Back by popular demand, two of the smartest, most incisive political reporters in America join us tonight for In the News with Jeff Greenfield — a deeply intelligent, highly entertaining look at the coming election year. Ahead of tonight’s conversation with Politico’s Alex Burns, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman sat down to talk with us about the state of American political journalism, how she’s maintained the trust of Washington insiders, the upcoming election, her respect for Burns and Greenfield, and much more.
Your reporting on American politics, particularly during the Trump and Biden presidencies, has been invaluable. It is an era in which some Americans are less inclined to trust the news — and, disturbingly, one in which political leaders seem more willing to be openly hostile to journalists. How do you maintain trust and candor from your sources in this political climate?
The distrust in media predated Donald Trump, but he threw accelerant on it and took it to a level we haven’t seen openly before, calling the press “enemy of the people” and routinely singling out individual journalists for attacks, which his supporters often join him in. We’ve seen nothing like that from the current White House, and very significantly, the DOJ under Biden has barred the practice of seizing reporters’ phone records in leak hunts. On a more day-to-day, mundane level, the current White House’s culture is a pretty well-documented distrust of the media broadly. I think there’s been a broad erosion in the understanding of what independent journalism is and is supposed to be. A few things I would say: one of the blessings of being 50 is I have a lot of sources I’ve known for a long time, so that makes it a bit easier. But I maintain trust from my end by not playing gotcha and being up front about what I plan to report. And I’m very blessed to work with one of the best reporters on the planet, Jonathan Swan. It makes it easier.
Donald Trump is currently facing multiple criminal trials and lawsuits. You and others have pointed out that Trump has spent his entire career avoiding prosecution — despite what he might claim, these cases are obviously not advantages for him, at least not in a legal sense. But is a courtroom good political theater for Trump in 2024?
Trump has certainly tried to make the best of undesirable circumstances by treating these court appearances as if they’re campaign appearances. I think that was a little easier, cognitively at least, in the civil cases. He’s about to go to criminal trial. He has to be at a criminal trial every day. Trump’s behavior at his two civil trials, in state court and in federal court, clearly did not help him. But look, he has used it to rally and galvanize the Republican base. He has used it to suggest that he is being unfairly persecuted. He’s compared himself to Nelson Mandela. We’ve never seen anything like this. I don’t think anybody wants to be convicted of a crime. I know Donald Trump does not.
He just announced that abortion restrictions should be left to individual states, and according to a recent piece in The Washington Post, some Republicans running for Senate seats who have previously been more hostile to abortion rights seem to be falling in line behind him. What should this tell us about abortion in the 2024 campaign?
I don’t know that people are falling in line behind him. It’s too soon to say. He said something to avoid being pinned down and buy himself some time, which is always what Donald Trump tries to do. I think this is going to be pretty hard to stick to — the complaint that I’ve heard from some Republican officials is that he didn’t really give Republicans running down ballot in various states a whole lot to work with. I think it is true that some parts of the evangelical right are falling in line. Not all, but some. I think that’s part of the calculation Trump made — that those people are likely to be with him anyway. The Biden campaign is arguing that this suggests he supports all bans, and they will use that to their advantage as much as possible. I don’t think we know how this all plays out.
In recent weeks, you’ve spoken about the threat of political violence during this election cycle, given Trump’s rhetoric on the campaign trail and what you’re hearing from some parts of his base. Are you concerned that the American electorate is becoming desensitized to violence in ways that could last beyond 2024?
A part of that is concern that the American public is becoming desensitized, but I’m more concerned about the fact that it’s becoming more prominent and more frequent — that it’s simply happening more often. It’s becoming normalized. If you look at the experience of Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman, the election workers in Georgia who were attacked by Rudy Giuliani and other Trump allies — these were just people who were working government jobs who had their lives upended. All kinds of incidents of political violence like threats and SWATing have become much more normal. They started increasing in 2023, around the Trump indictments. What we have not seen since January 6 is violence on the scale of January 6. I believe that a big reason is that there are still people being arrested and charged in connection with that attack on the Capital. Enforcing laws is, in part, a deterrent.
A lot can change between now and November, but from where we stand, in early April, what is Joe Biden’s biggest vulnerability, and what is his greatest strength?
I was about to say his biggest vulnerability is his age, because that’s the one he can’t do anything about, but I now think that the Israeli war in Gaza is number two. He has a couple of strengths. One is that he has a record of accomplishments he can point to. The other is that many voters still think that he cares about people like them. I think it is in his capacity to show empathy and understanding to voters who are concerned about Gaza, or feel that their paycheck is not going as far as it used to.
You and Alex Burns have worked together at The New York Times and appeared together at 92NY many times for In the News with Jeff Greenfield — the pairing is something of an audience favorite. What do you respect most about Alex Burns as a journalist?
Alex is one of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with. I think he’s incredibly fair-minded. I think he’s one of the best writers I know. When we were working together relatively early on — we used to write a blog together during the 2012 campaign — there was a moment when I realized that he was developing a writing style that was evocative of how he talks. That’s the gift of a writer, when you can hear the spoken word on the page. Alex is a genius. There’s no other way to describe it. And he’s funny.
Jeff Greenfield has been leading conversations at 92NY since 1989, and this will be your sixth appearance for his In the News series. What do you think makes him such an enduringly insightful interlocutor?
Jeff refuses to fall prey to conventional wisdom and asks tough questions of his subject, no matter who that subject is. But one of the things that I think gives him such range and durability is his willingness to believe something new can happen in politics. Jeff wrote a novel decades ago imagining a scenario where a president dies before the Electoral College swears him in. The book is satire, but it always serves as a reminder to me that Jeff is willing to imagine something previously unexperienced. And that has been pretty vital over the last eight years.
Since 2016, if not before, many Americans feel that they have come to know Donald Trump all too well. Your reporting has been crucial to that. What do we still not understand about him?
That’s such a complicated question. There’s a lot that people still don’t understand about him. But the flip side of it is that with Trump, there’s a lot that’s public, in his own behavior. He had a line in an interview in a New Yorker profile about him from 1997, “It’s always good to do things nice and complicated so that nobody can figure it out.” Sometimes he’s quite candid about himself. Other times he says things about himself or others that are not true. What I think people don’t understand is that he is a man of few moves. A very smart person who worked for him a long time ago said this to me when I was working on my book about him: “He is a man who has very few moves and he uses them over and over and over again.” He’s much more calculating than people realize.
Maggie Haberman and Alex Burns join Jeff Greenfield tonight, Sun, Apr 14; she joins George Stephanopoulos Wed, May 15.