Donald Trump haslashed out at the “failing” New York Times in an overnight Truth Social rant, demanding an apology for its “junk” coverage of him and singling out its correspondent Maggie Haberman for particular criticism.
“Will the failing New York Times apologize to its readers for getting years of ‘Trump’ coverage so wrong,” the president-elect wrote in the post.
“They write such phony ‘junk’, knowing full well how incorrect it is, only meaning to demean.”
Pivoting to Haberman, Trump mockingly misspelled the reporter’s name as he wrote: “Magot Hagerman, a third rate writer and fourth rate intellect, writes story after story, always terrible, and yet I almost never speak to her.
“They do no fact checking, because facts don’t matter to them.
“I don’t believe I’ve had a legitimately good story in the NYT for years, AND YET I WON, IN RECORD FASHION, THE MOST CONSEQUENTIAL PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN DECADES. WHERE IS THE APOLOGY?”
The Independent has reached out to The New York Times for comment.
Contrary to Trump’s allegation, the newspaper has a long history of rigorous fact-checking and has been at pains to explain its methods to readers in the interests of transparency.
It is not clear what specifically rattled Trump on Monday night.
However, the rant came shortly after the publication of a new NYT report, from Haberman and her colleague Jonathan Swan, which revealed Trump’s aide Natalie Harp had sent him a series of passionate letters, declaring in one: “You are all that matters to me.”
Harp, a former right-wing cable television host, had been on Trump’s radar since 2019 after her story of cancer survival caught his attention and he invited her to speak at the 2020 Republican National Convention (RNC). She later joined his staff in 2022 as a devoted aide, though she has no official title. It is also uncertain what role, if any, Harp will have in the forthcoming administration.
Sources told the Times that Harp, 33, sent a series of letters to Trump in 2023 which raised eyebrows among some in Trump’s camp. “I don’t ever want to let you down,” read one of the letters, in which she also thanked Trump for being her “Guardian and Protector in this Life.”
Steven Cheung, Trump’s spokesman, told the Times that Harp was “trusted and valued” and credited her “work ethic and dedication” for helping Trump win the 2024 election.
The same night the report came out, Haberman also appeared on Kaitlan Collins’s CNN show The Source, where she speculated about the prospect of Trump seeking revenge on Special Counsel Jack Smith once he enters the Oval Office in January.
Smith dropped the two federal cases accusing Trump of election interference and illegally retaining classified documents on Monday.
On Monday night’s show, Collins asked Haberman how Trump’s attorney general nominee Pam Bondi might respond if the incoming president called upon her to investigate Smith, as she previously threatened would happen during an interview with Fox News last year.
“I think you can expect that Pam Bondi and everybody else who has to go through a confirmation hearing are going to be asked by the Democratic senators about those comments,” Haberman answered.
“And it’ll be very interesting to see what she says.
“I mean, to your point, there was a lot of celebration about Matt Gaetz not being in that role anymore – and with reason. Matt Gaetz was investigated by that department and has all kinds of baggage. But it’s not as if the ‘I’m gonna clean this all out’ vow from Pam Bondi is especially different.
She continued: “There are so many unanswered questions, Kaitlan. But if the idea is that there’s lots of people around Trump and the White House who are gonna try to prevent him from doing this, I think people are sorely mistaken.”
Haberman has had many run-ins with Trump in the past and has often been the subject of his Truth Social attacks due to her reporting. She recently claimed he had “no sense of who he was in front of or who he was talking to” when he rebuked presidential rival Kamala Harris at a dinner for billionaire donors and suggested he was suffering from “anxiety” in the aftermath of the attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania, this summer.
