I don’t scare easily.

While covering stories as a foreign correspondent over the years, I’ve been beaten, shot at, even chased by a gang with machetes. I’ve had weapons pressed to my forehead, helicopter gunships searching for me, mortar shells falling around me, and journalist friends killed right next to me.

If these kinds of things didn’t scare me, I wouldn’t be normal. But they’re all part of the job description overseas and like I said, I don’t scare easily. However, there’s a story I’d be scared to cover today and I wouldn’t even have to leave the U.S. to do it: a rally for Donald Trump.

Hostility abroad was to be expected. We were Western journalists; our adversaries were anti-American. Sometimes the threat grew out of a bully’s calculated bombast, sometimes from the raw rage of a mob. All we could do was calculate our odds: How far should we go into the maelstrom without going too far? How long should we stay without staying too long?

Here at home, journalists shouldn’t have to calculate odds like that. Not when all they’re doing is covering a candidate. But this candidate is different. He’s hardly the first to malign the media. The difference is, he makes it personal. And vitriolic. He publicly pummels individual journalists, calling them “sleaze,” “dishonest,” “pathetic.” He condemns the whole press corps as “disgusting and corrupt.”

Now, you might agree with all that — many Americans do — but that’s almost beside the point. By tearing into the media at his raw-meat rallies, the candidate who has promised to pay the legal expenses of supporters prosecuted for violence is all but inspiring it. Now, as his behavior catches up with him, he’s even including the media in a “global” conspiracy against him.

Trump and his most bellicose believers are echoing the ancient tradition of targeting the messenger to discredit the message. To which I say, journalists can’t make this man look thuggish, boorish, misogynistic, narcissistic, un-empathetic, unprepared, vindictive, mean or dishonest without his help.

A New York Times story late last week catalogued the “menacing, thunderous roar” when reporters come into a Trump rally. Acolytes “flipped middle fingers and lashed out in tirades often laced with profanity” as journalists made their way in.

Granted, it’s The New York Times, which unconscionably has let its op-ed page bleed into its front page. But that too is almost beside the point. Where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire. What would it take for a rally to mushroom from threatening to dangerous to riotous? Only one spark, and Trump keeps lighting the match with incendiary indictments like, ”The media is, indeed, sick, and it’s making our country sick, and we’re going to stop it.”

You can simply say, “Man up,” but let me tell you about those beatings I suffered overseas. They didn’t start with a punch. They started with taunts. Which turned into shouts. Which evolved into pushing. Which morphed into punching.

Can the reporters covering Trump’s rallies feel secure that this won’t be the pattern there? It’s gotten so bad, evidently NBC and CNN have hired their own security to protect their people. NPR is giving Trump campaign correspondents “threat awareness training.” I have covered six different presidential campaigns, with candidates on both ends of the spectrum. It was never like this.

That scares me.

And you ought to be scared too. If not for the journalists who cover Trump, then for yourself, because if you treasure freedom of the press, you need to realize, he’s putting it in jeopardy. Whether ultimately any reporters get hurt covering his campaign, the free flow of information is taking a hit. If we do things Trump’s way, America could look more like those Third World countries where, because I was a journalist, I got chased, and shot at and beaten.

That scares me too.

Greg Dobbs of Evergreen is an author, public speaker, and former foreign correspondent for ABC News.

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