Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The definitive biography of Trump and his improbable rise from real estate mogul and television personality to president” (Financial Times) from the Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter and co-author of Regime Change

“Will be a primary source about the most vexing president in American history for years to come.”—Joe Klein, The New York Times

“This is the book Trump fears most.” —Axios

Few journalists working today have covered Donald Trump more extensively than Maggie Haberman. In this revelatory biography, Haberman shares the full depth of her understanding of the forty-fifth and forty-seventh president and of the Trump phenomenon.

Interviews with hundreds of sources, including Trump himself, portray a complicated and often contradictory historical figure. Capable of kindness, but reliant on casual cruelty. Pugnacious. Insecure. Lonely. Menacing. Smarter than his critics contend and colder and more calculating than his allies believe. A man whose path to high office began thirty years before he became a president who pushed American democracy to the brink.

Inevitably, Confidence Man is also about the world that produced such a singular character, and how the New York of the 1970s and ’80s shaped Trump’s rise. As Haberman makes clear, relentlessly transactional relationships, an overpowering survival instinct, and a fixation with loyalty have been throughlines of Trump’s life—and continue to guide him. Her mastery of this illuminating biography, and her singular newsbreaking ability, make Confidence Man the definitive account of one of the most consequential eras in American history.

Maggie Haberman is a journalist who joined The New York Times in 2015 and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on the investigations into Donald Trump’s, and his advisers’, connections to Russia. She has twice been a member of a team that was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, in 2021 for reporting on the Trump administration's response to the coronavirus, and in 2022 for coverage related to the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol. Before joining The New York Times as a campaign correspondent, she worked as a political reporter at Politico, from 2010 to 2015. She previously worked at The New York Post and The New York Daily News. She is the co-author of Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.