These books are for twatty reading circles where they all gasp and chuckle at how awful Trump was, while they drink expensive wine and talk about their kids' private school.
In the 2024 the GOP sweeps everything via legal, quasi-legal, and illegal means. The Christian Fascists are in total control after President Ghoul is swore in in late January, 2025.
But something is happening. Something powerful is happening. Well before the 2026 midterms a project is coming empower the hashtag-resistance! Wine Mom Bookclub is a satire-comedy movie for the ages. Devastating and savagely funny. Searing takedowns that slam the opposition. With a cameo appearance in her first comedy role - Rachel Maddow! Executive produced by Hillary and Chelsea Clinton!
So powerful. Wait until Middle America sees this film. Maybe they'll finally wake up!
look everyone, the empty-headed stenographer has something to say!
coincidentally it centers her
I couldn't help myself - I'm reading it.
I knew it was going to be fawning but fuck me...
This overall moment for so many people would be one of unadorned contentment if not outright triumph. Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, which comes out Tuesday, is an origin story plus an inside-the-room blow-by-blow — a book arguably only Haberman could have written. It's all but guaranteed to be a best-seller. On Amazon it already is. It's been called the book Trump fears the most — he's "terrified," said one former aide — and that's because Haberman is the reporter who knows him the best.
Here, though, at what most would consider the apex of her or maybe almost any career, Haberman fretted over a relative blip of a workaday hitch — a window into her broader current mood, some amalgam of obligation and addiction, of resignation and regret, a sense of pride but also the mounting toll that she feels due to the work that she does.
It's interesting how her surname is repeated over and over again instead of "she"
likeas a marketing ploy. Oops. I made a mistake there.Ninja edit: I just did a ctrl-f. The word "Haberman" appears 78 times.
My eyes started rolling up into my head at the obligation and addiction part.
Jesus fuck...
Vocal detractors of hers who are hardened in their partisan postures on the left misinterpret this reality as a closeness that's too close — seeing, because of a lack of understanding of reporting, what they believe to be access granted in exchange for favor rather than access earned as a function of rigor and time.
:cat-confused: "Look, that's not a 'laser pointer,' it's an evil fairy that is only kept from terrorizing us by my hard work and constant pounce-ready vigilance. I'm just sad that you're so hardened into your partisan posture that you can't see that."
a lack of understanding of reporting, what they believe to be access granted in exchange for favor rather than access earned as a function of rigor and time.
If Obama made her famous and rich - I guess the journalists who envy Haberman could make plausible arguments about her not actually being access journalist. But Trump is guy that made her. And is still doing that for her. If Trump turned off the access stream - she'd be far less rich and far less famous. Access is what sells.
access granted in exchange for favor rather than access earned as a function of rigor and time.
Access granted to Trump and granted by Trump, who we all know is deeply affected by "rigor and time". She's a journo who's camped out on Trump scoops, she's his tool of issuing press statements and in return she gets to call him up and ask him how he's doing. I bet she wouldn't have any "detractors," if her and her colleagues just admitted that their line of work is transactional and mercenary rather than some public service.
Woodward and Bernstein covering Water Gate was a vicious blow to the field of journalism. Once the position of journalist became a station of some respect, it was reduced to sinecures and vanity jobs for rich kids.
what they believe to be access granted in exchange for favor rather than access earned as a function of rigor and time.
Rigor and time doing what, Maggie?
Meanwhile in r/politcs...
It's interesting that Haberman's book has completely overshadowed The Divider by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, which came out only two weeks ago. Baker and Glasser's book had the same kind of advance leaks, but fewer of them, I think. I guess Haberman is more well-known. Or maybe the news cycle just has a short attention span.
Anyway, I'll read them both.
Oh no I just had an intrusive thought and I'm afraid I've lathed this into existence:
A similar article, or even memoir, by that one grifter who made a full-time gig out of being Trump's reply guy on Twitter
Lmao has anyone checked on him since our big wet ex-president was banned
that one grifter
Which one? There's a guy with a beard. Jeff Somebody. That guy?
Ninja edit - I googled
trump jeff twitterand I found him: Jeff Tiedrich (@itsJeffTiedrich)Oh yeah that's the one
Scrolling through his timeline makes me feel like my life is way less bleak than whatever he's got going on
A couple week ago I commented that he has a Patreon but that's it. I was (and am) mystified why he hasn't monetized himself. He has ~1 million followers and they upvote his tweets no matter how crappy as long as he shits on the GOP.
I'll take the guy who gaffes over the guy who steals nuclear secrets any fucking day of the week
57k likes for that witticism.
https://archive.ph/adlMb Because I'm not clicking on a Politico article
Imagine thinking Maggie Haberman is famous.
What the fuck are you doing with your life if you try to bring this person up in conversation.
I think the vast majority of top people in the news live in a bubble that has little to no connection with reality. They forget that the average person has no interest or knowledge about politics. The news people's "average American" starts to be the people who are total news junkies. An example is the average MSNBC viewer.
At MSNBC the median viewer age is 68. The viewers watch an average of 433 minutes per week. For them (or the typical CNN viewer) - Haberman is like a rock star.
Can cable news win over young viewers? At MSNBC, a 40-year-old new president is going to try.
At MSNBC, the median age this year has been 68, four years older than CNN, according to the latest data from Nielsen. That's up from a median age of 65 in 2017. Which makes it all the more noteworthy that MSNBC's newly appointed president is a 40-year-old "digital native" millennial named Rashida Jones.
[...]
[There will be] a new focus on streaming. [...] Advertisers remain most beguiled by viewers between the ages of 25 and 54.
[...]
MSNBC still commands an unusual devotion from its fans. During the first three months of 2021, committed MSNBC viewers watched the network for an average of 433 minutes per week, compared to 325 minutes for comparable Fox viewers and 291 minutes for CNN viewers, according to Nielsen data.
"We have audiences that will sit there and watch for hours and hours and hours," Jones said. "So, how do we get more people into that camp?"
For some reason I once read a sort of interview between Maureen Dowd and a fashionista. In any case - the key thing is that guy said he watched 7 hours of MSNBC a day.
