Ben Schreckinger is a reporter for Politico.

I was strolling with my parents through the National Postal Museum in Washington last October—a rare day off the Donald Trump trapeze—when I peered at Twitter and saw that I, like so many other reporters before and since, had suddenly drawn Trump’s ire.

Six hundred miles to the south, in Norcross, Georgia, at one of his biggest rallies to date, the Republican presidential front-runner was railing against me over a story I hadn’t even written yet. Trump, it turned out, was steamed about a report I had planned to file about his failed businesses—not exactly virgin journalistic territory—and for some reason, he was treating his audience to a dramatic reading of my banal, businesslike emails to the former PR flack for Ivanka Trump’s fashion line who now served as his press secretary.


“So we have this guy. I don’t know his name,” Trump said, before proceeding to stretch it out like a piece of sour taffy. “B-e-nnnnnn Schreckinger! Every single article is a horror show. I’m winning in the polls—he said I should’ve done better!”

Why me? I’m no Bob Woodward. Or Megyn Kelly, for that matter. Just a junior politics reporter for Politico who, by that point, had been covering Trump for all of three months. I’d been to a half-dozen of his rallies and I’d probably written 30 Trump stories.

Yes, his aides had yelled at me on the phone and berated me in person; I figured this was standard for covering a high-stakes campaign and didn’t take it too personally. But this was suddenly pretty personal. It’s hard to describe how I felt reading the tweets. Why was a man who was seeking the highest office in the land suddenly so fixated on me? It was disturbing and also, oddly, a bit thrilling to be name-checked by a celebrity who can elevate anyone from obscurity, even if he was insulting me.

Of course, the stakes were a bit different then. This was before Trump’s relationship with the media became a central storyline of the 2016 presidential race; before his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, arm-squeezed Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields and police got involved; before the wider world noticed Trump was goading his crowds to turn to the press pen and taunt the reporters stuck inside; before he began the widespread banning of news organizations (including mine) from his must-watch press conferences.

In fact, Trump’s Norcross speech turned out to be a mild preview of the wild half-year to follow, a period that saw Trump rapidly shift, in the eyes of the media and the voters, from a reality-show joke to a legitimate front-runner—not to mention a threat that has united the Democratic and GOP establishments in a last-ditch effort to stop him.

Brian P. Kelly; Alex Isenstadt; @unclehenry

This, needless to say, did not occur to me all at once. Like previous generations of rookie campaign reporters, I figured I’d have months to learn the ropes. Instead, in my first full-time job out of college I was thrust into the middle of the most important battle between the press and a politician in generations.

Here’s what I learned. A candidate who puts reporters in pens, who talked as much about me as about the Islamic State at a big rally, who thinks it’s a good idea to revisit the First Amendment, isn’t really winning—or he wouldn’t be doing those things. Sure, Trump has proven to be brilliant at branding himself and projecting a simple, powerful message—“Make America Great Again”—that resonates with his supporters. But presidential candidates—especially one like Trump, who started the campaign with already near-universal name recognition—aren’t there to win every news cycle or show every cub reporter who’s the boss. They’re looking for votes, not Twitter victories.

Yet here was Trump making me—and other reporters who crossed him, or merely seemed to Trump to be crossing him—a big part of the story. That, I eventually realized, was the problem for his campaign. Trump’s essential smallness, his focus on winning tiny, unimportant skirmishes with the press—an approach that served him so well in the New York tabloid fishbowl that helped make him a household name—would increasingly come to jeopardize any chance he had of winning the White House.

I certainly wasn’t the only reporter to incur his wrath, but I had a very close-up view of the ways—private and public—that Trump and his campaign staff blended flattery, intimidation and isolation to try to silence critical coverage. Over time, it wore awfully thin. At first, the press pack I traveled in was as amazed as everybody else by the success of the Trump show, and like the rest of the world, we wondered at its staying power and off-the-charts ratings. It was a wild ride, and it was even sort of fun. But eventually, the Trump traveling press corps came to seethe silently at its daily degradation inside a Secret Service-guarded cage—the stress of our jobs compounded by a hostile candidate, a hostile campaign, hostile crowds and, eventually, creeping worries about how history would judge us.

