The New Yorker Radio Hour - Maggie Haberman: Gang War in the White House

Episode Date: July 21, 2017

Maggie Haberman and Donald Trump go way back.   New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

Hi, it's David. Before we get started, just a quick heads up about something on the podcast. We're trying something new. Instead of the single hour-long podcast you've been getting until now, we're giving you two episodes every week, a half hour each, give or take. It's the same content, but arranged just a little differently for what we hope is the best possible podcast listening experience. There's a new episode up every Friday and Tuesday. Here we go. These are just anecdotes, but it's building up into something more coherent. I think it would be interesting just really try to unravel what his ties. There's a sort of country-city divide for their own convenient. And it's not clear where it goes next. From one world trade center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick. Maggie, this interview is quite something. I want to start with what he told you about Attorney General Sessions. What did he have to say? Look, he was very clearly frustrated with Jeff Sessions. He very bluntly said that... Long before she was a White House correspondent at the New York Times, Maggie Haberman was a local reporter for the New York Post and the Daily News,

the tabloids that really get into the politics and personalities of New York City, which is to say she had a front row seat to the Donald J. Trump show for a very long time. Covering Trump as the leader of the president. The free world, though, is something altogether different. The president sometimes isn't very happy with her, and in a moment of peak, he called Haberman a third-rate reporter. But it's clear that she's also earned his wary respect. Last week, when Trump went after his Attorney General Jeff Sessions, an astonishing public takedown that will end God knows how, it was Haberman and her colleagues from the Times who were in the room and got the story. I talked with Maggie Haberman last week.

From outside, it seems like we're looking at a kind of Borgia-like court in which everybody is leaking on everybody. Nobody particularly likes anyone else. Everybody's suspicious of each other. And the atmosphere is generally poisonous. Is that inaccurate? Yeah, I think that's 100% accurate. I mean, it's, look, we're used to a team of rivals. We are not used to a team of the bloods and the Crips, which is essentially what this is in the White House.

I mean, these are rival gangs. Who are the Bloods and Who are the Crips? How does it work? I think I'd need to add in some new gang names, too, because Bloods in the Crypts makes it sound like there's only two teams. There's something like six. It's a lot. And I think that you have so many people who started out not trusting each other, you know, because you had people who either were pro-Trump during the campaign or who were part of the RNC during the campaign. And that has morphed into something, you know, much different and more complicated.

So break it down. What are the teams? So, look, you've got sort of the policy teams of the NSC and the NEC. So this is the National Security Council and National Economic Council. So you've got, on the NSC side, you've got Henry McMaster, you know, Dina Pell works with him. NEC, you have Gary Cohen, the president's top economic advisor who came from Goldman Sachs. Deena Powell also works closely with him. Also of Golden Sacks.

Jared Kushner sort of touches on that. You've got these concentric circles. Then you have Steve Bannon, who doesn't really have direct reports and has, you know, I think, been choosing to throw himself into fewer meetings than he used to. He's fairly closely aligned at this point with Reince Prievis, which is ironic because they really disliked each other early on. Previs is seen pretty broadly as a weak chief of staff, and that is just an ongoing problem. And, you know, so here's a, for instance, you have these theme weeks that this White House does.

There's no through line. You know, there's Made in America Week, there's Energy Week, there's whatever. there's no sort of sense of unfurling a larger narrative here that you're trying to tell about this presidency from their comms team. It's just sort of throwing stuff at the wall, anything that it doesn't have the word Russia in it. How does Donald Trump spend his day when not in routine meetings that are on his schedule? This is really like the holy grail of reporting that has been sought and not completely answered for some time, including by me. Look, you know, he gets very irritated when we all report that he watches a lot of TV. He does watch a lot of TV.

