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The Inevitable Trump Loss

That Didn’t Happen

JOURNALISTS ARE THE SMARTEST people in the room, so smart that they can’t possibly be expected to just report the news. Thus, they grant themselves license to package it and analyze it with an intelligence only they seem to possess. They profess to believe in the power of facts, but what they really believe in is their power to proclaim facts. Facts exist to be bent to their will to further their narrative.

In 2016 that narrative was more an unequivocal declaration: Donald Trump must not win.

It was clear from the start that Donald Trump was itching for a fight with the media. He was going to put the entire profession on trial in the court of public opinion, and he did that by introducing two words that within a year had become part of the political lexicon: “fake news.” The media were aghast that they would be so rudely challenged and dismissed the charges—angrily. Perhaps they had a point. It was certainly unfair to paint an entire institution with this broad, ugly brush. But when Trump unmasked one truly fake news story after another, the self-righteous press met the evidence with stony silence. The institution was guilty of aiding and abetting fake news. It still is.

The campaign didn’t begin this way, however. When Trump descended the now-famous Trump Tower escalator and announced his candidacy to become the forty-fifth President of the United States, the announcement was met with ridicule. Trump wasn’t just dead on arrival. He was a joke.

MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell asked Ed Rendell, the former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania: “Do you have any doubt that this is anything more than a carnival show?” Over on CNN, noontime anchor Ashleigh Banfield teased an upcoming segment on Trump’s announcement by asking if it was “hilarity run amuck.” CNN commentator S. E. Cupp called it “a rambling mess of a speech. . . . I was howling. Howling!”

On Bloomberg’s daily political show With All Due Respect, co-host John Heilemann explained, “I do not hate Donald Trump, but I do not take him seriously. I thought, you know, everything that was garish and ridiculous about him was fully on display. . . . Will it get him anywhere close to becoming the nominee or the President of the United States? I think not.”

PBS NewsHour anchor Judy Woodruff calmly relayed, “So far, Trump has placed near the bottom in public opinion polls of the Republican presidential hopefuls.”

She was right to say that. He was tied for tenth at just 3 percent in a CNN poll of self-described Republicans (and independent-leaning Republicans), and that was where her colleagues thought he’d remain, too.

“He can’t win, but he can get a lot of votes,” Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, a former political reporter, predicted on MSNBC’s The Last Word. The Huffington Post’s Marc Lamont Hill agreed over on CNN: “Of course he’s not going to win.” CBS correspondent Nancy Cordes echoed that opinion: “No one expects Trump to get close to winning the nomination.”

The morning after Trump’s announcement, MSNBC Morning Joe pundit Mike Barnicle chortled, “Can we stipulate for the purposes of this conversation that Donald Trump will never be President of the United States?”

CBS This Morning host Norah O’Donnell reported that “some Republicans say they’re worried Trump will turn the campaign into a circus,” and the subsequent story by correspondent Nancy Cordes cautioned that “party leaders worry Trump’s presence will turn the primary into a joke.”

NBC’s Today relegated the news to a dismissive twenty-three-second brief but made sure to include this insulting sentence: “America’s largest Latino civil rights organization called Trump ‘an exceedingly silly man.’”

That night, NBC’s evening newscast took it to the next level, featuring a rare narrated piece by Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd, who unloaded on Trump. “On the one hand, he’s a late-night joke,” he stated. “On the other, he’s the proverbial skunk at the garden party. How does the Republican Party handle a political streaker who knows how to get attention?”

With “moderators” like this, who needed left-wing Democratic Party spokespersons?

The Associated Press rounded up all the delighted late-night comedians as part of its “news” coverage. ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel joked that Trump would be like a “president and an amusement park all rolled up into one.” NBC’s Seth Meyers said that “in a speech cobbled together from forwarded emails from your uncle, he let us know what he thought that America needed.” Despite leaving The Daily Show, Jon Stewart released a video calling the announcement speech “over a half-hour of the most beautifully ridiculous jibber-jabber ever to pour forth from the mouth” of a billionaire.

On Bloomberg TV’s With All Due Respect, co-host John Heilemann acknowledged that all this carried a whiff of elitism: “For the national press corps and other elites, Donald Trump’s campaign is a pure vanity exercise, and a target ripe for outright mockery, or low-level derision.”

