‘Times’ reporter Haberman weighs in on Trump, the media and the turbulent election : NPR

DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I’m Dave Davies. There are 47 days left in a presidential campaign that’s had more jolting developments than most of us have seen in any presidential campaign in our lifetimes. The first debate resulted in President Joe Biden withdrawing from the race, replaced by Vice President Kamala Harris just weeks before the Democratic National Convention. There have been two apparent assassination attempts against Republican candidate and former President Donald Trump. And we’ve seen more states seemingly come into play in this relentlessly contentious campaign that promises to be close and hard-hitting to the end.

To provide some perspective on all this, we’re joined by New York Times senior political correspondent Maggie Haberman. She’s covered five presidential elections and shared a Pulitzer Prize for The Times’ reporting of Trump advisors and their connections to Russia in 2018. She was last on FRESH AIR in 2022 to talk about her best selling book, “Confidence Man: The Making Of Donald Trump And The Breaking Of America.” We’ve invited her back to discuss the remarkable twists and turns in the campaign, some generated by Trump’s provocative and at times false assertions, and about criticism leveled at the media for its coverage of Trump. I’ll note that we recorded our conversation yesterday.

Well, Maggie Haberman, welcome back to FRESH AIR. You know, I recall that when we spoke in 2022, we ended our conversation by talking about the level of bitterness in American political discourse these days, how political identity is increasingly defined by who you hate and who hates you. And you note that this happened before Trump’s appearance as a candidate, but you say he fueled it and accelerated it because he benefits from it and sees hate as a public good. I remembered that. We’ve now seen two assassination attempts with Trump as the target in the space of a couple of months. He wrote on Monday, because of this communist left rhetoric, the bullets are flying, and it will only get worse. Does this campaign feel like something really different now?

MAGGIE HABERMAN: It does. And thanks for having me back, Dave. I want to just say at the outset, I don’t think that it’s quite fair to say Trump brought on two assassination attempts or the second one is an apparent assassination attempt according to the FBI. I do think that the rhetoric of this campaign has been heated for quite some time, but not symmetrically. And that’s the big difference. I think that Trump has been vilifying his opponents for quite some time. His opponents have vilified him in the form of saying he’s a threat to democracy. He has treated those two approaches as completely parallel, and they’re just not. Trump’s rhetoric is much hotter, it is much more accusatory, and it is darker. But I do think that what we discussed in 2022 stands, which is that the political moment is defined, by who you hate and who hates you back, and it has been getting exponentially worse since we first had that conversation.

DAVIES: Right. You know, it seems both sides have in common that they believe the other side is essentially threatening the future of the nation, and that can inspire people to radical actions. Although the two alleged assailants in the Trump attempts, clearly weren’t particularly people who were political partisans in the normal sense.

HABERMAN: At least in terms of what we know about them. There’s so much that’s not known about both of these incidents and particularly the one that just happened in Florida, but there’s still a bunch of unanswered questions about what happened in Butler, Pa. In both cases, there’s a lot of security lapse questions – right? – about exactly how we got here. But it is true that both parties are describing the other, and the other’s figurehead or top official, as an existential threat.

The reasons why are not the same. When I talk about the asymmetry, I guess an example I’d point to is this matter that both Trump and JD Vance – more Vance than Trump, but Trump talked about it in the debate – have been pushing, which is this baseless claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio have been eating pets. Now, officials there have said this isn’t true. Officials statewide have said this isn’t true. They have persisted with this, and what I keep thinking about is some Democrats I was talking to after the Democratic National Convention in Chicago – they were very happy with how the convention went. And it was a successful convention, which is pretty remarkable considering that there was a different nominee a short time before that. But one of the things that some of the Democrats I was talking to were so happy about was this idea that Democrats were willing to make fun of Trump in a way that they really weren’t eight years ago. Obama made a size joke a lot of people took note of. J.B. Pritzker mocked Trump as not a real billionaire, although Mike Bloomberg did a version of that in 2016 too. And they felt very good about this as evidence that they understood that a different type of campaigning is necessary against Trump.

But you counter what’s happening among Republicans, which is saying immigrants are eating cats, and these are just not equal in terms of what the two sides are saying. So there is an asymmetry here, which is something of a heads Republicans win, tails Democrats lose, as if you’re in a casino, because they’re – Republicans are just pushing the bounds of what have been historic norms in campaigns to go out and talk about a story that they have been told there’s no evidence for and to keep saying they believe it’s true is just something different.

