I was trying to cast his coiffure as a metaphor for his inconstancy and obsession with surfaces. But still. I played into a caricature of journalists as smart alecks taking cheap shots from the cheap seats. We have to watch our tone. We really do.

It’s impossible to talk about tone without talking about Twitter, so let’s. Are we right to spend so much of our time there? Twitter is a powerful tool, a handy delivery system for bulletins, fact checks, links. But too often, we use it as a vanity fair and an ego fortification system. Driven by the dopamine of “likes” and retweets, we jockey to be bitchiest or most blistering, snidest or most sarcastic. These gibes are then used against us. I also believe that the sniping nurtured on Twitter seeps into our interactions elsewhere.

As Damon Linker, a columnist for The Week, put it, “This makes Twitter horrible for our politics and equally bad for journalism.”

Meanwhile, more and more of us are yoking ourselves to increasingly narrow ideological and oratorical identities. A particular perspective of ours draws notice. We get bookings — on television, for speeches — based on it. It becomes a brand with financial rewards. Press this button and get this argument. We’re economically welded to it. And as it grows more fixed, we appear less genuine.

We’re also served poorly by an occasionally reflexive pessimism bereft of adequate nuance or a sufficient sense of triage. Don’t hear me wrong: If Trump’s press is overwhelmingly negative, that’s because he has earned it. But we sometimes go too hard on lesser actors and episodes, potentially sacrificing the credibility and authority that we need for more galling moments.

One bit of recent press coverage raked Mick Mulvaney, a former congressman who is now the White House budget director, over the coals for saying: “We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress. If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”

But some of these accounts omitted or played down what he said next: “If you came from back home and sat in my lobby, I talked to you without exception, regardless of the financial contributions.” And few forthrightly acknowledged that this is common behavior among Democrats, too. What Mulvaney copped to didn’t put him in a league with, say, Scott Pruitt. Let’s reserve our maximum outrage for him.