Michael Kruse is a senior staff writer for Politico.

He was the first reporter who took Donald Trump seriously. An old-school, pen-and-paper, document-driven, sourced-up investigative ace for the Village Voice in New York, Wayne Barrett nailed the aspiring real estate developer 38 years ago. “Donald Trump,” he wrote, in January of 1979, “is a user of other users.” Barrett’s unflagging work on Trump in the intervening years never disproved his initial read. He remained the most influential of Trump’s chroniclers right up until Thursday—one day before Trump was sworn in as president—when Barrett died, at 71, of complications from interstitial lung disease.

No small amount of the best, most discerning, hardest-hitting reporting on Trump in the last few decades, and especially throughout this incomprehensible past year, literally started with calls to Barrett. Barrett, unfailingly magnanimous, would invite reporters to his townhouse in Brooklyn, where they would descend a creaky set of stairs into his basement to discover shelves and shelves and cabinets and boxes and stacks of pack-rat records compiled over a lifetime of telling the truth about the nation’s biggest city and some of its scammiest citizens. His Trump trove was peerless.


Nearly a year ago, when I contacted Barrett to ask if he could join fellow Trump biographers for a recorded conversation over lunch at Trump Grille at Trump Tower, he said he wasn’t well. He came anyway, though, in a wheelchair and with a nurse. His mind was still sharp as a scythe. From the others there that day—Tim O’Brien and Michael D’Antonio, Harry Hurt and Gwenda Blair, whose books followed Barrett’s—I saw deference, admiration and love.

“He was the first person to take a close look, the first person to realize that a close look needed to be taken,” Blair said Thursday when I called and told her our friend had died.

“The first person to deal with him head-on, and to do it so scrupulously,” D’Antonio said.

“It provided everyone with a roadmap,” O’Brien said.

Barrett was the son of a nuclear physicist and a librarian. A Goldwater Republican from Lynchburg, Virginia, in his teens and early 20s who flipped ideologically in the late 1960s as a graduate student at the Columbia School of Journalism, he was a community organizer and a public school teacher before he became a reporter. He once told his son’s elementary school classmates that his job was to be “a detective for the people.” He called his long line of devoted interns his “soldiers of detail.” He taught journalism classes at Columbia, Hunter College and Long Island University. The credo of the indefatigable Barrett: “the exposure of the plunderers, the steerers, the wirepullers, the bosses, the brokers, the campaign fixers and takers. … Stew, percolate, pester, track, burrow, besiege, confront, damage, level. Care.”

Barrett started looking into Trump in 1977. Trump had been sued by the federal government for racial bias in renting apartments in Brooklyn and Queens and at the time was renovating what would become Manhattan’s Grand Hyatt hotel thanks to tax breaks of historic proportions. Before network television made his name synonymous with being a boss, before his divorces and his affairs and the bankruptcies at his casinos, before Trump Tower was erected as the hub of his vanity and ambition, Barrett sat in a spare room at the offices of the State Urban Development Corporation and scoured for hours thousands of pages of public records. He was 33, and Trump was 32. “I was a rookie, he was a rookie,” Barrett would say. And one day, a nearby phone rang. “Wayne!” said the voice on the other end. “It’s Donald! I hear you’re doing a story on me!” Someone at the UDC had tipped off Trump to what Barrett was up to. And when Trump eventually saw that Barrett saw through him—that he was focused on the sham, not the show—first he tried to bribe Barrett with a new apartment, and then he threatened to sue, invoking the name of Roy Cohn, his pugnacious and politically connected mentor. What Barrett nonetheless published in the Voice made him, forever, the original authority on Trump.

“We’ve been looking into a world where only the greed is magnified,” he wrote at the end of his foundational two-part series. “The actors are pretty small and venal. Their ideas are small, never transcending profit. In it, however, are the men elected to lead us and those who buy them. And in it, unhappily, are the processes and decisions that shape our city and our lives.”