Then again, that was still to come on that fall day I stood in the middle of the Postal Museum, staring down at my iPhone as my parents looked on. When I told them Trump was blasting me from the stage, my mother laughed. She thought it was hilarious.

My lawyerly father didn’t. He sensed the whole thing was spiraling out of control. “Be careful,” he told me.

***

It all began uneventfully. In early July, a couple of weeks after Trump announced he was running, Republican candidates were blanketing New Hampshire, decrying the country’s ruin over the sunny holiday weekend, and I was dispatched to cover it. “Could you write something funny about it?” one of my editors asked. Oh, and speaking of funny, would Donald Trump be there?

No, as it turned out. But a few days later, Trump’s press secretary, Hope Hicks—the steely former spokeswoman for the candidate’s daughter Ivanka—alerted me that Trump would be going to Las Vegas in three days. Trump in Vegas seemed even funnier. I asked for a sit-down with the candidate, and Hicks, to my surprise, granted it.

“Mr. Trump would be more than happy to have you,” Hicks emailed me. “But it’s a bit complicated. Give me a call.”

New Window Photographers barter for space to capture Donald Trump’s stage exit while Hope Hicks, the candidate’s media handler, stands by at a rally in De Pere, Wisconsin. | M. Scott Mahaskey for Politico Magazine

It didn’t happen. As I would come to learn, “complicated” in Trump-speak means something closer to “maybe Tuesday, or maybe never.” Still not understanding that an offer of a Trump interview was just the first step in a negotiation, I flew at the last minute to Phoenix for what I thought was part one of a two-part sit-down. I figured I’d get him after the rally I would also cover that weekend.

Already, Trump was becoming less of a joke and more of a real—and very unpredictable—factor in the Republican race. A backlash had grown into a full-fledged uproar over the three weeks since he had claimed in his announcement speech that undocumented Mexican immigrants were rapists and criminals. At the Phoenix Convention Center, I witnessed the backlash to the backlash. There were protests outside and protests inside, where 4,000 people had packed in to hear Trump speak. What struck me was a small—but I thought telling—sign of how the campaign played fast and loose, putting out a crowd photo of the rally on social media with the caption, “This is what 15,000 people looks like.” Never mind that the ballroom’s maximum occupancy was 2,158 (the fire marshal had allowed in twice that number), a detail I mentioned in my story and did not think much more of until later.

After Trump’s post-rally news conference, Hicks—often the good cop in these matters—tried to get me through a back door with the candidate when a man with a buzz cut and an earpiece shut me out, saying Trump was too tired to talk to me.

A few days later, after more back and forth, Hicks did in fact deliver, persuading Trump to call me that Wednesday. After all the build-up, the 10-minute chat was anticlimactic. He was restrained, even avuncular, on the phone. I asked him which of his opponents would make the worst president. “I don’t want to say that, because that would be disrespectful,” he responded. We headlined the interview, “Trump Grows Up.”

Soon, I was on the Trump beat full time.

Like most reporters covering him (I’m talking about the cover-every-event traveling press here), I was selected for the task because of, not despite, my inexperience. The Huffington Post had rather infamously relegated Trump to the entertainment section at that point, and most of the veteran political reporters were still worrying about presumed favorites like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio. So the early Trump troupe was hastily assembled mostly out of 20-somethings, recent college grads and an assortment of game, ambitious rookies like me.

I am 26 years old. I had come to Politico in January 2015, after having spent my first two-and-a-half years out of college working, for the most part, as a freelancer based in Boston. I didn’t know anything about covering a presidential campaign. I started off with a vague, Aaron Sorkinesque idea of trail reporting, culled from sundry viewings of The West Wing and The Newsroom: You fight with the powers that be during the day, then drink with them at the bar when the sun goes down. I vaguely remembered reading Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail in high school, but it didn’t leave much of a mark. I still haven’t read The Boys on the Bus.

