Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America
by Maggie Haberman
View on GoodreadsMaggie Haberman's 2022 biography of Trump — built on three decades of covering him for the New York tabloids and then the NYT — as the closest thing to a definitive single-volume work on the man.
Core ideas
- The New York-tabloid Trump and the political Trump are continuous, not different people — Haberman's argument is that Trump's whole career has run on the same set of moves (lie, sue, intimidate, retreat, repeat) and the presidency was just the largest deployment.
- Haberman's reporter-Trump relationship — much-discussed, occasionally mutual — produces material no other journalist gets, including direct interviews late in the writing where Trump's contradictions are captured in real time.
- The "confidence man" frame is the load-bearing concept: Trump is treated less as a political figure than as a grifter who took grifting into politics and found it scaled better there than anywhere else.
Published2022
Pages597
ISBN9780593297346
ReadSep 2024
