Trump warns a reporter ‘will pay the price’ for coverage he doesn’t like
The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman appeared on MS NOW’s “The Weekend” on Saturday morning, and when host Jonathan Capehart asked the reporter about Donald Trump’s “mental acuity,” she offered an interesting answer.
“His health is like a black box inside that administration much more than almost any other issue,” Haberman replied. “And if there is an area of failure in the reporting for us, it was this, and trying to ― not mental, per se, but just his health, how he is, why he has gone to [Walter Reed Medical Center] several times and they have released less and less information.”
I have a hunch the president was watching. Shortly after the MS NOW interview, the Republican published a 210-word rant to his social media platform, which included, among other things, a veiled threat directed Haberman, whose name the president continues to deliberately misspell. The missive read in part:
Maggot Hagerman has covered me incorrectly for ten years. Her book is a joke! 90% of it is Fake News. She has made a living off her bad reporting, and will pay the price when our Multi Billion Dollar Lawsuit against The Failing New York Times gets to Court, which should not be that long.
Trump proceeded to accuse Haberman of participating in a secret plot to undermine him politically, before boasting once again about having “just finished a perfect physical at Walter Reed,” where he “requested another Cognitive Test, the only President to do so, three times, and I aced them all — Got every question right.”
He concluded, “Few people in Washington, D.C., could do so, including Maggot and her flunky associate, Jonathan Swan. I would be willing to bet they couldn’t get 50% of the questions right.” (He was referring to exams used to identify dementia, mental deterioration and neurodegenerative diseases.)
A few hours later, Trump published an even longer, 448-word follow-up screed, in which he argued that he feels entitled to positive news coverage by virtue of his narrow 2024 victory, before condemning “Maggot Hagerman” as “one of the most unattractive people in the News ‘Business.’”
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Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
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