He didn’t stop reporting on Trump. On his entrance into Atlantic City. On his illustrative relationship with Cohn. On his ties to the mob. The resulting book, Trump: The Deals and the Downfall, came out in 1991, when Trump was all but done, swamped by debt racked up through recklessness and a blithe sense of invincibility—as beholden to the banks as the banks were to him, which was the chief reason, along with his family’s wealth, he was even able to contemplate a comeback.

But Barrett was unsparing in his assessment, and what he wrote back then still crackles with earned authority.

“He had prided himself on never having met a public official, a banker, a lawyer, a reporter, or a prosecutor he couldn’t seduce,” Barrett wrote. “Some he owned, and others he merely manipulated. As he saw it, it was not just that everyone had a price, it was that he knew what the price was. He believed he could look across a table and compute the price, then move on to another table and borrow the money to pay it. ‘Everybody tries to get some money’ was his assessment in one unpublished interview of what motivates the people he dealt with. It was his one-sentence summary of human nature.”

He concluded: “Somewhere on this odyssey of his, the image had devoured the man, and Donald had become the commercially useful personality he had helped invent. To some of those who watched him closely, he no longer behaved as if he believed he was merely living; he was now, in his own mind, portraying himself in a thrilling daily drama he scripted.”

Barrett worked exhaustively on far more than just Trump. He wrote an “investigative biography” of Rudy Giuliani, one of the mayors and governors he trained his eye on. His 1988 book, City for Sale: Ed Koch and the Betrayal of New York, is “a seminal work,” according to O’Brien. “I’m not an angry guy,” Barrett once said. “There’s just a lot to be outraged about.” But Trump was a particular and recurring target. He knew precisely who and what he was before most people outside of New York even knew his name.

And throughout this last year, as he was sick and getting sicker but kept letting into his house reporters from all over the country, from all over the world, he was with me the way he has been with so many others over so many years—welcoming and wise, generous with his insight and time, sharing with me this meaningful piece of his life’s work. I went to Brooklyn. I went into the basement. I sat on the chair by his bed. I called often.

“He’s the consummate example of what his voters rail against,” Barrett said last March, identifying the central paradox of what would become Trump’s surprising, unprecedented rise.

In October, in the aftermath of the lascivious comments in which Trump discussed his pattern of behavior toward women that sounded like sexual assault, drawing on decades of reporting on his power-hungry habits of subjugation, Barrett called him “a predator.”

“Shamelessness is a skill,” he said the day after Trump was elected president.

The last time we spoke, he told me he was going to try his best to join me and O’Brien, Blair and D’Antonio for another conversation—“I’ve been sick lately (more than usual),” he told us in an email, “but I’m even better on Trump when I have a fever”—but he told me on the phone he was getting worse. His wife of 48 years, the former Frances Marie McGettigan, with whom he raised their beloved son, Mac, wanted him to go to the hospital, he said. That was only a week and a half ago.

Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a not infrequent subject of Barrett’s critical, clear-eyed reporting as well, has called Barrett “a tenacious reporter” motivated by “a deep sense of moral purpose.” Governor Andrew Cuomo has called him “a lion in the field of journalism” who “did his job without malice and with an absolute dedication to the facts.” Current mayor Bill de Blasio has said he “inspired generations of journalists” and “held the powerful accountable.” Trump, through the years, has called Barrett “a very bad writer,” “a second-rate writer” and “a jerk.”

I was reporting at the Capitol in Washington Thursday afternoon when I heard he had died. After leaving and heading out into the cold, I walked to Union Station, past the fences and barricades and police force in place for what was to come, past vendor after vendor hawking Trump hats and Trump pins and Trump shirts and Trump dolls and Trump flags. The surreal juxtaposition of Barrett’s death and the beginning of the administration of President Trump, an event Barrett had thought impossible given Trump’s damning past, left me blinking back tears and grasping for words.

“He was the most Christian, in the best sense of the word, of any journalist I ever met,” D’Antonio told me Thursday night. “He believed in comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. You were OK with Wayne if you were doing good, honest work.”

“He planted a flag on the history of Donald Trump that can’t be ignored,” O’Brien said. “And given the fact that Trump is now a historical figure, his work will ride along with that.”

“We are all,” Blair said, “in his debt.”