Translation: Viewed through the eyes of his colleagues, only single-toothed welfare inbreds with second-grade educations could vote for Donald Trump.

The mockery and derision have never stopped. The media had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the realization that a large segment of Americans wasn’t listening to their chattering. In fact, these nonstop insult barrages were galvanizing his supporters.

We acknowledge that it would seem easy to dismiss Trump’s chances in the Republican primaries if you were looking at this through the lens of traditional electoral politics. He had never run for any political office and was certainly rough around the edges, to be kind. He was loud and obnoxious, the polar opposite of presidential timber. Pundits looked at the gravitas and experience, the fund-raising process and endless endorsements, and the brand names of candidates such as Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton and expected them to land the two nominations for those reasons. Indeed, these were foregone conclusions for most reporters. The “experts” were about to be exposed as dinosaurs, thoroughly out of touch with the American electorate.

On the first night, Trump’s announcement captured just four and a half minutes of airtime on the ABC, CBS, and NBC evening newscasts. NBC made Trump the third story. CBS waited until the sixth story. ABC made it the ninth item of the night.

To put that level of uninterest in its proper perspective, compare that with their coverage of the last president’s announcement. When Barack Hussein Obama announced his presidential bid on February 10, 2007, he too was an outsider without endorsements or branding, and he was registering just 18 percent in the polls, far behind the presumed nominee, Hillary. Yet the same reporters covered it as an inspirational moment in American history. He didn’t need to have a long résumé. In fact, he had no accomplishments. But he was black, a radical leftist, and charismatic, and so his self-narrated life story (including a memoir full of casual lies) was enough to qualify him as the next leader of the free world.

The day Obama announced, they went nuts for him.

Both ABC and NBC led their evening broadcasts with the Obama story even though it had been anticipated for months. CBS had scrapped its newscast, preferring to run sports instead, but its Saturday Early Show made up for it. They previewed it by devoting over nine minutes of “breaking news” time to Obama’s decision. It included Politico’s Mike Allen quipping, “Senator Obama has gotten such great publicity all his life that one of his friends joked to me that this morning, he’s throwing his halo into the ring.” So true. (And just imagine how Hillary must have responded to this coverage! No lamp in whatever room she was in was safe that night.)

Still, this was their dream, not their reality. She still had it in the bag. Shortly after that day we were in the green room at Fox preparing to do the Hannity show. Asked what chance Obama stood, former Clinton advisor Dick Morris echoed the media’s outlook on the 2008 presidential election outcome: “You conservatives are going to have to face reality. The next President of the United States of America will be Hillary Clinton.”

Democratic campaigns often are described in happy word pictures provided by “close friends” of the candidates. Liberals are awarded gold stars and twenty extra IQ points just for being liberals. They promise “hope” and “change” and never have to define what it means, knowing that their friends in the media will never call them out. But conservatives? They are presumed to be either evil or stupid and sometimes both. Anyone around in 1968, 1976, 1980, and 1984—the years Ronald Reagan ran for president—will remember that.

Donald Trump made it clear that his days as a liberal Democrat were behind him. Like Reagan, Trump declared he was now a conservative Republican. Now the leftist press was going to despise not just his personality but his policies, too.

Right off the bat they erupted over his comments about illegal immigrants from Mexico: “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” In the first month of his campaign, ABC, CBS and NBC aired a combined thirty-one evening news stories discussing this comment ad nauseam. It would be so, one controversial statement after the next, throughout the campaign. Trump thoroughly controlled the news cycle.

Trump opponents on both sides of the partisan divide kept finding moments when they just knew his campaign would self-destruct. The opening speech about Mexico sending rapists. The statements that John McCain was a loser for getting captured in Vietnam. The presumed resistance to filling out any financial disclosure forms. Daring to withhold his tax returns. Pledging to suspend Muslim immigration to the United States. Slamming the federal judge who ordered the release of Trump Foundation documents as a “Mexican” when he was Mexican-American. Attacking grieving Muslim Gold Star parents who criticized him from the stage of the Democratic convention. Finally, there was the supposed silver bullet: the 2005 Billy Bush Access Hollywood tape, bragging about grabbing women.

