In the Bream interview, Gidley leaned on the crutch of referring “anything on this matter” — the Clifford payment — “to the president’s outside counsel.” He told Bream that “we’ve addressed this many times,” even though “this” had taken a 180-degree turn earlier in the evening, courtesy of Giuliani. Gidley would remind Bream that he could not speak about “ongoing litigation.” The one hiccup was that on the second and third references he said “ongoing legislation,” but he still managed to maintain his air of complete authority. Gidley tried to pad his stonewalling by fashioning a “sorry-I-just-work-here, ma’am” tone of unhelpful regret in response to Bream. This is one of his go-to moves.

“Again, its ongoing legislation, I can’t speak to it,” Gidley said to Bream. “I’m not an attorney. I just work at the White House.”

In the two years since Donald Trump first upended our politics, a generation of spokespeople have hitched their careers to him, with mixed results. They have become objects of outsize exposure, commensurate with the fuss and emotion this president attracts. They can acquire a significant public profile of their own — and can suffer significant collateral damage. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her predecessor, Sean Spicer, might be simultaneously the most famous and infamous press secretaries ever to stand at the White House lectern. Hope Hicks was unquestionably the most fixated-over White House communications director in history, rivaled only by Anthony Scaramucci during his 10 days of hellfire last summer. Kellyanne Conway, a longtime G.O.P. pollster, caught on as Trump’s campaign manager two summers ago and has since been known as his most ubiquitous defender/enabler/dissembler. The president’s spokespeople are easily nicknamed (Spicey, the Mooch) and come with their own ready-made “Saturday Night Live” treatments, side dramas and caricatures, all bound somewhat to the same theme — that speaking for Trump is an almost absurdist proposition.

In previous White Houses, press offices functioned as far more predictable entities. They could be frustrating and rarely edifying to deal with, but no one would expect otherwise — in the same way that no one would expect to be entertained on a trip to the dry cleaners. In my experience, these operations generally worked according to a default dictum of “Do no harm.” I recall a story from 2004, after President George W. Bush popped into a Roosevelt Room celebration of his communications team to offer his thanks. He singled out Scott McClellan, his bland and robotic press secretary, for a special tribute. “I want to especially thank Scotty,” Bush said. “I want to thank Scotty for saying” — he paused — “nothing.”

“Nothing” would be insufficient in the service of Trump. That partly explains his appeal to many of his supporters, who appreciate that he does not speak in the same lobotomized, on-message way as other politicians. Trump loyalists perceive him to be “plain-spoken” even when he says things that are plainly untrue, or that would sound outrageous if uttered by someone not afforded the same “let Trump be Trump” indulgence. The 45th president has proved, again and again, that he is a sui generis character whose appeal is predicated more on his own colossal selfhood than on any definable set of ideas or positions.

One contradiction of the Trump phenomenon is that even as his spokespeople enjoy and suffer through enormous exposure, the president’s Twitter habit — by far his most powerful communications tool — renders them less necessary than ever. Still, Trump places high value on his proxies and expects them to talk more or less as he does, even if this might include advancing dubious claims and crossing certain lines of decorum. There is no better way to win favor with the boss in this White House than for him to see you on TV promoting and defending him, the more adamantly the better. As a result, the job inevitably carries significant risk for the spokesperson’s own reputation.

This risk becomes especially acute when Trump’s ambassadors are called upon to peddle “alternative facts,” as Kellyanne Conway once memorably put it. She uttered those words in defense of Spicer, who at the behest of the newly sworn-in president had stepped into the briefing room on Day 2 and insisted that Trump’s “was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period.” Overhead photos showing Trump’s crowd side by side with Barack Obama’s readily disproved this. And Spicer thus became the fastest White House press secretary to blow up much of his own credibility, period.