DAVIES: Now, I’m just wondering, do you talk – you must talk to other Republicans, including, I assume some kinds of conversations with Trump campaign officials. Do they seem to believe this is true, or do they not care, or…

HABERMAN: My sense is they don’t care that much. They are very happy to have a conversation about immigration, whatever form that takes, because immigration has been an issue on which the Biden administration has struggled. Although I will say that I don’t think it’s a top-of-mind issue the way it was, and they’re trying to push it out there because of that. So, the fact or lack thereof of whether this story is true doesn’t seem to be especially relevant.

DAVIES: I also wonder if – you know, Donald Trump has now had two occasions in which you know, long rifles were pointed in his direction. There was also reporting some weeks ago of a potential plot by Iran to assassinate Trump. Do you have any sense of how this is affecting his psyche?

HABERMAN: The shooting in Butler very clearly impacted him. It’s different than what happened in Florida. And in Florida, there were no shots fired at him. Obviously, a very scary incident – could have ended much worse and did not. But just fundamentally different because Butler, there was a man on a roof. He fired a shot. Trump’s ear was hit by something. He fell. Somebody was killed onstage. It was a terrifying moment. He was clearly impacted by that, and part of the tell there, Dave is that he keeps talking about or for a while, was talking about what happened over and over and over, and that’s usually him working something out.

So it was unquestionably scary to him. He’s one of the most effective compartmentalizers I’ve ever seen in my life, but this is a very hard thing to put into a little box. The Iran threats do impact him, but not quite the same way. All of it, though, collectively has created this kind of siege mentality that the campaign has, and I think that is impacting a lot of how they behave.

DAVIES: In what way?

HABERMAN: They’re very reactive. They’re very defensive. They’re very bunkered. They – you know, there’s a sense of paranoia that is seeping through. For instance, Jonathan Swan and I reported a couple of weeks ago that there was an incident where some folks had put fake listening devices – they were toys bought from Amazon. It was a prank. Some campaign aide did a prank, and I think they still don’t know who did it. But because the campaign had been the victim of a hacking – an email hacking that they pointed the fingers at Iran over, and the FBI later said that the Trump team and the Biden team – former Biden team – had been the focus of attempted hacks by Iran. So there was this incident where somebody played a prank, but nobody was owning up to it. And a 911 call was made by officials on the campaign, and the office was swept, and police came, yeah, because there is just a sense of paranoia. And I understand where it comes from right now.

DAVIES: Well, let’s talk a bit more about the campaign here. You know, you wrote a piece around the time of the Democratic Convention and said that the Harris campaign had learned from the way Hillary Clinton’s campaign had dealt with Trump and took a different approach. What did they learn from the Clinton experience?

HABERMAN: The Clinton campaign elevated all of Trump’s antagonisms, his racial provocations, his sexist provocations. They really tried to highlight them because they believed it was going to animate their voters. And they were campaigning through a sort of moral prism, where Trump was amoral, and voters would react to that. And the Harris campaign learned that all that did was elevate controversies that were actually at minimum not hurtful to Trump and at maximum helped him with certain voters.

And they – instead, the Harris team has decided to do much more of what the Obama team did in 2008, which was not respond to provocations. You know, Obama, the first Black president – only Black president so far – did not respond to every racist statement that was made or every, you know, effort to try to highlight him as other in some way for having attended a madrassa or having a father who was Kenyan and so forth and so on. He just brushed it off and focused on what he wanted to focus on. And the Harris team has really been doing the same. The biggest data point to that is her convention speech, where she really did not go into gender identity or racial identity. And when she has been asked about it in interviews – about Trump’s attacks – she will just say, it’s the same old tired playbook. I think that they want to stick to that as long as they can.

DAVIES: You know, one observation you made about the debate was that he used a lot of lines that really connect at his rallies, and they landed differently in the debate setting. Why?

HABERMAN: Because at the debate setting, he didn’t do the second beat that he usually does, which is, here’s the positive. Here’s the good thing. He did that once or twice. But on the rally stage, he packages the apocalyptic version of the United States and how terrible everybody is and how people are coming after him with, here’s what I’m going to do for you. And he goes through a litany of, like, 10 things. His debate lines – which were evocative of those rally lines, the darker versions – didn’t have the accompanying more forward-looking piece. And so they just came across very differently. And Harris, you know, also had some missed opportunities in terms of trying to turn everything back toward an economic message. But she was much clearer about looking forward than he was.

