to do as much as possible to hold leadership to account. Although if you look at the timeline in the New York Times, it does look like, I think,

that some of the manipulating of the data happened before the DOJ was looking into it. So in any event, Maggie, before we let you go, just a minute on your new beat. My new beat is actually very similar to my old beat just minus the white house um i'm going to be doing investigations and politics uh which i was doing while trump was in office um but uh i i think that we don't quite know what the next couple of years are going to look like politically uh certainly and i think in terms of investigations there a there's a new administration and b there is still an old administration that there are a lot of issues to look at. So that's my new beat.

And the old administration may try to be the new new administration. I am very skeptical, but yes, I think that's what we'll be talking about for a while. All right, which means, Maggie, you are still going to be a fixture in our lives. I'm sorry for your loss of time, Dan. Yeah. Anyways, thanks for being with us. Thanks for having me. Stay safe. That's our show for today. If you want to follow Maggie's work, you can find her at The Times or on Twitter at MaggieNYT. If you have questions or ideas for future episodes, tweet at me,

at Dan Senor. Today's episode is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.