It doesn't seem like that's a massively controversial statement. But he doesn't like it when that is said because he thinks it's shorthand for saying he doesn't work that hard. He holds a lot of meetings, but his Oval Office is an incredibly open door room online. like most oval offices, where really it is, you know, as you know, David, it's like it's the palace and the chief of staff is the gatekeeper. I mean, Trump's oval offices like Grand Central Station. People try briefing him and someone comes in and interrupts him. You know, people just sort of walk in without being previously announced in a meaningful way. He spends his day interacting, is how I would describe it. Now, over the course of time, what do you make out to

be the ideology of Donald Trump, or is it purely situational now after a half a year in office? I think he has no clear ideology. I think he has a couple of base impulses that he has held on to since the 1980s when he was taking out those newspaper heads about how Japan is, quote, unquote, ripping us off, right? I mean, a lot of the language that he used then is the same as what he uses now, but it's more of a feeling than an ideology. It's a sense that the United States is being taken advantage of. You know, he ran as a Republican, and he really appealed to this hard right base that believes in less government. But in reality, this is a man who grew up in Ed Koch's New York City. And I think has a very specific view of the role that government is supposed to play in people's lives.

What does that mean? We're on from coast to coast, as they say. What does it mean to have inherited, to some degree, Ed Koch's view of New York? I think he fundamentally believes that the role of government is to provide for people. What exactly that looks like, I think, is where you end up getting into, you know, a bit of a different place with him. But I think that Trump generally believes you have seen him talk about in various interviews where it has slipped out his belief that everybody should have health care. Ultimately, this is a guy who, you know, sort of grew up in a city where the government was hugely accountable for. policing for getting the garbage off the streets, for the buildings you build.

I mean, it's, and I think that the role of government in people's lives in New York City in the 1980s was pretty liberal. And, you know, he's he's much more Trump, I think, at heart of a big government type than his fans might realize. You recently described him on an Air Force one trip to Paris where he kind of held forth with the press. He was rather friendly. He was rather open.

He was rather a bullion. And at the same time, he tweets about and gives speeches where he loathes the press. He is called the press. He's called us. Enemies of the people, a phrase that has roots in French Revolution and Stalin's Russia and all the rest. How does he really feel about the press? Look, I think that he loves the press. I think he lives at least loosely by the theory that if not all press is good press, that most press is good press.

I think he finds the press has been his nurturer and validator for 30 to 40 years, right? I mean, this is a person who courted the tabloids in New York City aggressively in the 1980s. He found a way to make himself a commodity for the gossip pages and play the tabloids off each other. He likes attention and he likes media. You know, he loves to manipulate the media. He is a master at it. And he was also in a good mood. And I think he wanted us to see him in a good mood for whatever reason. So, you know, he spent an hour back there with us, which is a very long time for the president to be at the back of the plane. You worked for Rupert Murdoch at a certain point. I did for two certain points. Yes. And Rupert Murdoch is said to have a very close relationship with Donald Trump. And it's reflected.

in the New York Post in a certain way, and even in the Wall Street Journal in a certain way. What is that relationship about? Well, it's actually, it's funny that you said that because they didn't really have a relationship before, not in the same way, and they knew each other, and they were sort of friendly-ish. And, but the main relationship was really between Murdoch and his then-wife Wendy Dang and Ivanka Trump. Murdoch has always wanted to be an advisor to a president, and he certainly didn't have that with Bill Clinton, and he didn't really have it with Bush. The Bush people didn't really have much use for him. So he saw the opportunity and jumped on it, and they now talk most days. They talk most days.

What about? The economy, certain news stories, you know, what's happening in the world. I think Murdoch tries to keep Trump focused. Who else does Trump talk to in that way? Who else outside the White House is a kind of conigliary from afar? Well, I can point you to a story that Glenn Thresh and I did on this about a month ago. There's a bunch of people. I mean, he talks to Sean Hannity a lot.

Sean Hannity had an inexplicable freak out on Twitter when we reported it. But he is one of the people who Trump really does trust. He talks to Steve Schwartzman. There's a bunch of people. And then periodically for a time, but it was more really a – Jared relationship, he was talking to Ron Lauder, you know, because Lauder was one of the only people who was telling him what he wanted to hear on the idea that a peace deal was possible with the Palestinians and Israel. The Washington Post recently published a story saying that the president's allies are about to ramp up their fake news war by targeting specific reporters, that they'll look back through years of work in search of anything that can be fed to conservative media outlets and go about discredited. their work. Are you concerned that the nature of the personal attacks on you could get ratcheted up?

