In an essay for Politico magazine, Susan Mulcahy, former editor for the New York Post‘s “Page Six,” explained that it’s been difficult to cover Donald Trump since the 1980s because of his “pathological lying.” According to Mulcahy, Trump was “the king of ersatz. Not just fake, but false. He lied about everything, with gusto. But,” to Mulcahy, “that was not immediately apparent.”

Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has repeatedly hyped falsehoods, parroted conspiracy theories, has been labeled by media fact checkers as “the king of whoppers” for his recurring habit of making false claims.

According to Mulcahy, this behavior is nothing new for Trump, in fact, as early as the Post’s 1980s coverage of Trump, he ”could not control his pathological lying.” Mulcahy wrote that despite that “Trump lied all the time,” that he “was so outrageous – and outrageously tacky,” and that “every statement he uttered required more than the usual amount of fact-checking,” making covering him “a lot of work,” ignoring him would have been difficult:

I have a confession to make, and please don’t shoot when you hear it: I helped make the myth of Donald Trump. And for that, I am very, very sorry.

If you worked for a newspaper in New York in the 1980s, you had to write about Trump. As editor of the New York Post’s Page Six, and later as a columnist for New York Newsday, I needed to fill a lot of space, ideally with juicy stories of the rich and powerful, and Trump more than obliged. I wrote about his real estate deals. I wrote about his wife, his yacht, his parties, his houses.

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I had started on Page Six as an assistant in 1978, when I was still a college student, became a reporter a couple of years later and editor of the column in 1983. All I knew at the beginning was that Trump was big, brash and newsworthy—every building he proposed would be the largest, every deal the most enormous ever. And he loved publicity.

It should be simple to write about publicity hounds, and often it is, because they’ll do anything to earn the attention they crave. Trump had a different way of doing things. He wanted attention, but he could not control his pathological lying. Which made him, as story subjects go, a lot of work. Every statement he uttered required more than the usual amount of fact-checking. If Trump said, “Good morning,” you could be pretty sure it was five o’clock in the afternoon.

I once received a tip that Trump and Richard Nixon had had a lengthy meeting in Trump’s office. Trump said he knew nothing about it. I ran the story, not only because I had an excellent source, but also because a Nixon aide confirmed it. Nixon, who was shopping for a condo the day he met with Trump, may have had issues with credibility in his time, but over Trump, I’d have believed him any day. Trump was such a pretender he even used to fake being his own spokesman, as I learned recently, though I never heard from the faux flack he called John Barron. My Trump items came from all over the place—never Trump himself—and when I called to check on something, he usually lied to me directly.

Denying facts was almost a sport for Trump, and extended even to mundane matters. While still married to his first wife, Ivana, Trump bought a mansion in Connecticut, and she decorated parts of it. Not the most earth-shattering news, but hey, everyone has slow days. When I called to confirm the purchase, Trump denied it, more than once. Sure enough, before long, he was spending weekends in the mansion, parts of which were decorated by Ivana. Did he think twice about such a seemingly pointless lie? Why would he?

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So, if Trump lied all the time, why did I and other journalists continue to cover him? In hindsight, it’s easy to say, “Oh, we shouldn’t have,” but it’s not that simple. He was on the scene, like it or not, a developer who wielded real power in the city, and ignoring him would have been difficult.

Also, Trump was so outrageous—and outrageously tacky—it was a constant temptation to write about his antics, particularly because he thought he was the height of sophistication. He didn’t seem to understand, for instance, that if he wanted the respect of Manhattan’s cognoscenti, he should have left the beloved Bonwit Teller building in place on 57th Street, or at least given the bas-relief sculptures on the department store’s façade to the Metropolitan Museum, which wanted them for its collections. He smashed them to bits instead, declaring them of no artistic value, though a prominent art dealer who had agreed to appraise them said they were as significant as the Art Deco sculptures at Rockefeller Center. In 1980, down came Bonwit’s, soon to be replaced by Trump Tower.

Writing this in 2016, with Trump’s many financial reversals and failed companies now long since part of the public record, it’s easy to forget that he once earned headlines with actual business deals—major real estate projects in New York, like Lincoln West. A large swath of land on the far West Side that is no longer owned by Trump, though some of the buildings there bear his name, Lincoln West was the largest piece of undeveloped land in Manhattan when Trump took it over in the mid-1980s. The property, which stretched from 59th to 72nd streets, for a time had been known as Television City, when it looked as though NBC would be the anchor tenant in an enormous new complex. To entice the TV network, which had been making rumblings about moving from Rockefeller Center to New Jersey, Trump needed to offer below-market rents, and for that he required tax abatements. He didn’t get them. Trump and Mayor Ed Koch engaged in a public shouting match that offered a preview of the Trump now running for president. Calling Koch a “moron” and “a horrible manager,” Trump said the mayor should resign. Koch countered by labeling Trump “greedy, greedy, greedy” and saying that if Trump was “squealing like a stuck pig, I must have done something right.”