DAVIES: Right. I guess that’s part of the advantage of actually preparing, you know, a timed answer. I mean, you have two – if you burn a lot of two minutes doing stuff in the rally that is part of a nine-minute riff, you’re going to run out of time.

HABERMAN: Yeah, I think that’s part of it. I also just think that Donald Trump, for whatever reason, feels like he has to respond to everything. I keep thinking about something that Mitch McConnell said to him in the 2016 campaign. And Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump were not exactly pals. But Mitch McConnell was just baffled by Donald Trump’s approach and said, why do you feel the need to respond to everything? And Trump said, I have to defend myself. And do you really? But he thinks he does. And so when you think that way, and when everything is, I must swing at every pitch that is crossing the plate, you burn a lot of time.

DAVIES: We need to take a break here. Let me reintroduce you. We’re speaking with Maggie Haberman, senior political correspondent for The New York Times. We’ll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF SLOWBERN’S “WHEN WAR WAS KING”)

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we’re listening to the conversation I recorded yesterday with Maggie Haberman, senior political correspondent for The New York Times. She’s written about Donald Trump for decades and is now covering the presidential campaign.

You know, Donald Trump had a news conference at Trump Tower, September 6, after he’d gone into a Court of Appeals hearing on the E. Jean Carroll case in which he was found liable for sexual assault. It was – this was kind of an odd event. Tell us about it.

HABERMAN: Trump announced that he was having a press conference, and he’s done a bunch of these since the Democratic National Convention. He did one in – actually, this one was right before, but he did one at Mar-a-Lago that I attended. He did one at Bedminster that I didn’t go to. He did this one at Trump Tower, where he didn’t take questions. The one in Mar-a-Lago, he took questions for an hour. He just ranted.

I mean, he had gone to a hearing – a federal appeals court hearing in connection with the E. Jean Carrol case. It was a roughly 30-minute hearing. He did not have to appear. He did go. He didn’t speak. There was no scenario in which he would speak. But he had a bunch of things he wanted to say, and that’s fine, except he’s running for president, and the E. Jean Carrol case is not top of mind for most voters. So he then spent 45 minutes reminding everybody of all of these allegations and going over them in really graphic detail about what he had been accused of.

Now, to be clear, he was saying, and these aren’t true. This is not how most politicians handle these things. And I’m sure that it is very appealing to his base of supporters, but it is not appealing to, say, suburban women. It is not appealing to persuadables who just don’t want to be reminded of at minimum the constant drama that surrounds him. And so he did this for 45 minutes and, you know, seemed to, as one person close to him told me, get it off his chest and moved on. But it was utterly purposeless.

And what was interesting about it, too, Dave, is he had a – he sometimes peeks through what his actual intentions are in these moments. And so toward the end of this rant, where he said all kinds of things that were contradictory – Democrats should be investigated for attacks on Republican judges, including – appeared to be saying – he didn’t name her – the judge in Florida whom he appointed when he was president who has dismissed one of the indictments against him.

DAVIES: Verbal attacks, right? He didn’t…

HABERMAN: Verbal attacks. Sorry. They’re not physical attacks but just verbal criticisms. Meanwhile, Trump is, you know, calling judges in his cases who he doesn’t like corrupt. But he said something about – to that point, he started talking about how bad Republicans are at working the ref. There was nobody better at it than the late great Bobby Knight. I think he was the Indiana coach if I’m…

DAVIES: Yes. Yeah.

HABERMAN: I’m not the biggest basketball person. But he was great at this. And, you know, he would make a fight over one point, and he’d lose that one, but he’d win the next one. And there is a sort of reading the cue cards aspect to Trump sometimes where he just starts essentially saying what the stage directions are. And that’s what he was doing here. He was attempting to work the ref. And he spent 45 minutes complaining about the refs, in this case the judges, in this case the media, and then he just wandered off.

But it underscores for me how much – and I said this a long time ago during the presidency, and I think it is still very true today. So much of these things have historically been a game to him that he just sees if he can win. The stakes are obviously very, very high right now. If he doesn’t win the election, he is in significant legal jeopardy. But that is his approach, and you’re seeing it here.