I mean, how much more could they get? It's been pretty bad. Describe what they're like. I mean, you know, there's, I think it's already pretty intense. And I think that what you talked about and what that Washington Post piece talked about describes a level of organization that certainly doesn't exist now. And if it does start to exist, then people should wonder who's paying for it. Recently, some CNN reporters were getting death threat after death threat. Have you gotten this kind of harassment at home? Yes, I have gotten anti-Semitic male pieces to my home that I have had to try to keep out of my children's eyes. I've gotten a lot.

I mean, but whatever, this also is, you know, this is what happens in the Internet age. It's mostly located on Twitter? Most of it's located on Twitter or in my work email inbox. I do periodically get stuff at home, but short of moving, there's not really much I can do. I've been lucky enough to have glimpses of watching you, just kind of live your life for a few minutes at a time, and your phone does not stop. Your fingers do not leave the screen of your iPhone. You tweet with incredible regularity, which means that you're also reading a lot of things. And it's not an uncommon day to see your name as part of two, three, sometimes more stories.

Tell me about this pace of life, what it does to your brain, how you work. What's your day like? It's not great. I'm just, you know how when you have a newborn, you feel as if you are living one long day. So I feel as if I am living one long day. I've done campaigns for years now. This is not, this is unlike that. Usually in a government, things settle down after the first three months at the most.

This is very different. You know, the day begins with getting my kids to school. Before that, I scan a couple of websites. I always look at the New York Post. It's the president's first read. Go to work. There's a list of people who I'm in frequent contact with. Meaning you do a round of calls.

You just call everybody that's on your... Call or text or, you know, G-chat. Yeah, just, you know, what are you here? What's going on? Do those sources worry that they're being monitored? Yes, everybody worries they're being monitored now. They do. When did that happen?

When did that start? A couple of months ago. Why? What set it off? An enormous focus on leaks within the White House. So do you communicate only on signal as opposed to regular G-chat? I don't want to get into specifics of how I communicate with people, but I will say that people are concerned about being monitored. And with reason?

I mean, I don't know that they have reason in the sense that I don't know that somebody's actually – look, it's actually really hard. Despite the president's tweets suggesting that you can wiretap someone with ease, you know, it's actually really difficult to do that. But I think that people feel hunted. And I think this White House has made public its anger and potential for venting that anger on people who speak. Why doesn't anybody resign? It's a great question that comes up a lot. I think for a few reasons. I think that people, you know, in some cases, people need to have it, you know, on their resumes that they withstood a certain amount of time.

I think that some people really do believe that they are doing what's right for the country. And I think that other people are very personally loyal to the president. I think in some cases you have people who are afraid of quitting because they're afraid of how they're going to get trashed on the way out the door by rival factions in the White House. Talk to me about Jared Kushner. He is in a unique position. This is a guy who saw his own father. father go to jail and his rage about that, his sense of resentment, never really abates. Now he's in a position where he is included in this scandal. He's a son-in-law. It's hard for him to

operate. He's incredibly entitled within the White House. And yet at the same time, probably fears leaving it. I mean, I think that's absolutely true that he fears leaving it. I think that he's afraid that he will be, you know, targeted in a different way. I also think that if Jared Kushner were not related to the president, any other person with this faxed would have been fired in any other White House. So, you know, there is a reason why nepotism laws exist. To your point about Kushner's sense of grievance over his father's prosecution and being haunted by it and traumatized by it, that's absolutely true. Kushner has what many people in Trump's orbit have, which is a sense of huge misdirection.

You know, he doesn't blame his father. And I can understand why that would be hard for a son to do. You know, it's the people who are to blame or the people who went after his father. And you hear that kind of thing a lot from the Trump White House grappling with other issues like Russia. Who do they blame? You know, the leakers or the Democrats or this one or that one, but there's not much reflection on their own actions. Do a lot of people in the West Wing not talk? Is there any discipline there in that sense?

