Maggie Haberman’s book, “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America,” released on Tuesday, reveals how ex-Gov. Rod Blagojevich lucked out in getting Trump to commute his sentence when he did, with the then president ignoring the advice of his advisor in 2020.
Haberman, who shared a Pulitzer Prize with her New York Times colleagues for their coverage of the Trump administration, has been chronicling Trump since his early days as a New York developer.
Haberman is the New York born and raised reporter who, as she writes, has spent her career “at the news outlets Trump cares most about.”
Indeed, she sums up Trump in a way those of us who see things through a Chicago-centric lens can appreciate: “During two campaigns and four years in office, he treated the country like a version of New York City’s five boroughs.”
With its deep New York context, Haberman’s Trump book is, she writes, “an examination” of Trump’s New York world — and how his presidency was “shaped and defined” by it.
Haberman’s book tour hits Chicago later this month. Here are some details from her book with local angles, starting with the disgraced former Illinois governor.
BLAGOJEVICH’S BREAK
Trump commuted the 14-year prison sentence of Blagojevich in February 2020, calling the eight years the ex-Illinois governor had already served in prison on corruption charges a “long time.”
“Blagojevich had appeared on Trump’s ‘Celebrity Apprentice,’” Haberman writes, “but the stronger bond between the two men derived from a common nemesis, or at least the appearance of one; the federal prosecutor responsible for Blagojevich’s conviction was close friends with (former FBI Director James) Comey.”
The reference is to former U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, the then Chicago-based federal prosecutor who was a longtime Comey friend — and a member of the legal team representing Comey after being fired by Trump.
“It’s the same guys going after me,” Trump told aides. At other times, he said Blagojevich was prosecuted for doing what many other politicians had done.
Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s then acting chief of staff, “had tried telling Trump that clemency for Blagojevich should be a second-term item, and had House Republicans explain to the president how severe Blagojevich’s crimes were, but Trump was unmoved.”
BIRTH OF TRUMP’S BIRTHERISM
Haberman explores how Trump exploited “birtherism,” the fraudulent claim that Barack Obama — born in Hawaii — was a native of another country. Trump’s birtherism helped fuel his own rise to the White House — with the mainstream press, in the end unintentionally elevating the lie.
Trump making news on his fake claims about Obama — who moved to Chicago as an adult to be a community organizer — was, Haberman writes, “not at all improvised.”
Trump actually spent time “exploring this new conspiratorially minded subculture.”
“...Most conservative commentators, even otherwise caustic voices such as Andrew Breitbart and Ann Coulter,” Haberman writes, “derided Trump for questioning Obama’s legitimacy as president. Trump kept at it, delighted by the headlines.
“...He escalated with each interview,” claiming he sent investigators to Hawaii and “they cannot believe what they’re finding.”
Reporters suspected that Trump was making this all up about hiring investigators and jumped on fact-checks to try to set the record straight about Obama’s birth in Hawaii. In hindsight, this all backfired.
Haberman writes, “Even as they mocked Trump’s shamelessness, the mainstream press could not turn away from the story, believing itself a fact-checker responsible for educating the public that it was false. ...All it did was further spread the lie, which was itself a barely coded way of suggesting that the first Black president illegitimately held the office.”
TRUMP’S LONG HISTORY OF LIES: SAYING CASINO NEAR GARY, IND., WAS ADJACENT TO CHICAGO
Birtherism, election denial, made up stuff to push baseless conspiracy theories — everything Trump is now — he was back then.
Haberman’s book provides a vivid example of Trump the fabulist in a story dealing with geography familiar to Chicagoans.
In 1995, Trump was making a pitch for a riverboat casino in Indiana — actually near Gary in Buffington Harbor. He wanted investors to think the Gary area actually hugged Chicago.
Trump asked someone to “doctor a map” in one of the slides being used in the presentation to investors “to suggest” that Buffington Harbor — where the casino was docked, “was adjacent to Chicago. In reality, it was roughly a 40-minute drive.
“Reminded that he was dealing with an SEC-monitored public offering,” Trump told an aide that the map “could be used outside Chicago, because no one would realize it was misleading.”
