Until Donald Trump ran for president, the national media sat cute knowing they had free license to embarrass and belittle anyone they wanted without recourse, as Republican nominees were too concerned with their tone to return fire.

Suddenly, any insult directed at the press, or any denied press credential is evidence of a dictator-in-waiting. Now a New Yorker with a big mouth hits back and the media have a no-tolerance policy for a “bully” in politics.

“Bully” was the word used by the Washington Post editorial board last week on the same day the paper ran a column with the headline: “Donald Trump declares war on the press.” CNN went with: “Trump launches all-out attack on the press.”

It was a supposed turning point: Trump held a press conference that was meant to clear the air about money he’d raised for veterans’ charities and which organizations had received the checks.

Trump repeatedly called the media “dishonest” for questioning him on the donations. He said the press “should be ashamed” of itself. He singled out ABC News reporter Tom Llamas as “a sleaze.”

CNN’s Dana Bash, devastated, said it was time for the press not to be “dispassionate” about Trump and his apparent assault on the press. PBS called it a “no-holds-barred assault.”

But even before the press conference that will live in infamy, journalists were faint at the idea of a politician who pushed back.

In April, Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple described Megyn Kelly, Trump’s most well-known media adversary, as “the Fox News host whose life Trump has pretty much ruined.”

By “ruined,” Wemple was presumably not referring to the Vanity Fair cover, book deal and primetime special that all followed the new fame Kelly enjoyed after she grilled Trump at the first Republican debate and the insults he threw at her in response.

The political media were used to being the ones who got to push people around.

In 2012, then-GOP nominee Mitt Romney was relentlessly mocked for referring to a chain of convenience stores found only in a handful of states on the East Coast as “Wawa’s” rather than the correctly pronounced “Wawa.”

The Huffington Post said it made Romney look “clueless.” Andrea Mitchell’s program on MSNBC even edited the clip of Romney’s remarks about the store to make it look as if he was offering his own amazement about a quaint fixture of middle-class life instead of a larger point he was making about the efficiency of the private sector.

That’s the price Romney paid for mistakenly adding an “s” to the name of a store most people hadn’t heard of.

Demonstrating that as governor of Massachusetts he made a concerted effort to balance out the gender makeup of his staff, Romney noted during one of the presidential debates that he’d searched through “binders full of women” for the names of qualified candidates.

It was the source of endless mockery from the major networks, who didn’t have a problem with obsessively ridiculing a well-intentioned but awkwardly phrased defense of equality in the workplace.

As for Trump, on nearly every op-ed page of every national newspaper on any day of the week, he’s called a “racist,” “xenophobe” and “bigot” for wanting to cut back on illegal immigration.

In October, the Boston Globe thought it important to note that Trump’s “simple sentences . . . could have been comprehended by a fourth-grader.” A US News & World Report story published in January smartly wondered, “Why is Donald Trump orange?”

When reporters and editors talk this way, it’s their noble duty as an “adversarial press.” But if Trump calls the media a bunch of dishonest dorks, journalists see an irreversible decline in America’s moral fabric.

Press freedoms go both ways. But the media weren’t expecting this year’s Republican nominee to know that.

Eddie Scarry is a media writer for the Washington Examiner.