Katy Tur Recounts Her 'Crazy Year' on the Trump Trail

It's a little hard not to make yourself part of the story when the Republican presidential nominee/insult comic Donald Trump calls you out by name in the middle of a rally, on more than one occasion, guaranteeing that you will be the story. And so that is where NBC News correspondent Katy Tur begins her account in Marie Claire of her "crazy year with Trump": In a speech carried live from Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, on at least three TV networks last December, soon-to-be Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump was telling the world he wanted to ban Muslims from entering the United States. "It's temporary," he later tried to soften. And then I heard my name. "She's back there. Little Katy. She's back there." I was six months into covering the Trump campaign for MSNBC and NBC News, and there I was, in the belly of a World War II battleship, in a press pen made out of bicycle racks, surrounded by thousands of whipped-up Trump supporters. The thing that set Trump off, writes Tur, was her reporting. Literally. It was the act of noting and tweeting out the number of protests at a prior rally, protests that eventually caused Trump to call it quits on the rally. But for Trump, that recording of fact was "dishonest reporting," leading to, for Trump, a public grudge, leading to, for Tur, an unwelcome notoriety on the Trump trail. There's a lot more to Tur's story than this unasked-for feud with Trump. There's the unexpected twist of right-time-right-place luck--a recognizable phenomenon to many who reflect on their own career paths--that got Tur, formerly a foreign correspondent, placed on the Trump beat. There's the engrossing minutiae of campaign reporting life, the behind-the-camera look at her interview with Donald Trump, the camaraderie among reporters, even when they are your competition: We often help one another, putting aside corporate rivalries or the day-to-day of who's scooping whom. If you miss a line of Trump's speech, someone will fill you in. If you're missing a charger or even the occasional contact, someone is always there with the assist. We depend on one another's public reporting, using it to spur new lines of inquiry and fresh reporting of our own. Many of these things are endemic to presidential campaigns in the general sense, but some are very specific to Trump. Circling back to that Mount Pleasant incident, Tur describes what happened next. It's unlikely, however, that any of Trump's future attacks will be as scary as what happened in Mount Pleasant, where the crowd, feeding off Trump, seemed to turn on me like a large animal, angry and unchained. It wasn't until hours later, when Secret Service took the extraordinary step of walking me to my car, that the incident sank in. The wave of insults, harassment, and threats, via various social-media feeds, hasn't stopped since. Many of the attacks are unprintable. Read the entire piece here.

Fishbowl

Katy Tur Recounts Her 'Crazy Year' on the Trump Trail

"It wasn’t until hours later, when Secret Service took the extraordinary step of walking me to my car, that the incident sank in."

Corinne Grinapol

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Corinne Grinapol