There are plenty of people who are disciplined in the White House. And I wouldn't say that those who do talk are being undisciplined. I think that those who do talk in some instances are looking for a reality check. It's like therapy. They're looking for therapy not to shape the reality. No, they're looking, some of them are painfully aware that what is happening around them is quite unusual. And they're looking for somebody to validate that feeling. Maggie, thank you so much.

Thank you. Maggie Haberman, White House correspondent for the New York Times and an analyst for CNN. Later this hour, Bruce Eric Kaplan remembers the crazy TV specials of his youth and will get some even crazier exercise tips from none other than Bob Odin. The star of Better Call Saul. Stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and now, ladies and gentlemen, Bob Odenkirk. Bob Odenkirk here.

I'm an actor, but I'm also a middle-aged white guy and a dad. Now, you're probably wondering where I got these amazing abs. They're so ripply and rock hard. They're difficult to fathom. My perturbed, puffy face sets you up for a blubbery gut. But then you see these abs. stacked like bricks. And you have to ask,

does he work out for two or three hours a day? Or does he just work out all the time? Or perhaps you think I purchased them from a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills. No way. No, my secret is simple. Dynamic tension. Tension that is tense and dynamic.

And never ending. The best kind of tension there is. Dynamic tension. I have analyzed each app and where it draws its tension from so that you too can get the abs you've always dreamed of. The ab on the upper right is taught and sinewy thanks to middle school. Middle school. Specifically, the effort of trying to get my two kids placed in a top-notch middle school.

It's a lot of work, and I'm there every step of the way, leaning over their shoulders, looking down. That's what tightens the ab, swallowing hard, also good for the ab, and clenching and unclenching my fists. That's good for the fist. Nice ab, dad. Thanks, kids. Dad loves you, and dad loves the ab you've given him. The middle right ab bulges handsomely. That's thanks to talk radio.

Talk free. I simply tune in to conservative talkers when I'm driving, and my screaming at the host tightens this app for an extended, uninterrupted rep all day long. What kind of world do you want to live in? You want to live behind you. The upper left ab pops out impressively from the effort of love. lugging five-gallon water jugs into our kitchen.

Actually, the lugging, it does nothing for the app. It's that one moment where you have to tip the full jug into the dispensing reservoir without spilling, that strains and sculpts this beautiful ab. Tip the jug! Afterwards, slipping on the spilled water, that can be great for a full-body clench. The bottom right ab, the biggest of all my abs, and therefore the most impressive, is from not having sex. Salivacy.

This is a real secret secret. The ab is quietly tensed at all times. It has been for years now. Can you imagine the Pope's lower-right ab? That must be huge. The Pope is celibus. I, however, did not take a bow of chastity, so this would be a sad situation

if it didn't yield such an amazing ab. Finally, you've got to appreciate my extra abs. That's right. have two abs more than most people. They're in my lower back, and I'll admit it, they were put there by a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon. I was told they're the latest thing. God, I hope so. They hurt like hell. Where I got these abs. Now you know. That was the writer and actor Bob Odenkirk performing a piece he wrote for the New Yorker. Odenkirk was just nominated for an Emmy for Better Call Saul. Now in the office here hanging up all around the hall,

We've got blow-ups of great cartoons published in the New Yorker over the decades. They're fun. Visitors love them, but I guess for the cartoonists themselves, sometimes they can be a little weird. I passed one of my cartoons in the hallway, and, you know, it's this man and a woman fighting, and they're so blocky. Once someone said my cartoon characters are fat,

I thought it was a very pejorative thing to say about my people. But anyhow, the one thing that I do notice when I walk by this image of these two people fighting is like, it's the most unsexy world. I still can't access sexiness in cartoons at all. Even when I write TV shows, I can only really write a bad sex scene. That's Bruce Eric Kaplan, who's not only a cartoonist of amazingly unsexy people, but a TV writer with quite a list of credits to his name, Seinfeld, six feet under, and girls. Kaplan's calling as a writer began in New Jersey, in the suburbs.

where he lived what he calls a normal childhood, which is to say hours upon hours upon hours of television. When I watched TV, it was like I was living. I was seeing what life was. Life was about, like, connection and banter and wit and passion. From Television City in Hollywood, ladies and gentlemen, sunny and shares. In the summer, every now and then, a summer variety show would come on. And that was so great, because these summer variety shows were just not as produced, looser, the outfits would be lower.

