Maggie Haberman reveals the moment she first realized Trump might win the 2016 election

New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman revealed the first time she realized that Donald Trump might win his first political campaign.

Haberman, whose new book, “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America,” came out Oct. 4, told WGHB-FM that she realized the former reality TV star had a serious shot at winning when she covered one of his campaign rallies in Dubuque, Iowa in 2016.

“I was going up to people asking a pretty leading question, which was basically ‘Are you here because the spectacle is going to end?’" Haberman told the public radio station, "and one after another, people told me they were going to caucus for him. One guy looked at me like I had eight heads."

"When I asked him ‘Why are you going to caucus for him?’ he said, ‘I watched him run his business,'" she added. “He meant ‘The Apprentice.’”

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That NBC reality show presented Trump as a successful and decisive businessman, which Haberman said gave viewers a much different impression of him than the reputation he developed over the years in the New York real estate world.

“People who either tracked him in the 1980s when he made himself as a brand synonymous with wealth, or who watched 'The Apprentice,' they viewed him as this hyper success,” Haberman said. “That was obviously not true, but that really solidified the view of him outside.”