Timothy L. O’Brien, an award-winning journalist, is the author of TrumpNation:The Art of Being the Donald, the definitive biography of President Donald Trump.

Tim also is the executive editor and a columnist with Bloomberg Opinion, a digital commentary platform that analyzes and explores the most compelling and pivotal business and political news and issues of the day.  His columns can be found here. Tim is the recipient of several awards for his columns, including recognition from SABEW, the Society of Professional Journalists, and the Deadline Club.

Tim has been a political analyst and contributor to NBC/MSNBC since 2017, and he appears regularly on MSNBC’s news and commentary shows — including “Deadline White House,” “All In,” “Hardball,” “The Beat,” “MSNBC Live,” “The Last Word,” “Rachel Maddow,” “AM Joy,” “Up,” and “Morning Joe.”

Tim is also the author of two other books: “The Lincoln Conspiracy,” a historical thriller, and “Bad Bet,” a social history of gambling in the United States.

Before joining Bloomberg, Tim was the Executive Editor of The Huffington Post where he oversaw the site’s original reporting efforts. Tim edited a ten-part series about severely wounded war veterans, Beyond the Battlefield, for which the HuffPost and its senior military correspondent, David Wood, received a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2012.

Prior to joining the HuffPost in early 2011, Tim was an editor and reporter at The New York Times, where he helped oversee a team of Times reporters that was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Public Service in 2009 for coverage of the financial crisis. The Times series that emerged from that work, “The Reckoning,” was also a winner of a 2009 Loeb Award for Distinguished Business Journalism.

Prior to becoming Sunday Business editor at The New York Times in 2006, Tim was a staff writer for the Times. Among the topics and people he has written about are Wall Street, Russia, Manhattan’s art world, cybercrimes and identity theft, Warren Buffett, geopolitics, digital media, international finance, Hollywood, terrorism and terrorist financing, money laundering, gambling, and white-collar fraud. Tim was a member of a team of Times reporters that won a Loeb Award for Distinguished Business Journalism in 1999.

Before returning to the Times in 2003, Tim was the senior feature writer at Talk, a magazine founded by former New Yorker editor Tina Brown. Tim was with Talk from 2000 until it ceased publishing in 2002. Before joining Talk, Tim was a reporter with the Times and, prior to that, The Wall Street Journal.

Tim has a B.A. cum laude in literature from Georgetown University, an M.A. in U.S. History, an M.S in Journalism, and an MBA, all from Columbia University. He has lived and worked in Europe, South America and Asia.

Read a profile of Tim from his high school newsletter: Download PDF