How to cover a Page Six president

A lawyer who represents himself may have a fool for a client -- but a PR man who represents himself just became president of the United States, and he’s nobody’s fool.

You can’t understand Donald Trump without comprehending just how much of his shtick – all those self-promoting, make-up-your-own-facts, confrontational go-to moves – emanated from the froth of 1980s and 1990s tabloid New York City. Trump may have added to his family’s already considerable fortune through real estate, reality TV and branding. But his basic job all these years – especially 2016 – has been selling himself, and selling himself hardest to the city’s daily newspapers, especially the New York Post, which is basically a dead-tree Trump.

It’s no coincidence that one the best reporters covering the president-elect this cycle happens to be the one who best understands the tabloid-Trump nexus: Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, who spent much of her career working at the city tabs as they chronicled every doing of the man then known as “The Donald” with the constancy (and reportorial grace) of the daily horoscope.

“It was all about the proximity and the familiarity with him,” said Haberman, my former POLITICO colleague and (in full disclosure) one of my closest friends.

“I first started getting to know Trump when I was at The Post and he would call into Page Six with regularity,” added Haberman during this week’s episode of the Off Message podcast, referring to the Post’s revered gossip page.

“He was tabloid gold. I mean, people loved to read about him,” Haberman said, noting that among the reasons legendary tabloid columnist and former editor Pete Hamill didn’t last as editor-in-chief of the Daily News, the Post’s bitter rival, “was he didn’t want to print Trump stories in the 90s.”

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/maggie-haberman-trump-new-york-times-231873