Have fun, do what you want,” Donald Trump is said to have shouted at his man for the rough, Rudy Giuliani, when he did not want to accept the 2020 election defeat.

Maggie Haberman, journalist for the "New York Times", traces Trump's career in her more than 600-page book "Confidence Man" and also provides new insights into his erratic behavior after Joe Biden's election victory.

The book appears under the title "Täuschung" in German.

Trump repeatedly assured his staff that he had no intention of leaving the White House "just like that".

While his attempts to challenge the election were unsuccessful, the lie of “election fraud” became the defining narrative in the Republican Party and is likely to shape campaigns to come.

A number of anecdotes in Haberman's book add many facets to what is already known.

She was able to question Trump several times and also publishes his written answers.

Many details were reported before the book was published - for example, the revelation that Trump flushed official documents in the White House down the toilet came from him.

The Pulitzer Prize winner also traces Trump's behavior during the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 - Trump did nothing for hours to stop the violence.

Other anecdotes in the work mainly confirm what is already known about Trump's personality and administration.

He is said to have described former Chancellor Angela Merkel as "that bitch".

When he was asked to distance himself from neo-Nazis,

Trump said to former New Jersey governor Chris Christie: "A lot of these people also vote." Trump is said to have asked about possibilities to bomb drug kitchens in Mexico to fight international drug trafficking.

Above all, such stories show what Republicans have been willing to tolerate, support, or occasionally contain in order to stay in power.

Always trouble with the women

Hardly anyone had any illusions about the man they were supporting to assert their own political interests.

"The women" is said to have been Trump's answer when his adviser Sam Nunberg asked him what his biggest concern was with regard to a possible presidential candidacy.

Nunberg recalls the situation from 2015 in Haberman's book. The future candidate pointed up in Trump Tower, toward his penthouse, and said, alluding to his wife Melania, "I'm going to get in trouble up there." More than twenty women accuse Trump of sexual harassment or coercion, author E. Jean Carroll accuses him of raping them in the 1990s.

Many authors, including Bob Woodward, Carol Leonnig, and Philip Rucker, have attempted to explain the Trump phenomenon in their books.

Haberman's work wants to stand out from the multitude of Trump books because it consistently portrays the former president from the perspective of his New York years - and not as a particularly extreme phenomenon of American political culture.

The author, who grew up in New York, shows how the business practices and social rituals common there shaped Trump's development from Queens entrepreneur's son to real estate tycoon, television star and president.

"In his two campaigns and four years in office, he treated the country like a version of New York City's five boroughs," said Haberman, who has followed Trump as a journalist for more than 20 years.

She describes what was then New York as a “quagmire of corruption and mismanagement”.

For Trump, the presidency was something like the ultimate lever to fame.

He always wanted to test the reactions of the party and voters that gave him the most reach and the best financial opportunities.

He was once asked whether he regretted having been president.

According to Haberman, he said he knew a lot of rich men that no one knew.

he was once asked.

According to Haberman, he said he knew a lot of rich men that no one knew.

he was once asked.

According to Haberman, he said he knew a lot of rich men that no one knew.

A number of reviewers have said that the journalist has published the most thorough book on the former president.

Even before the publication date, however, there was a lot of criticism because the author kept important details to herself that could be relevant to investigations into Trump.

The Nation magazine accused her of perpetuating Trump's "myth" by focusing too much on him as an individual and less on the political forces that made him possible.

Trump himself responded to the book with the usual rants.

"Fake news" is once again being spread and the country's "coastal elites" are "obsessed with boring books," he said through a spokesman.