WASHINGTON — We are not ready for this.

The Washington, D.C., press corps, used to playing small ball for small exclusives, has been suddenly thrust into a presidential administration that appears hell-bent on transforming our constitutional republic into something entirely different.

For decades, the coin of the realm in political journalism was access. Who you knew determined what you knew, and especially what “inside” information the people you knew were willing to give you.

Sometimes this sort of journalism leads to big, important stories that bring out facts that otherwise would never see the light of day.

Far, far, far too often, though, and much more frequently in recent years with a never-ending news cycle, the “scoops” that win reporters’ attention and promotions and higher-profile jobs are stories that “reveal” news that was going to come out anyway. Sometimes you see scoops that brag about some nugget just minutes before it is officially announced.

We can debate what sort of value that offers our audience, particularly if the cost of getting it is treating the source who fed you that scoop with kid gloves. There are actually terms of art for this sort of story — “beat sweeteners,” “source maintenance” — that acknowledge the symbiotic relationship here.

I, personally, have never subscribed to this sort of reporting, but nor have I had a deep objection to it. Until now.

In the before days, if a reporter had the opportunity to get a new tax proposal from Mitt Romney’s campaign a day before he announced it, OK, whatever. If President Barack Obama’s campaign had some research they wanted to plant about Romney’s businesses, sure.

In the end, the source relationships that led to that genre of stories were harmless. Whether Obama won or Romney, the future of the republic was secure.

That is no longer the case.

Before our very eyes, Donald Trump and his administration, with what so far has been an extraordinarily pliant Republican Congress, are taking those exact steps that autocrats who were initially democratically elected take to consolidate power.

From installing people who appear to be more loyal to Trump personally than they are to the U.S. Constitution in the key national security positions, to asserting vast new powers via executive order, to telling journalists to toe the official line or else — this country has never dealt with a president and an administration as power-mad as this one since the founding.

In this environment, trading soft coverage for better access is going to fail not just our various audiences, but American democracy itself.

It was clear as day what Trump’s White House was doing when it ostentatiously punished The Associated Press for failing to call the Gulf of Mexico by Trump’s preferred name. We in the White House press corps should have understood that if we did not respond with a unified voice, solidly behind the world’s largest news organization, Trump would soon start pitting the rest of us against each other.

And, of course, he has. On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that she and her assistants would henceforth choose the composition of the daily “pool,” that group of reporters who accompany the president at most events, usurping that role from the White House Correspondents’ Association, which has held that responsibility since the inception of the pool decades ago.

Hours later, they decided that HuffPost and I, personally, would be the next examples to be made. We were scheduled to take Wednesday’s slot. But two weeks earlier, I had asked Trump several questions he didn’t like during an in-flight news conference aboard Air Force One. And while Leavitt and the press shop resisted fully explaining their decision — in a brief encounter, she told me I should “be grateful” — it’s not hard to imagine the reason for what happened next.

Late Tuesday evening, Leavitt’s staff began trying to find another outlet to take over HuffPost’s pool spot. To their credit, The Wall Street Journal apparently refused to participate in Trump’s games. To their lasting shame, Axios did not.

Axios did not respond to a request for comment from HuffPost, though a spokesperson gave a statement to other outlets that included: “We had nothing to do with the decision to remove HuffPost and were unaware of that decision when we accepted the spot.”

In the end, though, how the press pool is run and who participates is a symptom of the state of affairs, not the cause.

Trump made clear what he thought of democracy when he tried to end it four years ago by trying to overturn an election he had lost. Far too many of us accepted the bargain to leave out that context in our coverage for the sake of access to Trump’s campaign and the chance for an interview.

That was then, when the idea of a nation careening toward autocracy might have seemed just a wildly remote possibility. It seems neither wild nor remote now.

So now is the moment. Either we will help the nation meet it, or we won’t.

For the sake of 238 years of democracy, we should choose wisely.