Impulsive, abrasive, and disruptive – the latter a virtue to many who gave him their vote – Donald Trump was in numerous respects a president without precedent. Now, unaccepting of a failed bid for reelection, with enduring clout in his party and seeming designs on another run for the White House, he’s an ex-president like no other.

Few have gotten to know him like The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman.

Six days before the pivotal midterm elections of 2022, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter examines one of the most complicated and controversial figures in our nation’s history in a discussion of her new blockbuster book Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America. Haberman looks not only at Trump’s four years as president but also the prelude of personal and business experiences in New York that shaped him.

Haberman, who joined The Times in 2015, has covered Trump full time for much of the past decade and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer in 2018 for reporting on his advisers and their connections to Russia. Despite frequent public insults of her, Trump has given her countless interviews and agreed to three more for Confidence Man. During one of them, Haberman recounts, he told two aides, “I love being with her; she’s like my psychiatrist.”

Before The Times, Haberman worked as a political reporter for Politico and wrote for both of New York City’s other major newspapers, The Post and The Daily News, among other publications.