Lost amid the post-election clatter about what the media missed is an appreciation of the hardworking journalists who had Trump nailed when most of us were still in swaddling. Wayne Barrett, the longtime investigative reporter for the Village Voice, is one who only now is receiving his just due at the national level.

Barrett’s Trump: The Deals and the Downfall was first published in 1992 (it has since been reissued as Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth), at a moment when New Yorkers thought themselves rid of “the Donald’s” malign hold on their collective imagination. His biography is a rich and layered—Caro-esque—excavation of the dirty-dealing, insiderism, and blind greed that made Trump a powerful figure in 1980s New York, and which eventually brought him down, beset by a string of bankruptcies, a scandal-plagued public divorce, and a forced retreat from public view—which proved, to our great national misfortune, a temporary one.

What makes Barrett’s work so vital today is his prescient depiction of Trump: It was all there for us to see, if only we had known to look. We learn how Fred Trump, Donald’s father, leveraged his connections to the Brooklyn political machines to gain access to federally backed mortgage funding, which he then turned into a real estate empire in the city’s outer boroughs. We find a young Donald taking those experiences and political assets with him to Manhattan as a brash, young developer. And throughout, there are the deals: the Commodore Hotel, the West Side Railyards, Trump Tower, the United States Football League, and finally, and tragicomically, the Atlantic City casinos—a string of failures, or at best, semi-successes.

Barrett makes the links and names the names because his understanding of New York City politics and society is unrivaled. What’s more, at Trump’s lowest point, he discovers in Donald Trump a “fatalism” of character that will eventually take him to the White House. “His fatalism allowed him to hold himself blameless; his determinism convinced him he’d be a winner again,” Barrett writes. “On the public stage where he’d played out every act of his life he was too much of a showman to be embarrassed by a single disastrous performance. The cumulative effect of this life view—so deep seated it appeared to be instinctual—was the confidence that all of this would come and go.”

We sat down with Barrett in his home in Brooklyn to talk Trump, the media, and what America can expect of its new president. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.