New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman sat down with Trump in the Oval Office in March, 17 days after Operation Epic Fury began and American bombs started falling on Iran. She expected maps of the Middle East, she said. She expected something about troop deployments, casualty projections, or the diplomatic channels that were being quietly assembled while the bombing continued. Instead, Trump picked up photographs of maple trees. “I am choosing maple trees for the White House,” he told her. “I am good at picking trees.” Haberman told Axios in an interview published today that she sat there, baffled, recounting the moment for co-author Mike Allen: “There is no precedent in U.S. history of a sitting president devising such endeavors in their own name.”
Haberman is the co-author, with Times colleague Jonathan Swan, of “Regime Change,” the Trump biography that has sold roughly 600,000 copies and spent seven straight weeks at the top of the Times bestseller list. Her account of the maple tree meeting is the kind of detail that the book is built from: specific, verifiable, and more revealing than anything Trump says in a formal press conference or scripted rally speech. He was not performing for a crowd when he showed her the tree photos. He was showing a Times reporter, in the Oval Office, what occupied his attention on the 17th day of a war.
What interests Trump, Haberman said, is “things that you can see and touch.” Her estimate is that roughly 70 percent of the president’s attention, “maybe plus or minus 5 percent,” is directed toward what she described as gilding, construction, renovation, renaming, and tribute projects. The remaining 30 percent, give or take, covers everything else: the Iran war, tariff negotiations, the legislative calendar, the midterms, the judicial appointments, the diplomatic engagements, and the ongoing management of the federal government. “He is spending a huge amount of energy, mental and otherwise, on these renovation projects, beautification projects around Washington, and then monuments to self,” she said.
The list of what the 70% has produced is not abstract. Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America by executive order. He had his name added to the Kennedy Center, producing the lawsuit that required its removal. He renamed Denali back to Mount McKinley, which required a separate executive order and generated diplomatic complaints from Alaska’s Native communities. He is renovating the Oval Office with gold leaf. He had his name placed on passports. He is putting his name on the Qatari-gifted Air Force One. He has proposed putting his face on Mount Rushmore, a suggestion his advisers have not fully discouraged. He chose maple trees for the White House grounds 17 days into a war.
“He didn’t really want to talk about that,” Haberman said, when Allen pressed her on whether Trump discussed the Iran war during the Oval Office meeting. “He didn’t really want to talk about policy specifics. He wanted to describe himself as winning, and he wanted to show us how he had remade Washington.” The war was in its 17th day. More than 18 American service members would eventually die in the conflict. The ceasefire expires in four days. Trump showed Haberman maple trees.
The book “Regime Change” covers Trump’s return to power through the lens of the people around him and the decisions he made in the transition and early months of the second term. Haberman has covered Trump for longer than virtually any other journalist, beginning with his real estate career in New York and continuing through two presidential campaigns, two impeachments, two criminal trials, and now a second administration that is conducting a war while he makes tree selections for a White House renovation. “What interests him are things that you can see and touch,” she said. The tree photos were things he could touch. The war maps were not in the room.
He is the president. The war is in its sixth month. The maple trees are being planted.
When the president spends 70% of his energy on monuments to self and tells a Times reporter he is good at picking trees on the 17th day of a war, what exactly is the other 30% managing?
Sources
Raw Story: Trump fondles tree photos in front of baffled reporter: ‘There is no precedent’
