Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America Paperback - 2025

"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.