Donald Trump has always alternated between snarling at reporters and fawning over them. During his time in the White House he defamed Maggie Haberman as a third-rate drudge or a “crooked Hillary flunkey” and tried to hack her phone to unearth the sources for her revelations about him in the New York Times. He once tweeted an unflattering photograph of her; whenever he saw her on CNN he sneered at her smudgy specs. His animosity amounted, in Haberman’s opinion, to a “fixation”. Yet although Trump knew she was writing a book about his ignorant, incompetent and often insane conduct as president, he welcomed her to his Florida country club and during their last interview remarked to his aides: “I love being with her, she’s like my psychiatrist.”
Haberman dismisses the ingratiation, then reflects that Trump “treats everyone like they are his psychiatrists”. He vents experimentally in the hope that others will be able “to decipher why he was doing what he was doing”; while in office he “drove days of news based only on his reaction to people reacting to him”. The crucial difference from a therapeutic session is that this tantrum-prone patient is not hoping for a cure. Instead, his aim is to mystify and, with luck, to madden the world. The White House during Trump’s occupancy was a crib for the mentally stunted monster Freud called “His majesty the child” and cabinet officials spent their days dangling shiny objects to distract him as he “popped off about various topics and chased fragments of conversation about things he’d heard on television”. Haberman’s book is chockablock with scoops, comprehensively leaked to the press before publication, but what singles it out from the competition is its perceptiveness about Trump’s character and the way his private vices became public menaces.