During the 2012 campaign, I had interned at National Journal, and I remember a colleague, Rebecca Kaplan, who was embedded with Mitt Romney’s running mate, Paul Ryan, stopping by the office to tell us what it was like. My two takeaways: You never got to sleep in your own apartment, and the private charter jets used by campaigns were cool—you didn’t have to stow your laptop or turn off your phone during takeoff and landing.

As it turned out, Trump’s skeleton crew of a campaign staff in those early days was almost as inexperienced as I was. The deal-maker candidate was notoriously cheap, and a control freak to boot. There was no press bus and there was no press plane. Trump’s campaign announced events at the last minute, and the press pack did its best to keep up with his private jet by flying commercial. The network embeds often carpooled, sharing rented SUVs to haul their equipment between rallies whenever the next stop was within driving distance.

Rather than hire a seasoned media team to impose order on the chaos, Trump’s press operation consisted of Lewandowski, the buzz-cutted gatekeeper whose omnipresent scowl and earpiece made him seem like a Secret Service agent, and Hicks.

Neither behaved like their counterparts in other campaigns. Hicks refused to appear on camera and at rallies often strode a single lap of the press pen before disappearing backstage. (Surprisingly, our relationship with the rest of the campaign staff, and even Trump’s beefy security detail, started out pretty cordial. The security team, despite a well-earned reputation for toughness, even bouncing Univision’s Jorge Ramos out of an early presser at Trump’s request, were among the chattiest and friendliest people around, at least with the embeds they knew.)

New Window Reporters covering Trump are often corralled into jam-packed pens in the middle of his rallies. Above, CBS campaign embed Sopan Deb sits in the press pen at Trump’s town hall in Janesville. Two weeks earlier, Deb had been arrested outside Trump’s canceled Chicago rally after filming a bloodied man lying on the ground. | M. Scott Mahaskey for Politico Magazine

Still, the baseline hostility between campaign and press corps was dictated by the candidate himself, and from the start Trump, often through his alter ego Lewandowski, sought to dominate and demean us. And besides, it quickly became clear that the campaign didn’t need more conventional tools of media management, given that its messaging operation primarily consisted of Trump’s mouth—and he often said outrageous and provocative things that guaranteed negative coverage.

In mid-July, I followed Trump to the Family Leadership Summit, an evangelical gathering at a slightly dilapidated auditorium on the campus of Iowa State University. There, the billionaire, who had avoided service in Vietnam through multiple deferments, said of Senator John McCain, the GOP’s 2008 nominee and a politician renowned for the bravery of his five-plus years as a POW in Vietnam, “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured? I like people who weren’t captured.”

That day, we learned an ironclad fact about the candidate: No matter how dumb, insensitive or self-lacerating his remark, the man simply refuses to apologize.

As it turned out, Trump’s skeleton crew of a campaign staff in those early days was almost as inexperienced as I was.

But in this case, when Trump stood by his statement, Stephen Hayes of the conservative Weekly Standard wasn’t having any of it.

“Are you blaming John McCain for his capture?” Hayes asked incredulously at a press conference after Trump’s appearance at the summit.

Trump: “I am saying that John McCain has not done a good job as far as—”

You’re not supposed to cut Trump off, but Hayes did: “No, that’s not what you said, and that’s not my question. Are you blaming John McCain for his capture?”

This went on for a minute—with Hayes pushing and Trump refusing to concede. But it was an important minute, at least for me. Someone had stood up to Trump—as opposed to other reporters, and especially the many TV personalities who seemed to be willing to check their skepticism at the door to get access.

“There’s no question” members of the media are afraid to ask Trump hard-hitting questions, Hayes told me later.

