Haberman Says About 70% of President Trump’s Attention Goes to Monuments, Renovations and Renaming

Overview

• Maggie Haberman told Axios she estimates roughly 70 percent of President Trump’s mindshare—“maybe plus or minus 5 percent”—is devoted to gilding, construction, renovation, renaming and tribute projects.
• Haberman recounts an hourlong Oval Office interview in March when Trump focused on photos of maple trees and ballroom column designs rather than maps or troop deployments.
• She described this pattern as historically unusual, saying she has not seen a sitting president direct comparable efforts to memorialize or remake the capital in their own name.
• Those observations are Haberman’s reported impressions from reporting for the book Regime Change and are presented as anecdotal reporting rather than as independently measured data.
• Regime Change, co‑written with Jonathan Swan, has sold about 600,000 copies and spent multiple weeks at No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list, increasing attention and scrutiny on Haberman’s account.