Hey, Maggie Haberman...WTF?!
Haberman treated us today to allegations of Trump crimes she's been complicitly sitting on for who knows how long to selfishly promote a future book.
Maggie Haberman’s forthcoming Trump book has been called “the book Trump is most terrified of,” and she just released a damning detail about how Donald Trump would regularly flush documents down White House toilets and occasionally clog them.
The detail is hot after this week’s breaking news stories about how the National Archives retrieved some fifteen boxes of stolen White House documents from Mar-a-Lago, and even recommended the DOJ investigate Trump after some of the recovered documents were reportedly found to be potentially classified.
Noteworthy scoop, but let me be crystal clear with a one-sentence paragraph: Maggie Haberman is a media villain.
Haberman is a White House correspondent for The New York Times which regularly cites its authority and prestigious role as the American “paper of record,” yet she refused to record these significantly damning details of presidential misconduct. Shouldn’t the NYT’s editors and executives be upset that one of their top political journalists isn’t sharing her most viral, newsworthy discoveries with them? You know, the thing they pay her to do?
The craziest part is that Haberman’s book will not be published until October 4th, 2022. Who knows how many exclusive bombshell revelations about Trump’s mob boss presidency she has stockpiled, and we won’t be told for EIGHT MONTHS. Isn’t some of Haberman’s upcoming reporting on Trump’s attempted coup and generally fascist state of mind immediately germane to the plethora of criminal investigations probing all his egregious abuses of power, treason, and obstruction of justice? Shouldn’t the January 6th Committee, the Department of Justice, and the attorneys general of D.C., New York, and Georgia (along with every other prosecutorial jurisdiction, grand jury, and litigant trying to hold Trump accountable for his literally ceaseless lifetime of misconduct) be sent some early proofs of her manuscript?
Her book’s subtitle is literally “The Making Of Donald Trump And The Breaking of America,” yet she’s hoarding evidence of Trump’s crime spree presidency to get bigger pre-sales. Her title literally suggests Donald Trump is an existential threat to America, and she’s withholding the details of his destruction for personal profit.
What a betrayal of the informed public. Wouldn’t voters be interested in learning how dangerous and autocratic the Trump Administration was behind the scenes before they vote in primaries for or against Trump-addicted Republican candidates who are collectively instituting a pavlovian Trump loyalty litmus test for GOP participation? Maybe citizens should be informed about just how close we were to losing our liberal democracy as soon as the evidence becomes available?
The free press is supposed to be the 4th branch of government, with constitutionally protected First Amendment checks and balances to safeguard the people from governmental abuses, but apparently Haberman feels the Founders should have written a Federalist Paper outlining that such a sacred duty need not apply if the press is carefully timing a book release for a month prior to the next election.
I’m sick of the media’s recurring tendency to ignore public interests and even societal safety in order to earn bigger book advances or continued access to self-aggrandizing sources that looks suspiciously like opportunistic complicity. Haberman’s efforts here are reminiscent of Bob Woodward’s deathly belated revelation that Trump personally told him at the beginning of the COVID pandemic that he knew COVID was really bad, and he was downplaying it publicly. Wouldn’t the hundreds of thousands of people who had died from COVID when Woodward’s book was published have been better served by his journalism if he hadn’t saved that detail for his book launch publicity blitz? And don’t forget about all the civicly relevant details damning Trump as a dangerously incompetent idiot and unpatriotic fraud that John Bolton, Michael Wolff, and Stephanie Grisham, among many others, saved for their book tours.
Sadly, the mainstream media is not helping its historic decline in profits, subscribers, and cultural influence with such lack of integrity. Despite regularly publishing op-eds full of “both sides” arguments and #DemsInDisarray narratives, the political parties are objectively not equal in terms of the hyper-partisan derailing of our democratic experiment. Yet, because mainstream media organizations have been pummeled for decades with mindless, bad-faith conservative accusations of liberal bias, they tend to commit overkill on any stories about misconduct from Democrats, and downplay Republican misconduct to signal their centrism.
The perfect example of this is how the NYT published several front page above-the-fold stories about Hillary Clinton’s email server in 2016 in the days before the election, yet this week buried its story about Trump hoarding the boxes of stolen White House documents on page 15. Imagine if a NYT reporter had been caught sitting on a similar document-toilet-flushing story about a Democratic president for a future book release. Republicans would shriek and stomp themselves into brain aneurisms, but, as we’ve become accustomed to in the last five years, Republicans benefit from the media’s utter dearth of surprise that Donald Trump would break the law, or that the GOP would be absurdly hypocritical and investigatively inconsistent.
Democrats are held to much higher standards than Republicans, and nothing is bigger proof of that than all the prominent journalists who race to the presses to pillory Democrats with “See? I’m not biased!” hot takes, but save their juiciest scoops on Republican villainy for book sales.
On a side note, as usual, Donald Trump turns my satirical pieces into prophesy rather than comedic exaggerations. Trump Administration officials eating White House documents is something I’ve joked about repeatedly with The Halfway Post, along with grosser allegations:
Trump Routinely Forced Staffers To Shred And Eat White House Documents
Rudy Giuliani Has Reportedly Eaten Several Documents That Incriminate Trump
Rudy Giuliani Reveals Documents He’s Been Hiding Up Rectum For Trump
Thanks for your eyeball attention!
-Dash MacIntyre