“I get that he’s a tough person to interview,” he added. “What I’d like to see is serious follow-ups until he gives an answer that is true and not a change of subject. … A lot of what goes into his granting interviews is deal-making. I think reporters have been part of that deal-making. I don’t mean to suggest reporters don’t do that in other contexts; I just think the problem’s particularly acute with Trump.”

***

Trump’s polls went up along with the ratings, and it became pretty clear the campaign had no intention of improving relationships with us increasingly beleaguered reporters—or even hiring a real media staff. Trump’s traveling press contingent was starting to get really fed up.

Ben Schreckinger; Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images; M. Scott Mahaskey

Three days before Christmas, Trump held a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan—the one where he famously said Hillary Clinton got “schlonged” by Barack Obama in 2008. For Trump, the highlight of the night occurred on the floor of the arena. For months, he’d dared camera operators who faced him from press risers to pan his enthusiastic crowds. There were plenty of audience shots from other sources—and we dutifully reported the ever-increasing size of his crowds anyway—but it’s standard practice for pool cameras at political speeches to remain trained on the speaker.

For whatever reason, the pool’s cameraman in Grand Rapids heeded Trump’s command—which provoked feelings of betrayal among the TV embeds. Absorbing Trump’s insults was one thing; caving was another.

After the rally, a group of us retreated to HopCat, a local brew pub. One reporter performed a hostile but amusing impression of Lewandowski, but the main subject of discussion was what they saw as the camera operator’s Benedict Arnold moment. “I’m going to lodge a formal complaint,” one embed fumed in futility.



Of course, there was no one to complain to—in part because Trump’s nonexistent org chart meant reporters had few sources to cultivate, with all roads leading back to Hicks, Lewandowski and Trump himself. If Trump was judge and jury, then Hicks was the bailiff and Lewandowski—a previously obscure, midlevel Republican operative from Lowell, Massachusetts, who’d come to the campaign by way of stints on Capitol Hill, a Koch brothers-backed advocacy group and a side gig as a trainee boat cop—was the executioner.

I would learn this firsthand over the months. When I had co-written a quick Lewandowski profile in July, his staff liked the piece enough that an assistant told me she wanted to frame a print copy of it for her boss. The honeymoon didn’t last. In August, I reached out to Lewandowski for comment for another story—I had discovered his 1999 arrest for carrying a gun into the Longworth House Office Building and his failed attempt to sue the police over the incident, demanding $50,000 and his gun back. Lewandowski claimed not to recall suing for his gun but didn’t dispute the details of the arrest. He did ask me to include the fact that he had graduated from a police academy. I agreed but then learned his graduation had come in 2006—seven years after the gun incident—so I left his police training out of my draft, figuring it was no big deal.

Before the piece posted, Lewandowski sent me a text message with a simple and soon to be very familiar phrase: “You are very dishonest.” (He would later say the text was sent because the story didn’t post online when I told him it would.)

The next week, when I sought comment from the campaign for yet another story, Lewandowski called me and told me that no one would be commenting to Politico for a couple of weeks.

By March, on the day I published an article questioning the competence of the campaign’s field organization, Lewandowski was berating my editor over another gripe: I had called the candidate “Donald” rather than “Mr. Trump” in an email.

Other reporters I talked to were clashing with campaigns over a wide array of policy and political issues; the clashes with Lewandowski seemed to me to be more intense and personal.

After an especially rage-fueled late-summer rally in Mobile, Alabama (as I pulled into the parking lot of the stadium, a man handed me a newspaper with a story about “black-on-white crime” and an editor’s note defending “peaceful neo-Nazis”), I filed a dispatch that compared Trump’s tough-talking populism to that of George Wallace, the state’s segregationist governor who ran unsuccessfully for president as a Democrat.

