President Donald Trump looks towards the demolished East Wing of the White House at the White House in Washington, D.C., January 9, 2026. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
During a Monday morning appearance on MS NOW, author and journalist Maggie Haberman revealed that President Donald Trump's own team pleaded with him to address voter anxieties, but he has so far seemed content to ignore them as the midterms approach.
Haberman, fresh off the success of her Trump administration exposé, Regime Change, appeared as a guest during the latest edition of Morning Joe, where host Joe Scarborough pressed her about the president's evident disinterest in engaging with voter concerns, even as polling indicates that his approval numbers are cratering even in the traditionally conservative South.
"What I don't get is you look at those numbers in the Deep South, -31 in Georgia, -25 in North Carolina, that's just for a guy from the Deep South, that's staggering to me that he's that low, even -22 in Texas. I didn't think I would ever see that," Scarborough said. "And yet the president seems so oddly disinterested. He's, as you said a couple of weeks ago, he's focused on construction projects and vengeance. He never got out and campaigned for the big, beautiful bill, as republicans called it. He doesn't talk about affordability without mocking and ridiculing it. The thing that I mean right now, my big question is why is he so disengaged from the fact there's an election coming up?"
In response, Haberman discussed a piece of internal polling that she and co-author Jonathan Swan obtained while writing their book. Conducted by Trump's "main pollster" Tony Fabrizio, and circulated to many of his advisers, which "was very clear on where the voters are on the economy."
"And it was... a warning that Republicans and the president need to be honest, 'HONEST' in all caps, about where things are," Haberman explained. "It's the end of August. I don't think that the president has really turned that honest view around."
Haberman added that, for all he likes to tout economic success, discussion about the economy "bores" Trump, which is a well-known fact about him by those who have worked around him during his time in Washington, D.C. Now, despite the looming midterm disaster waiting for Republicans, Trump is more interested in doing the things he wants to do, rather than what he ought to do.
"This politicking, domestic politicking bores him," she added. "It was more interesting to him when it was rallies that were about him. It was more interesting to him when he was fighting for what he would say was survival, when he was very realistically facing prison time during the first campaign, if he did not win, which he was open about with people in private conversations. And now this is the part where he wants to do what he wants to do. You know, you and I both know, Joe, that often the question with him that people will ask is, why does he do X, Y, Z? And the answer is often because he can."
Haberman continued: "He has told people, and we wrote about this in the book, that he is proud Republicans don't do as well when he's not on the ballot. He doesn't want to get impeached again. They don't want a lot of oversight. He's not looking at this the way they did in 2018 or 2019. In 2018, he was sort of indifferent to the fact that Democrats were probably going to take the House and what that could mean for him. He has made very clear he's going to pardon any number of people who have come within a certain number of feet of the Oval Office. I don't expect we are going to see this government comply with subpoenas in any meaningful way. And so the intensity of it for him is very different than it is, you know, for other people in his government who don't necessarily have the same protections."