DAVIES: Well, you know, one of the things in the press conference we should clarify, he wasn’t just talking about the Jean Carroll case…

HABERMAN: No, no.

DAVIES: …But all of these allegations that women made after the Access Hollywood tape emerged.

HABERMAN: Yes, but part of why they were factored in is because some of those were referenced in the E. Jean Carroll case.

DAVIES: I was going to play a little clip here. This is part of his – he was discussing in this case one of the witnesses, Jessica Leeds, who had told the jury that Trump had groped her on an airplane in the 1970s. Here’s what Trump had to say about that.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

DONALD TRUMP: So think of the impracticality of this. I’m famous. I’m in a plane. People are coming into the plane. And I’m looking at a woman and I grab her, and I start kissing her and making out with her. What are the chances of that happening? What are the chances? And frankly, I know you’re going to say it’s a terrible thing to say, but it couldn’t have happened. It didn’t happen. And she would not have been the chosen one, she would not have been the chosen one.

DAVIES: Oh, boy. I mean, he has to add that she would not have been attractive enough to be his target.

HABERMAN: Yeah, it’s hard to think of a more self-destructive statement that a male candidate could make, but there you have it. And I expect you will see that in some form of an ad, but we’ll see. When he says I was famous and this couldn’t have happened, he was not that famous then, with all due respect to him. He was a New York developer who was trying to boost his own brand and trying to get headlines all the time. He was not the Donald Trump of now, who’s the most ubiquitous presence on the planet. But this notion that, you know, everybody stepping on a plane immediately said, there’s Donald Trump, forgetting about – I was obviously not there. I’m not weighing in on what happened. But the idea that people getting on a plane would’ve immediately said, oh, look, there’s Donald Trump, way back then, is just not true.

DAVIES: You know, you noted that when he had this news conference about these sexual assault allegations that there were no campaign aides there. What’s your sense of who has influence in the campaign and whether anyone can do anything about?

HABERMAN: Look, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita are his top advisers. Corey Lewandowski, his fired 2016 campaign manager, has recently rejoined. I don’t think anybody is able to modify his behavior to any great extent or any length of time. And I think that even though that was more true that they could many months ago, and especially when he was facing a greater immediate legal threat, it has never been true in a late-stage campaign.

The only thing I can think of where Trump was more controlled late stage in a campaign was toward the end of 2016, when they got him to stop tweeting himself for what is, in real terms, a very short amount of time. To him, I’m sure it felt like an eternity. But that was the only time that I can think of. In general, he is just not going to listen to people. And he is older, and he is more hardened in his ways, and no, they’re not going to be able to get control of him. What I don’t have a sense of right now is how hard anyone tries.

DAVIES: Maggie Haberman is senior political correspondent for The New York Times and author of the book “Confidence Man: The Making Of Donald Trump And The Breaking Of America.” We’ll hear more of our interview recorded yesterday after this short break. I’m Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF BRUCE HORNSBY SONG, “BACKHAND”)

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I’m Dave Davies. We are listening to the interview I recorded yesterday with New York Times senior political correspondent Maggie Haberman. We wanted to talk about the contentious course of the presidential campaign and criticisms that the media have done a poor job of covering Republican Donald Trump’s assertions and accusations. Haberman has reported on Trump for decades and is author of the book “Confidence Man: The Making Of Donald Trump And The Breaking Of America.”

I mean, I don’t want to spend the entire interview talking about kind of self-destructive things Donald Trump has done, but on Sunday…

HABERMAN: It’s a long list. I mean…

DAVIES: Right. On Sunday, on Truth Social, his social media platform, he tweeted in all caps, I hate Taylor Swift, exclamation point. What’s that about?

HABERMAN: You know, it’s interesting. I think it was Yashar Ali who pointed out on social media that he had never seen Trump use the word, I hate – the phrase, I hate, before. And I believe that’s true. Trump often says other people hate him. But I don’t remember a time where he has said he hates someone. And, you know, I think that he is very offended when somebody who’s famous, who is younger and attractive, is critical of him, and I think that he reacts with significant lack of emotional maturity, but it is, as you say, incredibly self-destructive. She has a huge following. And also, all this did was elevate this endorsement. He has a way of making people focus on things that – you know, frankly, it’s no differ than what we were just talking about with the E. Jean Carroll case. This is not top of mind for everyone. So he’ll just make it top of mind for everyone because it’s top of mind for him.

