Maggie Haberman talks about her new book on Donald Trump, Confidence Man, in an excellent interview with Olivia Nuzzi:
“In a lot of ways, in addition to contextualizing a lot of his background, I did try showing the outtakes — the moments when he is not on-camera, the moments when he is figuring out what he is going to say once he gets on-camera. That moment in the January 6 committee hearing, where they showed the video of him recording what he was going to say to the public after January 6 and he kept saying, ‘I don’t want to say the election is over.’ I thought that was one of the most revealing things they could have done about him because what he says between the takes is much more authentic to who he is.”
“One of the things I write about is that he sort of created the character of ‘Donald Trump’ with Tony Schwartz in The Art of the Deal, but the book that he published later, Surviving at the Top, that was him, that was his voice. It was grievance and anger and this one was mean to me and he described his life as ‘shit’ and his marriage. It reminded me of his presidency. He came into the Oval Office and people really believed that the office was going to change him, and that was just never going to happen. The real version of him, the one that his staff tried to hide over and over again, kept popping up.”
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