The Haberman Rule

How to know what Trump really cares about.

President Donald Trump with New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman during his first term.

The Trump administration turns one month old today, which makes it far too early to say whether or not it’s been a success — but a reasonable time to start laying out a definition of what success would look like.

An obvious place to start, of course, is asking whether the administration is on track to accomplish the goals it set out to achieve, but that’s a harder question to answer than it might seem.

Like any machine, the administration is made up of many constituent parts, all of whom wanted different things out of it. If you’re a Republican base voter, you might have wanted increased immigration restrictions, changes to social policy, and a flurry of actions to upset Democrats and the “deep state,” in which case you’re probably pretty happy.

If you’re a swing voter, you may have wanted clear actions aimed at reducing prices, of which there have been relatively few. If you’re a Republican member of Congress, you might have been hoping to see progress on a legislative agenda, which so far has been elusive. On the other hand, for Elon Musk, the main goal seems to be blitzing through the government and receiving maximum attention, which has certainly come through.

That leaves one more stakeholder to consider. What does Donald Trump want out of the second Trump administration?

After wrestling with this question for the last few weeks, I’ve finally settled on a rubric that seems clarifying. I call it the Haberman Rule. If you want to know what Trump actually cares about, look at what Maggie Haberman is covering.

Haberman, for those unaware, is a White House correspondent at The New York Times; she’s widely regarded as the leading reporter on the Trump beat. She is known for speaking to a larger and wider array of sources than almost anyone else, including the people Trump stays in touch with from his New York days — and, reportedly, sometimes Trump himself.

At one point, Trump wanted to obtain Haberman’s phone records to find out who was leaking to her, a detail that was itself later leaked to her. She understands Trump’s mind like few others, something even he’s acknowledged. “I love being with her,” Trump once said during an interview with Haberman. “She’s like my psychiatrist.”

Over the last few weeks, Trump has undoubtedly left his mark on government, using his signature Sharpie pen to reshape energy, trade, federal hiring, and more through a flurry of executive actions. But a very different set of presidential priorities starts to emerge when tracking Haberman’s byline.

To wit:

• Yesterday, she was one of four authors on a story that reported Trump is “furious” about Boeing’s delay in delivering two new Air Force One jets. This is apparently a persistent object of the president’s attention: “He often laments how far [Boeing] has fallen, wondering aloud what happened to the jet maker and why it seems incapable of building things anymore.”

• Haberman and her frequent reporting partner Jonathan Swan also wrote that Trump has “told associates that he wants to rip up the grass in the Rose Garden” and replace it with a patio, similar to the one he has at Mar-a-Lago. This is not an idle matter either; according to the Times, “it has been the subject of almost daily discussions.”

• Last week, Haberman and two colleagues reported on Trump’s appointment of himself as chairman of the Kennedy Center, the D.C. performing arts space. They wrote: “The news stunned the world of arts and culture but was not a surprise to people who speak with Mr. Trump,” many of whom also speak to Haberman. “In the weeks after his election win, Mr. Trump has been saying to people that he wants to be the chairman of the storied Kennedy Center.”

• Another idea, per Haberman and Swan, that Trump had privately been talking about “for weeks” was the U.S. taking ownership of Gaza. “Several advisers to Mr. Trump said they expected the Gaza ownership idea to die away quietly as it became clear to Mr. Trump that it was unfeasible,” they reported. Apparently, it didn’t.

• Finally, there is Trump’s desire to “exact revenge on his perceived enemies,” which has featured prominently in several Haberman stories. “President Trump typically views the world through the lens of how people treat him and how they behave toward him,” she said in a Times video, explaining why he chose to pardon January 6th rioters on his first day while simultaneously taking actions against his critics.

None of this is to say that Haberman — who is a thorough, fair, and meticulous reporter — has not also covered the policy implications of Trump’s return, which she has before and after his inauguration. But, as the resident reporter inside Trump’s brain, not just his government, her stories seem to be the most accurate gauge of what the president is actually thinking about from day to day — which, throughout his second term, has pointed her in a direction notably distinct from the rest of the coverage.

If the greatest asset in an administration is the president’s time, then Haberman’s reporting helps elucidate how Trump is spending his behind the scenes.

According to her piece on Trump’s Air Force One frustrations, while Elon Musk is holed up at the White House with his group of engineers, Trump took time on Saturday to tour a luxury jet “owned, at least until recently, by the Qatari royal family,” an apparent show of “his willingness to explore other options” than the Boeing jets.

Another recent piece bearing Haberman’s byline opened with a similarly revealing anecdote: Trump used a precious Oval Office meeting earlier this month to convene two top golf executives, in order to help mediate a merger that not only revolves around his favorite sport — but which would also benefit his family financially.

That same week, Trump had another meeting, with House Republicans, focused on a somewhat weightier topic: the fate of his legislative agenda. According to The Daily Beast, the president opened the sit-down by laying out his “red lines” for a reconciliation package: “No taxes on tips, addressing the state and local tax deduction, and border control enhancements.”

Then, the report said, he walked out and let the lawmakers hash out the rest. “You guys sit here until you figure it out, and then come in the Oval Office,” Trump told the group.

