'Democracy dies in book deals': Maggie Haberman ripped for withholding Donald Trump bombshell

12 September 2022

The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman reported on Donald Trump’s presidency extensively during his four years in the White House, and she does some more Trump-related reporting in her forthcoming book, “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.” According to CNN, one of revelations in the book (which has an October 4 release date on Amazon) is that after Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, he declared, “I’m just not going to leave.” And some Trump critics are wondering why Haberman didn’t report that statement earlier.

Before the 2020 election, MAGA Republicans accused “Real Time” host Bill Maher of having “Trump derangement syndrome” when he warned repeatedly that Trump would refuse to admit defeat and try to stay in the White House if he lost the election. But sure enough, Trump lost the election and did exactly what Maher feared he would do. And Haberman, in “Confidence Man,” cites an example of the type of behavior that Maher and other Trump critics predicted.

CNN’s Jeremy Herb reports, “Trump’s insistence that he would not be leaving the White House, which has not been previously reported, adds new detail to the chaotic post-election period in which Trump’s refusal to accept his defeat and numerous efforts to overturn the election result led to the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by pro-Trump rioters.”

CNN’s reporting on “Confidence Man” is receiving a lot of discussion on Twitter.

Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann was vehemently critical of Haberman, posting, “Oh good, another fact, vital to the safety and continuation of the nation, that @maggieNYT withheld from the public for many months if not a year-and-a-half so she could put it in her f*****g book.”

Similarly, Dean Baker, a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, tweeted, “If the NYT was a serious paper, Haberman would be fired on the spot for this. She did not do her job: full stop. This would be like a cop watching someone shoot a person right in front of them, and then just walking away and doing nothing.”

Author John Pavlovitz wrote, “Maggie Haberman is another in a long line of people who were willing to let democracy die on the altar of a book deal.”

@DenaePFA posted, “She's not really a reporter if she's not reporting on it at the time. She's an access novelist.” And @Concerned4410 tweeted, “Yes we know this. He said when asked by reporters would he peacefully transfer power as all other presidents have . . .his reply. . We will see. . ‘If I lose it will only be because of FRAUD’. . . You see. . He admitted his crime before it happened.”

@HogsRUs, responding to Olbermann and Baker’s tweets, wrote, “Spot On. @maggieNYT is employed as a reporter by the NYT. The information that she gathers on topics the newspaper pays her to cover belongs to the NYT. If not, then the NYT may as well just let her sit in her office at the paper and work on her books all day.”

@Jkornack made a scathing analogy and tweeted, “To sustain the analogy, the cop would witness the murder, walk away, and then — rather than doing nothing — would sell the story to a publisher and would be invited by cable news outlets to promote the publication to maximize personal profit at the expense of society.”

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