In a political news cycle that churns from one outrageous story to the next, David Fahrenthold and a team of Washington Post reporters told a story last week that stuck. After the Post reported President Trump’s vague plan to host next year’s G7 summit at his own struggling Doral resort in Florida, the negative public response—particularly among Republicans—led Trump to cancel his plan within days. Though the president’s decision to issue a contract to himself was “without precedent,” as the Post reported, a reversed decision from the Trump administration in response to public accountability reporting is also disturbingly rare.

The success of the Post’s reporting owes in part to the simplicity of the narrative—a product of the zealous pre-reporting and carefully catalogued business dealings that has characterized much of Fahrenthold’s work on Trump. The Washington Post’s reporting team—Fahrenthold, Jonathan O’Connell, and Josh Partlow, who all focus on Trump’s businesses, as well as others—has learned that deep immersion in Trump’s business dealings provides them with expertise that enables them to confidently boil a story down to its essentials. “You don’t have to understand emoluments or tax fraud or anything else,” Fahrenthold says of the Post’s recent G7 coverage. “It’s not complicated. This was the president giving a huge contract to himself.” The constitutional emoluments clause is part of the story, of course, but it’s not as easy to understand as, say, the resort’s financial struggles, Fahrenthold says. A story that makes a constitutional argument against the president’s actions can confuse readers. A story that says, “Donald Trump’s resort is struggling, and now he’s using tax-payer money to hold an event there” packs a punch.

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The Post team, which had reported on Trump’s businesses for years, had already compiled considerable evidence that the Doral resort wasn’t doing well financially. They had built relationships with sources, heard rumors that Trump planned to award the G7 contract to Doral, and were able to think the story through before it hit. When the story broke, the team was confident in calling the president’s action “unprecedented,” and was able to provide evidence to demonstrate the resort’s financial troubles—hard to do when you’re chasing a breaking news story, but powerful when you break the story yourself.

When Fahrenthold began his reporting on the Trump Organization several years ago, he noticed that finding the truth required creative and deliberate reporting, because the narrative of the organization was controlled almost exclusively by Donald Trump himself. “He’d make some great promise,” Farenthold says. “And then you’d find out two years later he was wrong. But then he was down the road, off on something else. So the key for us at the beginning was, Let’s just find as many ways over the wall as we can, to figure out what’s going on inside.”

Fahrenthold gets ahead of some stories by trying to be ahead of all of them. He sets reporting goals for himself: ten new attempted contacts and three FOIA requests every day. He creates extensive spreadsheets and takes careful notes— “You should never rely on yourself, even if you’re not covering something as chaotic as the Trump presidency”—and turns over every stone imaginable: each financial disclosure, every property tax appeal. When his to-do list runs out, he forces himself to get creative: “Maybe I’ll FOIA the Irish government, or I’ll FOIA the Scottish government,” he says. The approach yields a lot of dead ends. “Sometimes it doesn’t see the light of day right away,” says Fahrenthold of his reporting’s products. “Sometimes it never sees the light of day.” Other times, Fahrenthold will receive an unexpected phone call, or a fulfilled FOIA request. “It’s like a gift from heaven,” he says. “This thing comes in that you forgot you even asked for.”

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While Fahrenthold’s approach for cultivating expertise applies to all sorts of beats, it seems to steady his work covering the tumultuous Trump presidency. “Whatever I learned today, I’ve codified it and written it down and made it easier to find again,” he says. “Today’s story helps me tomorrow.”

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Lauren Harris is a CJR Delacorte Fellow. Follow her on Twitter @LHarrisWrites.