Donald Trump has spent the better part of his life either controlling people or trying to control them. Nowhere is that clearer than when it comes to New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman, who has been covering Trump for decades. Trump even went so far as to ask his advisors to obtain her phone records.

That’s what Politico is reporting in a lengthy profile of Haberman in the lead-up to her book Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, which is scheduled for release in early October.

Trump is obsessed with Haberman and has been from the get-go, continually lambasting her in public, while praising her in private, Insider reports. The former president trashed Haberman’s book in public on Friday, calling it “boring and stale,” and said she was a “failing” reporter who tells “made-up stories.”

Privately, however, Politico reports that he reveres Haberman.

“I love being with her,” he reportedly told two aides. “She’s like my psychiatrist.”

“I’ve never seen a psychiatrist,” he said at the time. “But if I did, I’m sure it would not be as good as this, right?”

For Haberman, the Trump beat has been a long haul, covering his real estate exploits when she wrote for a New York tabloid before moving on to Politico, and later, The New York Times. Haberman picked up the writing gene from her father Clyde, who’s also a longtime reporter at the Times, and her mother Nancy, a public relations executive in New York.

After Trump announced his first presidential run in 2015, Haberman asked her editors if she could cover his campaign. That’s according to the Showtime documentary The Fourth Estate. 

And while you might think that Haberman approached Trump to write her forthcoming book, the opposite occurred. Trump actually approached her, Politico reports.

“He recognizes her genetic code,” Trump aide Michael Caputo told Politico.

While Haberman’s book is scheduled to be released on October 4, several excerpts have been published and they have revealed that Trump asked then-President Barack Obama how he kept his approval rating high and that at one point he called then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel a “b*tch.” We also find out that he told his pal Rudy Giuliani, his former defense attorney to “go wild” and “do anything you want” to derail the 2020 election results and that he nearly fired his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner in a tweet.

While Trump is inconsistent on many issues, he can be consistently relied on to criticize the media, and he once again complained about Haberman on Friday. In response, she posted a photo of what seemed to be his handwritten answers to her questions about her upcoming book.

From CONFIDENCE MAN pic.twitter.com/TML85hMT07

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) September 30, 2022

Haberman has offered a window into the life of this man. Would we have learned just how incompetent, evil, cruel, vain, insecure, and supercilious Trump is without her unstinting efforts?