Every year, Italy honors a single American journalist as the very best of the best.

Pulitzer Prizes may scatter to many journalists, but there is only one Urbino Award each year. To scholars of Italian history, this implies that a hot spot of the Italian Renaissance, Urbino, where Duke Federico da Montefeltro’s grand Palazzo drew Europe’s finest artists and philosophers of the 15^th and 16^th centuries, now recognizes top American journalists as the Raphaels and Castigliones of our age.

Past winners of the Urbino Award were probably unaware of what they had won, at first. Diane Rehm, Wolf Blitzer, Martha Raddatz, Thomas Friedman, David Ignatius and others  (since it began in 2005) may have been initially impressed when their award was announced at a lavish dinner at the Italian embassy in Washington D.C.

By the time they got to the ceremony in Urbino, in the ancient tapestry-filled great hall, it felt like a beautiful dream of Journalism Heaven. I witnessed that joy twice, for Sebastian Rotella in 2012 and for Gwen Ifill in 2015. They were dazzled by the colorful attention.

This year’s winner was Jonathan Karl, ABC News’ chief White House correspondent. The selection seemed an encrypted jab at President Trump, who calls Karl a “sleezebag.” Karl has covered Trump longer than any other White House correspondent and has written three best-sellers about him, “Front Row at the Trump Show” (2020), “Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show” (2021) and “Tired of Winning: Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party” (2023).

At the ceremony on Friday, Karl seemed charmed, an innocent abroad, by the Urbino welcome. In a TV news interview with a translator, he spoke pure basics. “I think the most important thing for a young journalist is to focus on the facts,” he said. “You don’t take sides.”

In an interview Nov. 16, 2023, when “Tired of Winning” had just come out, he tried to explain why calling Trump “worse” than before was not taking sides. It was describing what Trump was saying in 2023. It was the “truth” that future generations will judge us on, when they look back at this time.

For “Tired of Winning,” Karl was given a remarkable statement from a former Trump official, someone who worked with Trump almost every day in the West Wing, and never criticized Trump publicly. When this unnamed person learned about the classified documents Trump took to Mar-a-Lago and refused to give back, he wrote the statement to himself. Karl asked to use it, and the man agreed, if not named. Karl read aloud, from the book, what this person wrote about Trump.

He lacks any shred of human decency, humility or caring. He is morally bankrupt, breathlessly dishonest, lethally incompetent and stunningly ignorant of virtually anything related to governing, history, geography, human events, or world affairs. He is a traitor and a malignancy in our nation and represents a clear and present danger to our democracy and to the rule of law.

Whew! That was in Karl’s book a year before the election, and many, many others who worked closely with Trump said the same thing, more publicly. As a columnist for the Toronto Globe and Mail wrote recently, “Americans took a long look at all this and said, yes please.”