New York Times reporter and author Maggie Haberman confirmed MS NOW anchor Jonathan Capehart's claim that the White House is in a "constant state of chaos" as staff lose their sense of purpose with the midterm elections approaching.

Haberman, a White House correspondent who has covered Trump since his New York real-estate days and wrote the 2022 book "Confidence Man," has been one of the most consistently sourced reporters on his inner circle.

"There's a sense of grind and a lack of having fun or common purpose in this White House right now," Haberman said on MS NOW's "The Weekend" on Saturday morning. "They want to see him succeed, but [Trump] is not doing much to help himself."

Co-host Eugene Daniels then played footage of U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick admitting that "the one thing" Trump likes to do in the middle of the week is construction — as opposed to acting like a president.

"[Trump's staff] are all aware of what Howard Lutnick just said, except I was pretty surprised, Eugene, to hear him say that publicly, that they are 'trying to keep the president happy' because he prefers focusing on building projects on the day job over what he was elected to do as president," Haberman said. "I don't think that's going to make voters very thrilled. But that certainly is true that that is what the president prefers. So, nobody is really trying to rein him in that hard. They're just trying to figure out how to balance it heading into November."

The November reference is to the midterm elections, in which all 435 House seats and roughly a third of the Senate are on the ballot — contests that historically serve as a referendum on the sitting president's party and that shape the second half of his term.

She repeated her claim that staff do not deliver bad news to Trump in large doses, but instead introduce portions of truth carefully couched among other, happier topics — because the staff's top priority is apparently Trump's happiness above all else. Such accounts echo reporting from Trump's first term, when aides were widely described as managing how information reached the president.

"People are very careful about what they say to him. He intimidates people [and] his own staff," Haberman said.

Haberman also pushed back against White House attacks on her following her published story revealing that Trump was avoiding a ceremony in Manhattan marking the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, in part because he was refused the opportunity to give a speech, according to four sources with knowledge of the events.

"When we tried to follow up and confirm your reporting, a senior White House official told me that actually the reason for Trump going to the Pentagon instead of New York is because JD Vance is going to be attending, and the vice president and the president cannot be at the same place at the same time," co-host Jacqueline Alemany told Haberman.

Haberman dismissed that claim outright as after-the-fact cleanup work by the White House.

"Look, we stand by our reporting and the Times put out a statement explaining that this is based on multiple sources, that we went to the White House. We were quite transparent with them about what we were reporting, including [that] … part of the reason why he was not going to New York was because they didn't let him speak, and the White House did not say anything or push back on what we were reporting. And then 24 hours later, the president started attacking the piece."

"You know, so readers can make their own assessment about a denial that comes a day later," Haberman added. The exchange is a familiar pattern: Trump has repeatedly attacked news organizations and individual reporters after unfavorable stories, often after his aides initially declined to contest the reporting on the record.

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