“Herr Hitler at home in the clouds”. This was the headline of the story published in the New York Times magazine on August 20, 1939. In typical Sunday leisure journalism style, the text read: “High on his favorite mountain, he finds time for politics, solitude and frequent official parties”.
This is nine months after the Crystal Night, five after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia and three after Benito Mussolini’s Steel Pact with Italy.
Donald Trump’s presidency did not, of course, promote the extermination of 6 million Jews or start a world war. But the Republican’s stint in the White House welcomed neo-Nazis, separated immigrant families from their children — trapped in cages —, banned Muslims, culminated in a violent coup attempt and was decisive in putting the United States on an autocratic trajectory.
The Times headline about Adolf Hitler’s idyllic country home came to me as I read the latest in the long list of bestsellers about the former president.
The author, Maggie Haberman, is a reporter for the New York Times and has had extensive access to the New York businessman over the last two decades, in stints in the New York Post and Daily News tabloids and, later, on the website Politico. She was therefore familiar with the man who was already seen as a playboy scoundrel.
When the Republican was elected, Haberman, who was churning out scoop after scoop, was nicknamed the “Trump whisperer”—a reference to trainers who get along with whispering animals.
His book Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America is filled with revelations ranging from bathroom anecdotes to pressure for military adventures like bombing the Mexico to neutralize drug trafficking laboratories.
Trump even asked the reporter to report first on her pre-candidacy, in June 2015, when she, newly hired at the Times, was not a highlight of political journalism. Haberman doesn’t speculate on why, he just attributes his access to Trump’s obsession with the paper.
The Republican displays an almost chemical dependency on media attention and has given interviews to countless journalists who have documented his catastrophic presidency in books. But his fixation on Maggie is peculiar, who this week swore a “maggot” (worm).
In interviews, the journalist has rehearsed some self-criticism about how the American media was not prepared for a renegade who turned every scandal into an opportunity for attention. However, a retelling of her reporting suggests that Haberman did not fortuitously attract the epithet of “court stenographer” given by critics.
In the book, she describes Trump as homophobic, when she previously described him as gay-tolerant; she now reports episodes of racism, when, in the past, she suggested that Trump was the opposite, for having dated a light-skinned biracial model; after the scandal of the recording in which Trump bragged about sexual assaults and grasping women “by the vagina”, Haberman published an unctuous account describing a sad and isolated candidate in the high penthouse of Trump Tower – that is, him as a victim.
“Confidence Man” is a list of revelations that can satisfy voyeurism. If it only confirms the already known Trump, it seems to want to absolve authors who, when writing the first draft of history, put monsters on Olympus.
With a wealth of experience honed over 4+ years in journalism, I bring a seasoned voice to the world of news. Currently, I work as a freelance writer and editor, always seeking new opportunities to tell compelling stories in the field of world news.