New Window After the Trump campaign canceled his March rally in Chicago due to safety concerns, pandemonium ensued inside the University of Illinois pavilion where the event was to be held. Some supporters seemed to take a cue from the candidate and taunted reporters on the scene. Above, a Trump supporter (left) argues with an anti-Trump protester (right), one of hundreds who had infiltrated the event. When a second Trump supporter noticed a photographer nearby, she thrust her hand up to the camera’s lens. | M. Scott Mahaskey for Politico Magazine

Lewandowski went over my head at Politico to complain about the story. But the complaint wasn’t about Wallace; it was about my passing reference to a crowd count—in Phoenix, the month before. “In the 4th to last paragraph the reporter claims that 2,000 people attended a rally in Phoenix, Arizona for Mr. Trump,” he wrote in an email. “It is this type of reporting which leads many to question the objectivity of the media.”

In fact, my story had stated that 4,000 people had attended the rally in Phoenix, the official number from event staff. A few hours after I made it home from Alabama, Trump was on Twitter railing against Politico: “I had 15,000 people in Phoenix but @politico said ‘the rooms capacity is just over 2000.’ But said Bernie Sanders had 11,000 in same room.” (It was a different room.)

Katie Glueck; James Hohmann

At the end of September, after a month of testy exchanges in which the word “dishonest” came up repeatedly, I asked Lewandowski for a meeting at Trump Tower in New York. He agreed, then reneged, then agreed to meet me in the building’s basement ice cream parlor, which was, of course, Trump-branded. Lewandowski, fixated on the screen of his phone, kept trying to get me to say that I had been unfair to the campaign. I didn’t.

It was also clear by then that I wasn’t the only member of the media who increasingly felt under attack by Trump & Co.

As he solidified his lead in the polls, Trump spent more and more time in his public events exhorting security to remove protesters and calling out reporters by name, even when it seemed counterproductive. (Why, for example, in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses did he target reporters for the Des Moines Register, the state’s dominant media outlet?) Trump’s supporters could be even more belligerent toward journalists. At an October rally at the Doral, the Miami golf club owned by Trump, a female reporter I know left the press pen with a camera to document protests. She returned, shaken, and reported that she had been elbowed hard in the ribs by a Trump supporter.

“I know who you are, bitch,” the man told her.

***

One of the biggest misconceptions about Donald Trump is that his decades of life atop New York’s tabloid heap have allowed him to manhandle and manipulate the national political press with ease. In fact, the opposite at times has seemed to be true: For all his brilliance in garnering publicity and turning basic cable into his personal bullhorn, Trump’s view of the media covering him has arguably been distorted by parochial New York assumptions that didn’t travel well. In the end, his war with the press almost certainly has contributed to his unprecedented 60 percent-plus disapproval ratings—which will be a huge hurdle to overcome should he make it to the general election.

Before the piece posted, Lewandowski sent me a text message with a simple and soon to be very familiar phrase: “You are very dishonest.”

It’s true that Trump’s campaign broke the rules and succeeded for a time, but there’s one basic rule of national politics that he has ignored to his own peril: You win by getting more people to like you and fewer to hate your guts.

He entered the race with a lot of preconceptions about how the press should cover him and has never really let go of them. Trump’s memorabilia-bedecked Manhattan office tells part of the story: His wall is covered with blown-up covers of himself on old magazine covers, and he tends to see encounters with reporters as simple win-lose propositions, a daily tabloid game, with the ultimate goal of being provocative enough to get his name in print. “One thing I’ve learned about the press is that they’re always hungry for a good story, and the more sensational the better,” he wrote in The Art of the Deal in 1987. “The point is that if you are a little different, or a little outrageous, or if you do things that are bold or controversial, the press is going to write about you.”



For all its brass, though, the New York tabloid environment is insular, small and transactional, with an established set of protocols and a relatively limited cast of characters. Trump has a great instinct for what will hit, and has always served as his own publicist, cultivating relationships with reporters who play ball, planting tips, navigating negative stories through sheer bombast, ditching anyone who causes too much trouble—often by feeding scoops to competitors at their own organizations.

