In an interview with the Guardian's David Smith, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman described her more than four years covering Donald Trump and admitted that nothing much surprised her after having been familiar with his antics while growing up in New York City.
However, as she noted, there was one time during his presidency that she described as a "striking moment" which ended up having major repercussions for his presidency.
As Smith noted, Haberman "... was born in New York to parents who met while working at the New York Post, a tabloid newspaper that he long courted, and lived most of her adult life in the borough where Trump learned the mechanics of political power."
Pointing out that she remained in New York instead of being assigned to Washington D.C., after his presidency, she still covered him from afar, and explained, "Everything about this presidency was foretold. The past is prologue with lots of people, but particularly with him. He ended up having this set of behaviors of his own that were augmented by the world he came from, the climate he came from in New York, the industry he came from and the industries he dealt with in terms of politics, of media.”
With Haberman explaining, "Our politics are broken. They’ve been broken for a while. I don’t think he created that but he fueled it and exacerbated it and benefited from it," Smith wrote that Trump, nonetheless, "lived down to her expectations."
Asked in particular, "Was there anything, amid the four-year madness of all caps tweets, hirings and firings, insults and lies that shocked even her?" the New York Times reporter said it came at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
According to Smith, "Haberman picks the day that Trump stood on the White House podium floating the idea that coronavirus patients might inject themselves with bleach."
“He was feeling competitive with the doctors because he gets competitive with everybody. That was a pretty striking moment,” she recalled.
Smith added, "As Trump mused on the utility of disinfectants as a miracle cure, the then coronavirus response coordinator, Deborah Birx, infamously sat silent. It was one incident among many that shone a light on the White House officials and aides who enabled Trump – or at least failed to make a stand until it was too late."
You can read more here.
