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

The #1 New York Times bestseller • Updated with new reporting through the 2024 election

"The definitive biography of Trump." —Financial Times

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

"A political epic." —The Guardian

“A uniquely illuminating portrait.” —Sean Wilentz, The Washington Post

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter most central to our knowledge of Donald J. Trump, the magnificent and disturbing Confidence Man chronicles his life and its meaning, including a reckoning with the 2024 election.

Few journalists working today have covered Donald Trump more extensively than Maggie Haberman. Now with a revelatory afterword on Trump's second presidential victory, 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.