But the national press is much, much bigger and much harder to control. And it probably doesn’t help that, at 69, Trump faces a press pack chock full of millennials he’s never dealt with before. Ali Vitali at NBC, Sopan Deb at CBS, Jeremy Diamond and Noah Gray at CNN, and Kevin Cirilli at Bloomberg are all around my age—a few years out of college. It makes for a volatile mix, and might help explain Trump’s zigzag path between flattering and threatening, avoiding and bulldozing reporters as he searched out the elusive route to controlling our message.

Which is why if there’s one consistent theme to what I’ve experienced covering Trump, it’s the unpredictability. The handshakes sometimes come after the hardest slaps, and the doghouse is a short elevator ride away from the penthouse.

In October, after a Republican primary debate wrapped in Colorado—a low-key performance by Trump’s standards—I emailed Hicks and Lewandowski to tell them I was writing an analysis.

Hicks, to my surprise, called me moments later for my opinion of the debate, then asked whether I’d like to speak to Mr. Trump.

She passed him the phone. The first words out of his mouth were, “I respect your writing abilities, Ben. They’re good.” (I relate this not to boast: A week later, he would go on the radio and say I write “so badly and so incorrectly.”)

“Thanks, Donald. I appreciate that,” I responded.

“I thought it was my best performance,” he said.

I asked whether he wished he had gotten more speaking time, and he told me that he actually preferred being at the margins of the action. “I think that’s an asset, not a liability,” he said. In fact, he said he took the moderators steering clear of him as a sign of respect. “I was honored by that,” he said.

I thanked him for his time, and he signed off by telling me, with a hint of resignation, “I hope you’ll be fair to me.”

It all took about four minutes.

The era of good feeling didn’t last, and I take some responsibility for that. My story after the low-key Trump performance at the debate was headlined by my editors: “The Incredible Shrinking Trump.”

The next day Trump tweeted: “Wow, just heard really bad stuff about the failing @politico. How much longer will they be around? Some very untalented reporters.”

The phone call, you probably won’t be surprised to learn, was the last time I’ve spoken with the candidate.

As Trump rampaged from one primary victory to another, tensions were rising at his rallies, with protests becoming more disruptive and Trump’s language toward protesters (and the media) more and more belligerent. Everyone—reporters, supporters, Secret Service agents, even the candidate himself—seemed frayed at the edges.

The campaign responded to the stress in characteristic fashion. They cracked down on us. Just after Super Tuesday, I showed up at a Trump rally in New Orleans and found that the press cage had sprouted new bars. Rather than opening directly onto the floor of the airport hangar where Trump was set to speak, metal barriers now formed a narrow corridor leading out of the hangar, so members of the press would have to essentially exit the venue to get out of the press pen. Affixed to the barriers were placards that read, “Police Line—Do Not Cross.”

New Window Members of the press toting portable equipment are screened by police officers at a Trump event held in Janesville, Wisconsin, in March 2016. | M. Scott Mahaskey for Politico Magazine

Black Lives Matter protesters interrupted the rally that night, and Trump’s security team assisted uniformed police officers in removing them under the supervision of Lewandowski, who stood next to the scrum, arms folded. The avenue for clearing protesters from the hangar ran directly in front of the press pen, and during one disruption, a crush of people was pushed into the barrier at the front of the pen, threatening to topple it over onto us.

***

Earlier this year, a producer in Los Angeles approached me about participating in a reality show about journalists covering the campaign. He sent me a sleek preview of another show he was developing about war-zone reporters. I wasn’t sure that footage of me falling asleep in my work clothes at a Hampton Inn and fielding passive-aggressive emails over lukewarm coffee could measure up.

But of course the world outside The Pen remains frightened and fascinated by the Trump spectacle. And the candidate is still both a huge draw and the odds-on favorite to win the Republican nomination.

The handshakes sometimes come after the hardest slaps, and the doghouse is a short elevator ride away from the penthouse.

