I Was an Enemy of the People

Thrilling, without a single boring day: That’s how I’d describe my four years as an enemy of the people, a lanyard-wearing member of the “Lügenpresse,” a term some Donald Trump supporters borrowed from the Nazis to refer to insufficiently flattering coverage of their movement, or of the man who led it.

I miss it already. I miss it terribly, even if I miss little else about the past four years. Without quite meaning to, Trump reminded journalists that their relationship to power should be adversarial. I hope my colleagues in the press corps (I am a national correspondent for Yahoo News) remember that, as some measure of pre-Trumpian courtliness returns to the White House briefing room.

The brandishing of Nazi imprecations was yet another sign that Trump took things way too far. But he didn’t exactly relegate us to the concentration camp for the unflattering stories we published. Cable news, more like it. During my first MSNBC “hit”—you always call it a hit, never anything but—I mispronounced , making the first syllable sound like the lowing of a cow (in case you’re ever in a similar fix: his name rhymes with). Either the anchor didn’t notice, or it made no difference, because the producers asked me back. Not many times, but enough for my children to regard me with a measure of awe, as if I were taking regular journeys into outer space.