New York Times reporter and "Donald Trump whisperer" Maggie Haberman said she was stunned watching the U.S. president greet Russia's Vladimir Putin.

Speaking to CNN on Friday after the two men met and began their summit, Haberman said that Trump places high value on how things "look" in terms of staging.

President Donald Trump was no match for Russia's Vladimir Putin when they met at the summit in Alaska last week, argued Maggie Haberman of The New York Times on CNN Monday evening — in part because Putin turned out far more unyielding in his demands.

This comes as Trump also hosted several European leaders, who did their best to re-sell him on preserving America's commitment to the security of Ukraine and of NATO.

The Trump administration's cabinet meeting on Tuesday amounted to a display of personal affection toward the president, according to one analyst.

Maggie Haberman, a journalist at The New York Times who has written a book about President Donald Trump, joined CNN's Kaitlan Collins on "The Source" on Tuesday to discuss the meeting. At the meeting, cabinet secretaries heaped praise on Trump in front of the cameras, which caught Haberman's attention.

New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman exposed President Donald Trump's new bid to exert a "different kind of cultural control."

Trump announced that he would host the annual Kennedy Center Honors, making him the first sitting president to ever perform the function. He also announced the honorees, including country singer George Strait, actor and comedian Michael Crawford, Sylvester Stallone, Gloria Gaynor, and the band KISS. Each nominee had to be approved by him, and he rejected several candidates he deemed "wokesters."

President Donald Trump's new gambit to try to use new testimony from convicted Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell to distract or placate his base from the exploding controversy over why he hasn't released the entirety of the files on the Epstein case is unlikely to work, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman told CNN's Kaitlan Collins on Friday evening.

"Maggie, just first on what we heard from Trump when he was landing in Scotland tonight," said Collins. "Is it clear why he is now saying he wasn't briefed on his name being in the files after no one denied that when it was reported?"

A New York Times writer who has covered Donald Trump for decades slapped down one of the president's latest claims about the Jeffrey Epstein case.

Trump recently claimed he was unaware of disgraced Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell being transferred from her maximum security prison to a minimum security facility in Texas. Maggie Haberman, author of "Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America," said it was "hard to see" how that claim was true, given the numerous layers of approvals needed to make such a transfer happen.

New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman said she was “struck” by how President Donald Trump not only dismissed his own intelligence chief’s analysis on Iran’s nuclear activity – but also leaned entirely on his personal opinion.

Appearing on The Source with Kaitlan Collins on Tuesday, Haberman responded to new comments from Trump in which he contradicts testimony his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, delivered in March.