At that and other junctures, Republicans have been frustrated by how little direction Trump has given them on reconciliation, declining to set a path as House and Senate leaders squabble. Finally, after weeks of indecision, Trump appeared to endorse the House approach on Wednesday — even after saying the night before that Medicare and Medicaid are not “going to be touched.” (The House plan involves cuts to Medicaid.) The White House then told Politico that Trump would be open to Medicare and Medicaid changes after all, before clarifying that, actually, only Medicaid changes are on the table.

The end result is a complete lack of clarity on how the president feels about two of the nation’s largest federal programs.

Meanwhile, per Haberman’s reportage, Trump has been sure to inform aides that he “wants to hang a grand chandelier from the ceiling of the Oval Office” and that the “robin’s egg blue and white exterior” of Air Force One “should be updated with a bolder red, white and blue design.”

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Haberman’s magnum opus is “Confidence Man,” the book she released in 2022; at 608 pages, it is perhaps the most comprehensive Trump biography, taking him from childhood to the presidency.

Early in the book, Haberman identifies Trump’s primary interests: “Money, dominance, power, bullying, and himself.” All of those strands appear in her stories about the various passion projects of his second term, from the attempts to punish rivals to the efforts to enrich himself.

The book foregrounds Trump’s experiences in New York City, their shared hometown, as central to understanding him today. Accordingly, several of Haberman’s stories have been about NYC itself, showing Trump’s attention to the mayor’s legal jeopardy and the city’s congestion pricing plan. (“CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!” Trump wrote on Truth Social yesterday.)

The rest of the issues dear to Trump can largely be tied back to his previous New York-era incarnations as a TV producer (like his focus on touching up his Air Force One and Oval Office sets) and a real estate executive.

“Mr. Trump views foreign policy as a real estate deal maker,” Haberman and Swan wrote to explain his interest in a Gaza takeover. “The president-elect’s expressed desire to expand the nation’s footprint reflects an urge that has animated much of his career in the public eye: to make whatever he controls as big as possible,” Haberman and Times reporter Jess Bidgood wrote during the transition, linking Trump’s talk of expanding America’s borders to his ’80s-era acquisitions.

While orders go out in his name concerning all manners of policy items, the main issues that pique Trump’s interest — at least by following the reporting of his foremost chronicler — seem to be the ones involving aesthetic improvements and those that remind him of dealmaking in real estate.

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Most countries with parliamentary systems have a head of state, whose functions are largely ceremonial, and a separate head of government, who handles the day-to-day business of governing. In the United Kingdom, for example, King Charles III is the head of state; Prime Minister Keir Starmer is the head of government.

The United States, like most presidential systems, places both those responsibilities in a single chief executive.

But Haberman’s Trump reads much more like a head of state, while figures like Elon Musk and Stephen Miller jockey for the role of head of government.

Or, perhaps more accurately, her reporting depicts him wanting to play the role of national host — both literally (the Mar-a-Lago patio experience he wants to recreate at the White House involves him entertaining guests as a DJ) and figuratively (presiding over the show “American Politics” as its central figure, while side characters fill in the details of governing).

Of course, no presidents are actually drafting their own executive orders: they all have advisers who help them steer the ship of state. But it is unusual to have a president who seems to have so few policy issues — and, so far, zero pieces of legislation — that he is genuinely passionate about, to the point that he continues to flip-flop on the most fundamental issues in political life while leaving administration-shaping decisions to his lieutenants in Congress or the White House.

If it has to do with revenge or dealmaking? He’s on board. Otherwise, Trump appears largely disinterested in policy; by Haberman’s account, he seems to spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about redoing the Rose Garden and programming at the Kennedy Center.

That has created an enormous vacuum for someone like Musk, whose project to pick apart the federal bureaucracy — by far the most dramatic facet of Trump 2.0 — is being conducted with “little if any accountability or oversight,” including from the president himself, according to a story carrying Haberman’s byline. (A rare case where Trump appears to have given Musk a specific directive: the president told the billionaire to take on the Air Force One project, per Haberman and colleagues.)

On his first day back in power, as he signed a stack of executive orders in the Oval Office, Trump appeared to be learning about many of them for the first time when an adviser read out the title. “That’s a big one,” he said six separate times as he held up orders for the cameras. “How many people is this?” he asked about the January 6th pardons. “And what about ANWR?” he asked when handed an order about Alaskan energy. (The adviser informed him that it was included in the order.)

“He doesn’t especially like the work of governing, didn’t when he was in the White House,” Haberman told Times columnist Ezra Klein last year. “But he likes power, and he likes being praised, and politics combines both of those things.”

“The question I get asked more than any other question: ‘If you had it to do again, would you have done it?’” Trump told Haberman in an interview for her book. “The answer is, yeah, I think so. Because here’s the way I look at it. I have so many rich friends and nobody knows who they are.”

She said, in a later interview, when asked what he liked about being president, Trump answered, “Getting things done.” And yet, Haberman wrote, his earlier comment seemed telling: “Reflecting on the meaning of having been president of the United States, his first impulse was not to mention public service, or what he felt he’d accomplished, only that it appeared to be a vehicle for fame.”

Based off Haberman’s most recent reporting, little about what motivates Trump appears to have changed in his return to office.