President Donald Trump and his shrinking administration are increasingly acting in “survival mode,” reporter Maggie Haberman explained on MS NOW, with one of his latest outbursts showing just how much he no longer cares about his MAGA base.
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Haberman is a longtime reporter and author best known for her close coverage of Trump and his political career, including her explosive new exposé of his second term, Regime Change. On Tuesday morning, she appeared on MS NOW’s Morning Joe and was pressed about several new developments surrounding the president, including his recent statement lashing out against his voters for opposing data centers. Hatred for these AI-focused building projects has become remarkably consistent across partisan lines, leaving Trump in a tough bind given his efforts to court the AI industry to his side.
“The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor. If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign,” Trump posted to Truth Social on Monday.
When asked about the comment, Haberman invoked a notable quote from former President George W. Bush, who once joked to a group of wealthy donors that they were his base. Now, she added, “the tech leaders have become Trump’s base in many ways,” noting the parade of “just one tech leader after another, coming and paying tribute to the president” early on in his second term.
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“And he has gotten very enmeshed in that,” Haberman said. “He did become, pretty quick overnight, an evangelist for AI after being really concerned about it. But now, yes, you have a scenario where he is saying things that most people who voted for him, a number of people who voted for him, are very loud that they don’t want. And there’s just — his information ecosystem is very small.”
Haberman was also pressed about the odd circumstances surrounding the GOP’s midterm convention, a first-of-its-kind event set to take place September 9-10 in Dallas. Many observers have noted that these events will be taking place on the same nights as major opening games for the new NFL season, likely drawing significant attention away from them. Haberman chalked this error up to Trump’s increasingly small inner circle being more focused on “survival mode” and not being able to see the bigger picture.
“That was an error that some people around him privately acknowledged was something they had not been paying attention to,” Haberman explained. “But again, it speaks to how small his circle is. It speaks to how tiny this group of people, who are not just making decisions in the government, but who are advising him politically, is; they’re not looking at broader pictures like this. They are in survival mode. And again, that’s fine for themselves. But you have all of these members of Congress, you have senators who are complaining privately. Some are fine doing this, some do not want to. They don’t want to come off the trail. They don’t want to give instant ad copy to democrats of their, you know, faces of them sitting in this crowd while the president says whatever he’s going to say.”
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