President Donald Trump has shown himself to be especially unpredictable and difficult to manage in his second term, and, according to one prominent Trump watcher, some members of his Cabinet have adopted unusual tactics to keep pace with him.

Maggie Haberman, a New York Times reporter who has spent years interviewing and covering Trump, appeared this week on the Fifth Column podcast to discuss her book on Trump’s second term, Regime Change. During the conversation, she was asked how Trump is receiving information now compared with his first term and what that has meant for his administration. Her response included an unusual detail about how Secretary of State Marco Rubio has approached his relationship with the president.

Haberman said Rubio has made relatively few overseas trips, even though foreign travel is a normal part of the job. She said that decision reflects a deliberate effort to remain close to Trump, underscoring how much access matters in an administration where decisions can move quickly and the circle around the president is described as very small.

“ No, he's sticking around the White House because that's how you influence the president to make sure you don't get some bad news about what the president decided to do on Truth Social late at night,” host Matt Welch observed.

Haberman agreed that Rubio has tried to stay physically near Trump because decisions are being made by a very small circle of people.

“ Rubio did tell people that he felt the need to be around Trump because, as you say, this is a very tiny group of people making decisions and you could be at the top level of a major Cabinet agency and have no idea what is happening if you are not in the room with him,” Haberman said. “So, that is how Rubio has functioned. I don't know whether Trump will sour on him.”

Haberman said the arrangement appears to be working for Rubio, who she said has developed a good rapport with Trump despite earlier tensions between them.

“ Trump has a natural chemistry with Rubio that has been pretty surprising considering if you, like me, you remember the ' Little Marco ' [name-calling], or the, you know, the d—— jokes on stage [in the 2016 presidential debates] about the hands or whatever,” she said.

Haberman also said Trump is surrounded by more “true believers” in his second term than he was during his first, along with more people who are willing to align themselves with his political approach despite previous doubts. That shift, she suggested, helps explain why some officials are positioning themselves closer to the president rather than relying on traditional agency routines.

“ A ll of that is very different and the people who are around him are either true believers — and there are many, I would put Susie Wiles is in that camp, I'd put Steven Miller in that camp — a bunch of other people, or they are willing to, you know, claim a conversion, like Scott Bessant and Howard Lutnik, both of whom were warning in 2024 that Trump wasn't really serious about tariffs, which tells you how well they understood him or knew him,” she said.