And one of the things that gets said about him, Dave, is, there’s a lot of talk about how he has really good political instincts. I don’t think he has really good political instincts. I think he has good instincts for what might resonate in certain ways. But what he has is impulses for what make him feel good, and sometimes that overlaps with good politics and sometimes it doesn’t. And in many cases, lately, it’s not overlapping with at least what would be considered good politics. But again, the issue with him is he – because he is such a sui generis figure, he turns on its head what typically counts as bad politics, and then says, see, it’s not really bad politics, and sometimes it’s just that it just doesn’t matter for him.

DAVIES: He’s been traveling lately with Laura Loomer. Just for people who don’t know, explain who she is.

HABERMAN: Sure. So she is a conspiracy theorist who has shared videos suggesting that 9/11 was an inside job. She has made any range of bigoted statements. She also vigorously attacked Ron DeSantis during the Republican primaries earlier this year, and when those races were taking place late last year. And that really impressed Donald Trump, who knew her already. She is an ally of Roger Stone, who is Trump’s longest serving on-and-off advisor, and Trump will always gravitate toward a certain type of antagonist of others, and Laura Loomer is exactly that. And what he cares about is, is she fighting for me? That is the underlying issue. If the attacks then start to attract too much negative publicity, then he’ll start to pay attention, but it’s not because he is morally wounded by them.

DAVIES: You know, you’ve covered him for so long. Do you think he’s essentially the same candidate he was in 2016 and 2020? Has he really changed at all?

HABERMAN: So I would answer that slightly differently. I don’t think he’s the same candidate because he’s older, because I think in 2016, he was actually having fun because it didn’t really matter to him whether he won or lost. He didn’t want to be a loser, but nobody was going to hold it against him in a significant way. If he lost, he had never run for office before. He’d never run for anything before. And look how far he came. In 2020, it was such a bizarre campaign – for different reasons than this one is, because there was the COVID campaign, and he had had COVID, and he was much sicker than the White House told people, as we discovered later. He was very, very sick. And I spoke to people in the administration who said that if he had not been given the Regeneron treatments, he likely would not have survived. So that just created its own strange environment.

He’s the same man because he’s always been the same man. I mean, the same – I wrote a whole book on that. He’s the same person. He’s always been the same person. But I do think he is more of himself as I think everybody who gets older is, and I think that he is much angrier in his public commentary than he used to be. It’s not like it used to be harmonious. You look back at 2016, he was offering to pay the legal fees of people who punched protesters. He was saying he himself wanted to get off the stage and punch a guy in the face. It was not a sanguine campaign, but the rhetoric is a tick (ph) worse now.

DAVIES: So let’s talk about some of the criticisms of the media. I mean, I will just say, you don’t have to answer for all media or even the many reporters and editors at The New York Times who are working on this campaign. But I’m interested in how you respond when people say that The Times and the media have given Trump credibility by treating things he says as if they should be taken seriously when they don’t deserve that treatment, or when he gives a garbled answer about, you know, say, child care, and it’s rewritten to sound clear and credible. In general, I mean, is there a point here?

HABERMAN: I think that the media does a very good job covering Trump. There are always going to be specific stories that could have been better, should have been better, that are written on deadline, and people are not being as precise as they should be. I think there is an industry, bluntly, Dave, that is dedicated toward attacking the media, especially as it relates to covering Donald Trump and all coverage of Trump. And I think that Trump is a really difficult figure to cover because he challenges news media process every day, has for years. The systems are just fundamentally – they were not built to deal with somebody who says things that are not true as often as he does or speaks as incoherently as he often does. I think the media has actually done a very good job showing people who he is, what he says, what he does. I think most of the information that the public has about Trump is because of reporting by the media. And I guess I don’t really understand how this industry that literally exists to attack the press broadly – and the media is not a monolith. It’s not a league. But this industry that exists to do that – I don’t see how they think they are a solution by undermining faith in what we do. That’s been very confusing to me.

DAVIES: Yeah. Well, I mean, part of the attacks are clearly are partisan. I mean, Republicans and Trump supporters are going to attack.

HABERMAN: I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about…

DAVIES: Yeah, well, who is the industry you’re talking about? Yeah.

