Maggie Haberman vs. Donald Trump.

I just finished plowing through Maggie Haberman’s 500-page book, Confidence Man, The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, which in parts reads almost like a daily diary — it’s really that detailed. Because I lived in New York City from 1981 through 1993, the years when Trump put his name on buildings all over Manhattan, most of what Haberman recounts is hardly new or news to me.

There was one detail which I found interesting, namely, a brief comment taken from a New York Times story in 2020 written by another reporter about how Giuliani ranted about losing the 1992 mayoralty election to David Dinkins be “they stole it from me.”

In this instance the ‘they’ were Black operatives who produced phony votes from Black neighborhoods in The Bronx and Queens.

So, Rudy was already floating the election ‘fraud’ deal in 1992?

Haberman puts this comment in the context of Trump seeing the world through what she describes as tribal conflict, with the word ‘tribal’ really meaning ‘race.’ What she doesn’t seem to understand, or maybe she would rather be polite, is that what this world view represents is simply the mental meanderings of a dumb schmuck.

In 1987, or maybe it was 1988, I bought a season’s seat for every Friday night home game played by the Yankees in their home park. At the…