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 Maggie Haberman in the White House briefing room recently, in a photo taken by her colleague Glenn Thrush. |
| Hi folks! I'm Maggie Haberman, one of the six White House correspondents for The New York Times and the one whose home base is in New York City. |
| Of course, President Trump's home base is also in the city, and he'll finally be returning this weekend for one of the few times since he was inaugurated. I'll be there. |
| I've got a wide range of sources on Mr. Trump, partly because I've been covering him long before he became "Mr. President." I wrote intermittently about him at two of New York's tabloids, The Post and the Daily News, beginning in 1996. At Politico, I tracked his entry into the national political conversation in 2011, with a burst of birther fever about President Barack Obama. Since joining The Times in early 2015, I've written or collaborated on hundreds of articles that try to capture his actions and character. |
| His language is distinctive, his motives are often obscure, his actions are frequently contradictory. The problem with understanding this president is partly his prodigious output of words. |
| Given Mr. Trump's durability in our cultural fabric over many decades, finding new or unusual insights into him can be difficult. Below is a sampling of some of the rare pieces that, for me, caught the essence of the president. Perhaps they can serve as a palate cleanser for people who have grown weary of headlines about him. |
| "Uncle John Taught Trump About Fire and Fury," from Bloomberg. |
| Tim O'Brien is among those who have been sued by Mr. Trump — and won. The former Times journalist and current Bloomberg editor and writer put together a deeply researched biography of the real-estate developer, "TrumpNation," which questioned his actual net worth. |
| Mr. O'Brien knows what animates Mr. Trump. This week, he gave a peek behind the curtain into the president's decades-long rumination over nuclear weapons, and the man the president claims he learned them from: his Uncle John, a physicist at M.I.T. Uncle John did not work in nuclear physics, but Mr. Trump has often used his scholarly curriculum vitae to give himself a patina of academic understanding. |
| "Did Donald Trump Accidentally Threaten Nuclear War Out of a Penchant for Hyperbole?" from the Toronto Star. |
| Daniel Dale, a reporter for The Toronto Star, was one of the most keen-eyed chroniclers of Mr. Trump's language during the campaign, putting out a detailed list of the president's false statements on Twitter. |
| Within hours of Mr. Trump's threat last week to visit "fire and fury, the likes of which the world has never seen" on North Korea, Mr. Dale offered up a likely possibility — that Mr. Trump, who enjoys stress-testing favorite turns of phrase, had wandered into a threat almost by accident. |
| "Trump Revels in French Military Pomp Far From White House Turmoil," from The Washington Post. |
| Jenna Johnson, a constant presence on the campaign trail with Mr. Trump during the 2016 race, understands what makes the president tick as well as anyone. |
| So her coverage of his visit to France in mid-July, a trip made almost entirely to see a military parade, popped with observations about Mr. Trump's wide-eyed joy at the tanks and planes going by the Champs-Élysées. |
| The trip came at a particularly fraught time for the often-dour president, as a special counsel's investigation into whether he obstructed justice by firing the F.B.I. director was heating up. But as Ms. Johnson noted in her lede, "For two hours Friday morning, President Trump looked happy." |
| "The 27 Words Trump Wouldn't Say," from Politico. |
| The bundle of inherent contradictions that is Donald John Trump was perhaps most clearly articulated in his speech before NATO leaders at the end of May. On the one hand, he appeared to be committing to U.S. allies. On the other, he appeared to be berating those same friends as free riders who are overly dependent on American largess. |
| Mr. Trump has long had a habit of appearing to take two sides of an issue, sometimes in the same sentence. |
| Susan Glasser distilled that point with her scoop on 27 words that Mr. Trump ultimately dropped from his speech, a sentence that would have pledged "unwavering support" for NATO's all-in mutual defense provision. |
| "He Brutalized for You," from Politico. |
| Michael Kruse engaged in the literary equivalent of immersion therapy to cover Mr. Trump early in the campaign, poring over biographies, old television interviews and news clippings. |
| He identified a key formative influence on Mr. Trump's psychological makeup: Roy Cohn, the legendary McCarthy-era fixer. Cohn, long Mr. Trump's mentor, also introduced him to Roger J. Stone Jr., the self-professed dirty trickster who has been a somewhat hidden hand with the president for decades. |
| Where Mr. Trump's father, Fred Trump, urged him to never give up, never quit, never admit defeat, Mr. Cohn taught him how to manipulate the media, how to undermine rivals — and how to always be on attack, no matter how scared one might be deep down. |
| You can follow Maggie Haberman's real-time commentary on Twitter at @maggieNYT. |
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 Manan Vatsyayana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images |
| Brinkmanship |
| And Anna Dubenko, our senior digital strategist, collected articles from across the political spectrum that discuss the growing tensions with North Korea. "One theory is that Trump and Tillerson are deliberately playing different roles," one writer observed about the president and his secretary of state. "But there's good cop/bad cop, and then there's Keystone Kops." |
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| Edited by Andrea Kannapell |
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| For a twice-weekly look at what other Times reporters and editors are reading, sign up for the What We're Reading Newsletter. |
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