How often do I side-eye Maggie Haberman? Let me count the ways.
For some two years—until the release of her book, of course—The New York Times reporter buried knowledge that former President Donald Trump planned to stay in the White House after losing the 2020 election. Haberman did the same thing regarding information about Trump telling then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell about plans to overturn the election.
She’s been widely criticized and her journalistic ethics have been called into question for those decisions, and that’s perfectly fair criticism. However, Haberman was trending on Thursday morning specifically for a perceived unwillingness to call Trump a racist during an interview she gave while promoting her book. And that criticism just isn’t fair.
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Nicolle Wallace, a former White House communications director and Republican MSNBC news host, asked Haberman in an episode of Deadline: White House that aired on Wednesday if she thinks Trump is a racist, to which the journalist responded:
“I think he says and does racist things over a very long period of time. I don’t know how else you would define it.”
Haberman continued:
“I think that somebody who has been incorporating racial paranoia into his public persona since the 1980s, who took out an ad related to the Central Park Five case, where there were teenagers who were charged in that case, and they were all teenagers of color, and he called for bringing back the death penalty.”
The “Central Park Five” were made up of Black and Latino youths who were wrongly convicted of assaulting a white woman in 1989. Trump’s ad about them ran in The New York Times and three other city papers.
Trump said in the ad: “I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes. They must serve as examples for their crimes. They must serve as examples so that others will think long and hard before committing a crime or an act of violence."
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Even after DNA evidence exonerated the teenagers—whose names were Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Raymond Santana, Korey Wise, and Yusef Salaam—Trump refused to apologize for his ad.
He insisted he was right even though, as Haberman pointed out, “there is proof now that their confessions were coerced by officials.”
"So you go from there through the White House. He repeatedly says racist things and then says he was taken out of context," the journalist added. "But at a certain point, I'm not sure how much benefit of the doubt people are supposed to give him."
Trump is a racist, and Haberman all but called him one in her interview. I can’t in good conscience criticize her because she didn’t condemn his racism the same way I would have. This is a matter of semantics.
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