The press is the “enemy of the American people.” — President Donald Trump.

“I can’t wait for vigilante squads to start gunning down journalists” — Milo Yiannopoulos, provocateur.

“Killing journalists is an awesome position to promote….anyone calling for journalists to be killed is good” — Andrew Anglin, Daily Stormer editor.

Oaklanders know the story too damn well. Someone with a shotgun out to kill a reporter.

The 2007 killing of Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey on a city sidewalk was the last slaying of a domestic American journalist over a story.

Until Thursday.

The only thing surprising about the newsroom killings of five Annapolis Capital-Gazette employees is that it didn’t happen sooner. Jarrod Ramos, the alleged shooter, had a longstanding complaint with the paper over a story about his conviction for harassing a woman.

Ramos’ animosity ran on for years through two failed lawsuits in which he represented himself. Then, Thursday, he blasted his way into the paper with a shotgun and killed four journalists and a sales representative.

It came days after Yiannopoulos called for death squads for journalists. He says he was kidding and wrote those words only in a private text. But then he posted them on Instagram.

We all know the environment Trump has created for reporters, one in which a congressional candidate can body slam a reporter for asking questions. One in which his supporters angrily swarm journalists at rallies. To think that Thursday’s shooting isn’t related to that environment is naive and whimsical. Now the body count is four journalists, Gerald Fischman, Rob Hiaasen, John McNamara, and Wendi Winters, and an advertising salesperson, Rebecca Smith.

They cannot be forgotten.

They’re also far from the first to die because of journalism. Don Bolles, an Arizona Republic reporter killed with a car bomb in 1976; Bill Mason, a radio reporter shot by a Texas sheriff who Mason reported secretly owned a strip club, in 1949; Don Mellett, an Ohio editor killed in 1927 by a corrupt police chief he exposed; and more than 30 others have died for their work.

In Oakland, a group of journalists formed the Chauncey Bailey Project to finish Bailey’s work after he was killed by a member of the now-defunct Your Black Muslim Bakery on orders from its leader, Yusuf Bey IV. Our motto: You can’t kill a story by killing a journalist.

But when it became quite apparent that no one in power — not police, the mayor, the district attorney – cared about Bailey’s killing, we pivoted to exposing all we could about the murder, publishing hundreds of stories. I eventually wrote a book.

It was clear the powerful didn’t care about Bailey’s murder for various reasons. He worked for a small, weekly paper. They didn’t care because it was Oakland, which was awash in killings in 2007. They didn’t care because it was a black-on-black crime, because the Beys were a loony, violent cult that no one dared confront.

But a lot’s changed in 11 years. Everyone needs to care about what happened in Annapolis. This slaughter must be a touchstone from which respect for journalism returns as a civic value.

This is the only business and profession specifically named in the Constitution, singled out for protections because of its vital role in ensuring that America somehow works. The founders got this absolutely right. Democracy depends on bitter pills.

Then came Trump. Since the rise of the alt right – since Trump enabled idiots like Yiannopoulos and Anglin – journalists have been treated with disdain, disgust, disrespect.

The best of us anger people. Not the universe of “people” in Trump’s enemies rhetoric, but people with government and corporate power. The job is to find out what they don’t want reported and report it. To get to the most attainable version of the truth. To hold power accountable.

People devote their lives to it. This work is a calling. The deaths of these five newspaper lifers in Annapolis cannot be in vain. The president and his minions must stop their hateful rhetoric.

Other reporters will inevitably die for their work. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t hope like hell it never happens again. No more Chauncey Baileys. No more Annapolis fives. No more blood.