You would see more cleavage on the women like Cher's cleavage. I mean, Cher's cleavage was so intense when you were a kid. I don't remember anything analogous to it. Share is the sex symbol of the show, and it's structured that way. You can see everything. I still can't believe. Like, why were you allowed to see that? I'm sure there are some men who find you sexy.

I'm sure there are. I'm sure there are some men who find too sexy. And then you'd see that during the summer, and then in the fall, you'd go back to Carol Burnett, and she had her, like, dress up to here. You know? Same costumer, by the way, Bob Mackey. It was like Bob Mackey went crazy during the summer. Did you say I'll be to teach me tonight? I was, you know, addicted to television.

Television is how I learned about life. It was like my third parent. Because my parents didn't teach me anything. That was how I learned what life was. During the year, I was an enormous Carol Burnett fan, watched it every week. And I remember one summer, the Melbourne Moore Clifton Davis show appeared

instead of a rerun of the Carol Burnett show. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. And welcome to our first show of the summer season. Hey, how about a good luck kiss? Now, honey, not in front of millions of people. I am not ashamed of the way I feel about you. I have nothing to eyes, so lay it on me.

Oh, no, my mama told me about boys like you. And they were this couple. I guess he was an actor and she was a singer. Ooh, now that is a kiss. Mm-hmm. Now tell me, didn't your hands tremble and your legs go weak? Yeah, but I might have the flu. You know what?

You know what someone really showed me? Is if you let your guard down, things could be great. I never really understood my parents' relationship. There didn't seem to be a real ease between them a lot of the time. And I was scared. When I looked at my parents, I was scared that, like, oh, my God, that's what a relationship is. That's fucking scary. And then when I would look at TV, I would be like, oh, that's what a relationship could be like.

I would study things on TV like Melba Moore and Clifton Davis and be like, a relationship could be fun. These people are having fun. They're having a good time. Like, the last thing my parents had was a good time. When I was 15 and my family came to the island for the summer. There weren't nearly as many houses or people as they're odd. Television taught me about relationships and I guess then it taught me about sex. I think I plotted watching Summer of 42.

I think I read the description. I was like, I need to see this. And I saw I was on at 1145 and went down to watch it. It felt like a memoir because it had a narrator named Hermie, and it was in the first person. About Summer 42, when the writer was a teenager, like in some summer place, like a beach community. And he and his two best friends,

they fixated on this young woman who was married, whose husband was away at war. And that house up there, that was her house. The narrator befriends her. And nothing from that first day I saw her. And no one that has happened to me since. Covered in goosebumps. Has ever been as frightening and as confusing.

She's very upset one night and they have sex. And then you find out there was a letter that her husband had died in the war and that she turned to Hermie for comfort. It was so mind-blowing. The idea that you were 14 or so, and you could have sex, you could have sex with an adult woman. I'm a parent, and you would think, looking back on this now, I would be horrified. But it was so specific a story.

It was like the summer of 42 could just happen once in the world. This was it. you were seeing the one time someone this young could sleep with this beautiful woman. And even if you look at the title, it's the summer of 42. It's not 42. Summer is when something crazy can happen. When I was a kid, I loved the TV so much that I wanted to crawl inside of it. And I think, you know, when I became a TV writer, I actually did.

I got to be on the other side. I get to be in the TV when I'm on a set. But what I just realized in thinking about these summer variety shows and things I would watch during the summer is that I moved to Los Angeles. When I was 21, I moved to Los Angeles. It's always summer. Bruce Eric Kaplan, writer and cartoonist in Los Angeles.

Next week on the show, the country singer George Strait, One of the great hit makers of all time. He sits down with the New Yorkers' Kellefussano. Don't miss it. And for today, that's it. Thanks for tuning in. Hope you enjoyed the show. And I hope you'll listen next week as well.

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