No one embodies the surreal, codependent, often abusive relationship between the media and Donald Trump as much as Maggie Haberman, the most prominent White House correspondent for the publication Trump likes to call “The Failing New York Times.” Much as he professes to despise the Times—“total fiction,” he’s called it—he can’t quit Haberman. He returns her calls, gives her exclusives. “He wouldn’t talk to me as much as he does if I wasn’t at the Times,” Haberman said on a podcast recently. “That’s just the reality. He craves the paper’s approval.”

Haberman’s Twitter feed is as active as @realDonaldTrump’s, and indispensable for understanding him. She’s the queen of political journalism at a time when Trump’s reality-television administration has supercharged the news business, with hundreds of thousands of new subscribers flocking to legacy publications like the Times and The Washington Post, TV ratings through the roof, and a refreshing bump in public trust, according to a new Reuters survey, for the “fake-news media.” Haberman, who in a pairing with her colleague and frequent collaborator Glenn Thrush ranked No. 32 on Vanity Fair’s 2017 New Establishment List this week, is right at the center.

With her tabloid pedigree, her Lois Lane mien, her 158,000 tweets to more than 640,000 followers, and her lightning rise to front-page dominance, Haberman is a sui generis creature at the Times, even if she has formidable predecessors. Maureen Dowd was around the same age Haberman is now, 43, when she rose to fame covering the administration of George H.W. Bush in the early ‘90s. “When I was a Times White House reporter, it was very hard to get on the front page in the first year,” Dowd told me. “Maggie lives there—and in the digital ether, like that woman who loomed large in the sky in Woody Allen’s New York Stories.” Dowd, who was one of 20 colleagues, associates, and Times insiders I spoke with for this story, also said: “I tried to mentor her but quickly realized it should be the other way around.”

Dowd’s calling card as a White House correspondent was her storytelling, infused with attitude and prose that sometimes may have felt more at home in the pages of Spy magazine than the paper of record. (Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, was a co-founder of Spy.) Haberman’s signature is her preternatural ability to get lots of people telling her lots of things they probably shouldn’t be telling her. She’s regarded as the best-sourced reporter in Washington, the irony being that she only spends part of her time there, working largely out of her home turf in New York. She’s able not only to get inside the room with Trump, but to seemingly get inside his brain—to translate for the masses what he and the people around him at any given moment are thinking about the crisis or controversy du jour. That skill has made her incredibly valuable at a time when juicy, granular, inside-the-room dish has gained massive journalistic currency—Trump watching cable news in his bathrobe, Trump in a foul mood for this reason or that, and so on.

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“The larger story,” one of Haberman’s colleagues told me, “is the increasingly tabloid-y evolution of the mainstream political press. These stories are fun to read, they’re very of-the-moment, they’re made for Twitter. So I think Maggie’s success is very much part of that tabloid, Twitter-fied sensibility bleeding into the Times, entering the Times’s metabolism.” Jim VandeHei, who helped popularize this incremental, fast-twitch style of Washington journalism as a co-founder of Politico, where VandeHei hired Haberman in 2010, said it’s “definitely new turf” for Haberman’s current employer. He cited “a level of metabolism, a level of intrigue, a level of intense focus on the players and the personal dynamics that you’re just not used to seeing in The New York Times.” Speaking of Haberman and Thrush, a fellow New York tabloid and Politico alum, who joined the Times’s Trump team at the beginning of the year, former Times executive editor Jill Abramson said, “They’ve made the Times competitive in a Politico style of reporting that everybody who plays the inside game loves. The Times would not be as competitive without them.”