Donald Trump biographer-slash-nemesis Maggie Haberman admitted that Trump has made her genuinely laugh one single time.
Asked if there had been a time Trump made her laugh “intentionally,” not because of “something silly he’s done,” during the On With Kara Swisher podcast, Haberman recalled the moment Trump mocked his former chief of staff Reince Priebus in 2015.
It was “the one time that he has ever made me laugh,” Haberman prefaced, though “I can’t speak to whether it was intentional or not.”
Haberman wrote the 2022 Trump biography Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America and covered his initial rise to the presidency.
It was right after Trump first entered the 2016 presidential race and Haberman called him to ask about a story that quoted Reince Priebus—then Republican National Committee chair and later Trump’s chief of staff— sternly lecturing him about his offensive rhetoric about Mexican immigrants.
“I was asking Trump about it, and he said…‘He knows better than to lecture me.’ And then there was a pause,” before he added, “‘This is not a five star army general,’” she recalled. “And it just, it made me laugh. Whether he was trying to make me laugh, I don’t know.”
“I’ve seen him try to make crowds laugh,” she explained, but this was different. “I think he was more just—being sarcastic.”
Haberman then weighed in on whether anything Trump does is intentional. “It is more calculated than it seems sometimes, and then other times it’s not,” she said of his social media outbursts. “The problem is figuring out which one is which.”
