But there is another way of thinking about the gaffe: as an inevitable expression of the paradoxes of scrupulously objective political reporting, pressures that have held reporters hostage for decades. Until Trump, of all people, set us free.

The journalistic ritual of gaffe-spotting dates approximately to the Vietnam era, but it blossomed into a full-blown obsession during the 1980 candidacy of Ronald Reagan, whose malapropisms were well noted even before he won the Republican nomination. Before the summer was out, reporters were fulminating over his description of the Vietnam War as a “noble cause” and his suggestion that the United States should pursue official relations with Taiwan — a move that contradicted the terms of normalization previously negotiated between the United States and China. Both statements were within the spectrum of conservative opinion, but reporters took them as blunders. By early September, press reports routinely described Reagan’s campaign, in The Times’s words, as on “the political defensive after a string of admittedly costly verbal gaffes.”

Two months later, Reagan trounced Carter, winning 44 states. During his administration, verbal pratfalls became enough of a running joke that David Gergen, then his director of communications, commissioned a large plaster foot with a bullet hole in it to be passed around. The Washington Post’s Lou Cannon diligently cataloged the “Reaganism of the Week”; Dinesh D’Souza, who worked in the White House during Reagan’s second term, wrote later that “Reagan had no objection and frequently turned to the column to discover his own gaffes. Reagan’s advisers soon discovered what the boss already knew: that Americans didn’t mind his gaffes and were even entertained by them.”

What Reagan understood, in D’Souza’s telling, was that a gaffe revealed at least as much about the journalists who called attention to it as it did about the politician who uttered it. It reflected their own preoccupations and biases, which voters did not necessarily share. Ever since the late 1960s, when reporters began to take a more active role in scrutinizing presidential candidates, they had operated on the assumption that the way a candidate managed the challenges and humiliations of the campaign trail was in some way reflective of how they would perform in the White House itself — that a candidacy was a meaningful simulation of a presidency. By the 1980s, this vision of campaign reporting was toppling into solipsism. Journalists were, effectively, grading politicians on their ability to perform what everyone understood to be a largely artificial version of themselves — practicing a kind of theater criticism as much as political reporting.