HABERMAN: I’m talking about criticism on the left. I’m talking about a lot of that Trump has used the language of despots to undermine the press is very well established, and it’s very dangerous. And I’ve talked about that. The publisher of The New York Times has been incredibly clear about that. He published an Op-Ed recently in The Washington Post actually talking about that. So I don’t think that anybody is – in – at The New York Times is trying to sanitize Trump’s language. Do I think that there are occasional pieces at my paper, at other papers that probably should have been done differently? That’s absolutely true. And that’s – but that – what happens with this industry on the left that attacks the press is that it gets described as a grand conspiracy to try to help Trump somehow, as opposed to people doing their job on daily deadlines and not always hitting the mark because we are humans. And we are doing our best under a very challenging set of circumstances. But I actually think the media has done a very good job of covering Trump.

I think that what is frustrating to those people making those claims is that there is not the result they want to see, which is Trump melts or Trump no longer has, you know popularity. I mean, you were saying – I think your question was treat him with credibility. He’s the Republican nominee. So there’s a substantial voting bloc in this country – almost half – that take seriously what he’s saying. And it’s not because The New York Times wrote a certain story. And so to not understand that, I think, is problematic for folks leveling the charge.

DAVIES: I’m going to take another break here. Our guest is Maggie Haberman, senior political correspondent for The New York Times. We’ll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF JULIAN LAGE’S “IOWA TAKEN”)

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we’re listening to the conversation I recorded yesterday with Maggie Haberman, senior political correspondent for The New York Times. She’s written about Donald Trump for decades and is now covering the presidential campaign.

Donald Trump is known at his rallies for going into long riffs and digressions, which can be a little hard to follow. Here’s a piece of tape in which he explains how he knows what he’s doing.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

TRUMP: You know, I do the weave. You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about, like, nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together. And it’s like – and friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, it’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen. But the fake news, you know what they say? He rambled. That’s not rambling. When you have – what you do is you get off a subject to mention another little tidbit, then you get back onto the subject. And you go through this, and you do it for two hours, and you don’t even mispronounce one word.

DAVIES: Your thoughts?

HABERMAN: I don’t think he has friends who are English professors.

DAVIES: (Laughter).

HABERMAN: I don’t think that this is some intentional strategy. I think that he is aware that there’s a lot of questions about whether his speaking patterns have deteriorated, and he is just doing PR on that. I don’t think these various threads all weave together brilliantly toward the end. I listened to one of his rallies recently. I think it was Wisconsin a week and a half ago. And I was very struck by how meandering it is and has become, and that’s true. And again, it’s never – it was never not meandering, but he is going off on a lot of tangents these days. And I just think he’s trying to combat negative headlines by saying that.

DAVIES: You know, earlier this month in posts on social media, Trump threatened people he said would be cheating on the election and would be, quote, “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” which includes long prison sentences, adding that – adding, quote, “please be aware that this legal exposure extends to lawyers, political operatives, donors, illegal voters and corrupt election officials.” You know, he says and writes a lot of angry stuff, but you thought this merited a story.

HABERMAN: I did, and he did it again this week. I think when he is promising to use the apparatus of the government against critics and opponents – and he’s talking about a wide range of people there – once he’s in office, I think talking about things that he says he will do when he’s elected is very different than, you know, him talking about doing the weave or sharks and boats and, you know, wind, farms and birds. It’s just not the same thing.

Things that he says he will do – he is somebody who has shown that he is willing to use the apparatus of government to target opponents. I mean, he did it when he was in office. It’s not like this would be some new thing. He wanted investigations into political critics, political opponents, political rivals. He wanted John Kerry investigated. He wanted James Comey prosecuted. He wanted Hillary Clinton prosecuted, despite claiming that he didn’t. He has – now, and he was stopped or officials decided there was nothing to charge anyone for. But the fact that he never stops the first time is worth bearing in mind.

DAVIES: I want to just ask you a bit about your life covering this campaign. I mean, I’ve covered political campaigns, and every day, it’s just hard to know what to focus on ’cause there’s this flood of information from candidates’ campaigns, the media, social media, not to mention campaign finance reports and all this stuff wanting your attention. I mean, how do you decide what to do every day? How do you curate all this?

