It’s 2am on Wednesday 9 November 2016, and I’m pretending to be a Donald Trump supporter. I have been standing on the same spot in a hotel ballroom for six hours, slowly boiling in a winter coat, and have a splitting headache – maybe a metaphor for something. When security guards aren’t watching, I take out a notebook and interview supporters at Trump’s election watch party in New York about their journey from surrender to surprise to can’t-believe-this-is-happening ecstasy.

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By 3am, it’s over. I head out to the hotel bar and gulp down some water and much-needed aspirin. I’ve talked to the voters, seen the results and heard the man’s victory speech from up close, but it’s only when I see the chyron on a TV screen that it becomes real: “Donald Trump elected president.” The words will haunt me for the next year.

As the Guardian’s Washington bureau chief I’ve banned myself from using words such as “surreal” or “unprecedented” to describe Trump – he drained them of meaning long ago. The 45th president is exhausting, physically and morally. Covering his White House is like being tossed around inside a washing machine, from pre-dawn tweet storms to late-night revelations of alleged collusion with Russia. I’m short of sleep and high on coffee. There are a dozen stories to choose from every day, and events that would have dominated the Barack Obama presidency for a year now flare for just hours before burning out. On to the next outrage.

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There is also the degradation of political and civic culture. Just when you think Trump has hit rock bottom, a week later you realise you’re gazing up at that place wistfully from an even murkier depth. There was his drawing of moral equivalence between white supremacists and anti-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia. There was his attack on the African American widow of a soldier killed in Niger. Race always seems to be at the heart of it. Dwell on it too long and it can be soul-destroying.

“It’s totally toxic,” journalist Sally Quinn said of Washington in an interview on PBS television last month. “It’s like you’re breathing in carbon monoxide and it’s killing you but you can’t see it or smell it. It’s the most poisonous atmosphere I have ever known in my life.” Sometimes, one yearns to come up for air.

And yet, as I recall from reporting in hotspots in Africa, there is a paradox. Utopia is a pretty boring place; dystopia is what journalists thrive on. In the American capital there is a sense of being at the centre of things, of witnessing history firsthand – these events will be studied for decades to come. “I’m having the time of my life right now,” CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta told the Washington Post in July. “This is the biggest story of my life. I’m like a kid in a candy store.”

It’s a story where the journalists are protagonists, inescapably part of the narrative. Trump’s politics of division thrive off creating enemies that he can go to war with as a means of uniting his coalition: they know what they’re against. The media rivals Hillary Clinton as enemy No 1. I was in an unusual position near the front of the White House briefing room (normally I’m on the back row) when the then press secretary, Sean Spicer, stormed in for his debut briefing, lambasting the media as he bellowed: “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration – period.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest David Smith in the West Wing of the White House. Photograph: Courtesy David Smith/The Guardian

(In the ultimate symbol of our reality TV meets politics meets reality TV age, Spicer later parodied his own lie at the Emmy awards.)

The ensuing months would bring relentless media bashing, notably at Trump rallies (he’s already campaigning for 2020). Here again the reality is difficult to separate from sport or pantomime. When the president railed against “damned dishonest” reporters in a speech in Phoenix, Arizona, his supporters turned and booed and jeered us. Some appeared to be sincere, but others, maybe a majority, were grinning, as if knowingly part of a performance.

His highest-profile targets are CNN and the New York Times. The Guardian is still some way down the hitlist. But I’m told that Steve Bannon, when he was White House chief strategist, once remarked: “Read the Guardian if you want to know what they are thinking.” It’s fair to assume that, by they, he was referring to the liberal global elites he despises.

With one foot in and one foot out, the Guardian is well placed to maintain a critical distance; Americans say they value our outsider perspective. It is incumbent on us not to normalise the abnormal, diminish the emergency or be distracted by his words while neglecting the consequences of his actions. Trump has also raised unexpected journalistic issues. Should we call him a liar? A lie implies conscious intent, so we tend to go with “falsely claimed” more frequently. But the president’s assertions that millions of people voted illegally, or that Barack Obama wiretapped him, test the boundaries to breaking point.

At a recent Guardian Facebook Live event, a reader asked how we stay motivated to maintain integrity when more and more people deny the value of truth and reliable reporting of facts. The answer is there is no greater motivation. Let’s park postmodernism for now and get back to objective reality. Kellyanne Conway’s infamous assertion of “alternative facts” is galvanising for the media: a call to arms, a renewed sense of purpose. If we didn’t know why we were journalists before, we do now. Speaking truth to power has taken on a whole new meaning.

Reporting on the strangest president in American history is to witness the awesome, awful spectacle of a 240-year-old democracy and its institutions creaking and bending under a freak storm. A popular Facebook Live question was: will Trump be impeached? How much more of this is there? I have no idea, and that is both compelling and scary.