On Friday, at a news conference with Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain a reporter asked President Trump about disparaging comments he had made about her to The Sun newspaper. He denied ever having said them and declared that recordings of the interview would vindicate him. “We record when we deal with reporters,” he said. “We solve a lot of problems with the good old recording instrument.”

Do we?

“We have a problem,” my colleague announced in our office the Monday after Mr. Trump’s inauguration. “Trump doesn’t like microphones near his face.”

She had just returned from the West Wing, where she’d tried to do her job the way stenographers had since Ronald Reagan. As White House stenographers, we were among the handful of staff members who remained at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue when the administration changed. This was my first transition, but my boss had said every new administration she’d worked in since the 1980s was grateful for our help.

We weren’t powerful, but we were respected; George W. Bush used to call out, “I love the stenos!” whenever he saw my boss, Peggy, or her colleagues. Our job, after all, was to provide a first line of defense against the press by being present whenever a reporter was in the same room as the president.