HABERMAN: It’s a good question. So I’m blessed to have a lot of really great colleagues. I work extremely closely with my reporting partner, Jonathan Swan, and I’m very fortunate that I do. And we tend to work out how we’re going to cover things as we go. There are breaking news developments, and we’ll have to break off of longer-term enterprise targets. But we have things we want to focus on ahead of election day, and some are more attainable than others. Arthur Finkelstein, who was a Republican strategist, who had a lot of acolytes among Republicans, among them, people who are close to Trump – he used to say that – something with the effect of time is the one resource that a campaign doesn’t have in limitless capacity, and that’s true for campaign reporters too. So we do our best. But yes, I mean, it is a constant flood, and there is always a feeling of things that I wish I had spent more time on or – you just – if you spend a lot of time looking backwards, you’re going to go crazy. So we do the best we can to prioritize what we think is most important for readers to know.

DAVIES: I know we hate to speculate, but in the remaining seven weeks of this campaign, are there big events you’re anticipating? I guess that’s the things we don’t know about that…

HABERMAN: Well, first of all, Dave, it’s less than seven weeks, so please don’t add time…

DAVIES: Yeah, OK. All right.

HABERMAN: …Number one.

DAVIES: It’s 47 days…

HABERMAN: Forty-seven days.

DAVIES: …As of Thursday, right?

HABERMAN: Exactly – number one. But number two, yeah, look, this race is moving at the pace of sludge being removed from a river bed right now because there is no other major event ahead of us that becomes, you know, sort of the hitching post by which coverage hangs on. I do think there is a chance there will be another debate. I know Trump has said he’s not going to debate. I also know Trump said he wasn’t going to do the ABC debate, and then he did and then wanted to cancel it.

I don’t think these things are ever the last word with Trump because he can always change his mind. And I just have to wonder if he’s going to be okay with JD Vance being the last debate word for this campaign at the VP debate, which is at the beginning of next month. That’s one thing I’m watching for. But absent that, it’s just a sort of a day-to-day struggle between these two campaigns, and there’s obviously this uptick of threats. We’re watching for that as well.

DAVIES: What is your sense of the relationship between Trump and JD Vance, who’s certainly been out, you know, getting a lot of attention on his own?

HABERMAN: I think that Trump genuinely likes Vance. I think that Trump was only going to pick Vance despite how tortured his VP process was, of the available options to him. Do I think Donald Trump likes anybody getting more attention than him? No, which is why you saw him in his debate against Harris getting asked a question about Vance saying he would veto a national abortion ban and Trump throwing Vance under the bus, and Vance on Sunday on one of the talk shows said that he had learned his lesson not to speak for Trump when they haven’t had a conversation about it. It was pretty reasonable for JD Vance to believe that’s what Trump had said because Trump was trying to leave the impression that’s what he was going to do. But I think in general, Trump is quite happy with him. He often tells people that he sees himself as like Vince Lombardi, and, you know, he’s making the athlete better. I’m paraphrasing what he actually says, but it’s something to that effect.

DAVIES: The master coach?

HABERMAN: Correct. And he’s trained the athlete and found the good athlete.

DAVIES: You know, I live in a swing state – Pennsylvania – and I can’t watch a ball game without just a torrent of political ads from all sides. I wonder if it’s even going to matter at this point, since there is so much money with the campaigns and the political action committees.

HABERMAN: Yeah, there’s a ton of money sloshing around the system this cycle. It’s pretty remarkable. I have had strategists say to me from both parties that they don’t think TV ads are really going to matter that much this cycle because people aren’t consuming their news that way. They’re consuming it on their phones. They’re consuming it on YouTube. They’re consuming it on TikTok in strange ways. The way in which campaigns reach voters has just changed dramatically, but it hasn’t changed enough that you’re not seeing that flood of ads – right? – because they don’t really know what’s going to move people. We don’t really know what it’s going to look like in terms of ground game. I was talking to a Democratic strategist last night who was making the point that this person thinks that phone banks and door knocks don’t really work the same way they used to because people just get annoyed. In the post-COVID era, especially, everybody is kind of pulled back into their own worlds and into their houses. So I don’t know what is going to make the difference.

DAVIES: Well, Maggie Haberman, thanks for your time. Thanks for speaking with us again.

HABERMAN: Thanks, Dave.

DAVIES: Maggie Haberman is senior political correspondent for The New York Times, and author of the book “Confidence Man: The Making Of Donald Trump And The Breaking Of America.” We recorded our interview yesterday. Coming up, Maureen Corrigan reviews the new novel from Rumaan Alam, whose book “Leave The World Behind” was a suspenseful best seller about a family confronting a mysterious apocalyptic disaster. This is FRESH AIR.

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