Yet something has changed. I’ve seen it. Trump can’t afford to play by his old tabloid Art of the Deal rules anymore. His months-long battle with Fox News host Megyn Kelly, and her dignified determination to do her job in the face of his insults, has done nothing to boost Trump’s terrible ratings with women voters. (In early April, perhaps recognizing this, Trump agreed to a meeting with Kelly at Trump Tower, followed by an interview scheduled for next month.) The same holds true for Trump’s ejection of Jorge Ramos and his subsequent stonewalling of most Spanish-language media: About 8 in 10 Hispanics now say they view Trump unfavorably, and that could jeopardize his chances in Florida, a state he claims as political home turf.

As Trump hits a faux-gold ceiling of support—63 percent of Americans in an April AP/GfK poll said they would “definitely not” vote for him—the press that often enabled him is souring. Reporters have grown personally aggrieved by his abuse and his threats of “opening up the libel laws,” which feel less amusing and more menacing each day he creeps closer to the Republican nomination.

So far, Trump has kept the press off-balance and leveraged the value of access to him and his campaign (in terms of ratings and clicks on websites like ours, where he still reigns at the top of our most-read list). As former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson recently told Politico, most members of the national media are cloistered in coastal cities where Trump is unpopular, and failed to initially comprehend the seriousness of his appeal to disaffected, older, white Americans.

And, as much as we were angry at our treatment by Trump’s campaign, many of us still hold the view that Trump would make a formidable candidate in the general election. He’s just too talented, fierce and clever to go quietly.

Still, Trump’s failure to move beyond that base means his days of special star treatment are coming to an end. In March, Chuck Todd, host of NBC’s Meet the Press, announced he would no longer allow Trump to appear on the program by phone. Since the Michelle Fields incident, the political press has shown an increasing interest in Lewandowski’s modus operandi, and, as of early April, his influence with Trump appeared to be waning.

Moreover, reporters and broadcasters are just getting tired of the nonsense. They may finally come to see that exile isn’t death and access isn’t a guarantee of getting the real story with Trump.

I realized that a long time ago.

Ben Schreckinger; Ben Thomas Payne

Since March, Trump’s people—perhaps concluding they’ll never get the kind of stories they want out of me—have curtailed my access, and often that of my Politico colleagues, to Trump’s public events and press conferences.

In Concord, North Carolina, the campaign did not issue me credentials for a rally, so I went in with the general public and was able to file a better story than if I’d stayed in my cage. A few days later, two Politico colleagues were initially denied credentials for a planned Chicago rally that was scrapped out of fear that protests would get out of hand.

“The rest of the publication will suffer consequences” for my stories, Hicks told my editors in a phone call about the credentialing issue. “I’m hoping that will encourage you to make a change.”

After the call, my colleagues got their credentials for the Chicago event, but we didn’t make any changes to our Trump staffing. And on the night of the Florida primary, when I rolled up to Trump’s Versailles-ish resort compound, Mar-a-Lago, I presented identification to a man standing at the service entrance, who found my name on his list and directed me to park my rental car among the Mercedes and Porsches arrayed on a manicured lawn overlooking the Intracoastal Waterway. I approached a table outside the press entrance where a woman with another list told me I was not on it. She had a club staffer escort me off the property.

I watched the results of Trump’s victory roll in from my room at the Fairfield Inn. Being turned away from the “press conference” turned out to not be so bad. Trump had been filling the front rows of his primary-night press conferences with friends instead of press, and that night the buffer had grown to 16 rows, with reporters stuck across a massive ballroom from their subject, who called them “disgusting” and did not take any questions.

David Martosko, U.S. political editor of Britain’s Daily Mail, tweeted, “Note to @realDonaldTrump : A ‘press conference’ with no Q&A is just a speech. I want my plane fare back.”

The very next day, Lewandowski, under fire for the Fields incident, made a rare on-the-record media appearance on a local radio station.

“I have a great relationship with these people,” he insisted. He meant us, the press corps. And like so many things about Donald Trump’s presidential campaign this year, it wasn’t true.