Every misstep of the way they believed—hoped—he was a dead candidate walking, yet to their horror he seemed only to gain steam, with packed arenas and tens of thousands standing outside watching jumbotrons, roaring their approval along with millions doing the same thing at home. But it wasn’t just the maverick nature of this man and the unorthodox campaign he was running. It was the message. The press had no idea how powerfully it was resonating.

Missing the Revolution

The smartest people in the room believe their thumbs are pressed firmly on the pulse of the American public, but their world extends only across a tract of land along the Manhattan–Washington, D.C., corridor, along with some real estate in Beverly Hills. They were clueless as to the mood of an electorate in the real America that has lost its patience with the elites both in and out of government. This necessarily included them.

To understand the electorate in 2016 it is essential that one (re)read Angelo Codevilla’s “America’s Ruling Class—And the Perils of Revolution,” published by The American Spectator six years before. The 12,000-word essay was a masterpiece, read out loud by Rush Limbaugh to his millions of listeners. Codevilla presented an existential struggle for the future of America between what he dubbed the “ruling class” and the “country class.” It was prescient. Codevilla had perfectly described the opposing forces in the 2016 presidential campaign.

The ruling class is a fraternity whose membership includes those in a position of power over a population it views as less able—if not wholly unable—to handle its own affairs. “For our ruling class, America is a work in progress, just like the rest of the world, and they are the engineers.” The ruling class has no party affiliation. “Differences between Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas are of degrees, not kind,” the author wrote. “No prominent Republican challenge[s] the ruling class’s claim of superior insight, nor its denigration of the American people as irritable children who must learn their place. The Republican Party [does] not disparage the ruling class, because most of its officials are or would like to be part of it.”

On the other side of the coin is the country class with its “desire to get rid of rulers it regards inept and haughty. . . . The country class is convinced that big business, big government, and big finance are linked as never before and that ordinary people are more unequal than ever. . . . The country class actually believes that America’s ways are superior to the rest of the world’s, and regards most of mankind as less free, less prosperous, and less virtuous.”

Trump fundamentally understood the divide, and the billionaire chose to champion the country class. That would necessarily pit him against virtually all levels of power in America today: against the establishment elite of both political parties, against the Chamber of Commerce oligarchy, against the unions, against academia, against Hollywood, and of course against the national news media.

Interestingly enough, the country class uprising Codevilla had identified wasn’t limited to the United States. The same phenomenon was emerging in other nations. Many of the same issues, including unfair trade practices, uncontrolled illegal immigration, and Islamic terrorism, were triggering populist uprisings, and just as with the Trump phenomenon, the American news media chose sides.

It started with the elections in Israel on March 17.

The manufactured conventional wisdom and polling predicted a tight race and rough sledding for conservative prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. NPR’s Emily Harris reported from Jerusalem, “We might not know for days or even weeks who the next prime minister of Israel will actually be.” Instead the conservative won quickly and decisively, and that triggered a media explosion with the usual sore-loser outbursts about racist campaign tactics and how Mideast peace was dead. CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour channeled the hostility of Arab Israelis who, she said, “feel that the Likud Party and the right wing do have a, sort of, racist policy towards them and it’s very scary for them.”

Ring a bell?

Next came the British parliamentary elections on May 7. On NBC’s Meet the Press on May 3, host Chuck Todd proclaimed the race between Conservative Party prime minister David Cameron and Labour Party leftist Ed Miliband “too close to call.” Channeling the usual Democrat analysts, Todd declared, “There’s been commentary that if Cameron loses, the Republican Party ought to learn something from that.”

On MSNBC, anchor Andrea Mitchell brought on “senior political analyst” David Axelrod to make a fool of himself: “I think that the polls are accurate. This is a very, very close race, highly likely that this drama extends beyond tonight.” Wrong on both counts. Cameron defied the “experts” and won a clear majority in Parliament.

Like Obama field organizer Jeremy Bird, who had worked diligently in Israel to defeat Netanyahu only to fail, Axelrod had traveled to London to work for Labour, and like a good Obama strategist, he blamed others for the failure of his predictions: “In all my years as journalist & strategist, I’ve never seen as stark a failure of polling as in UK. Huge project ahead to unravel that.”

The defeats for the ruling class just kept coming. In June, the media were shocked again when Britain voted to leave the European Union—for a “Brexit”—over trade and immigration concerns. As in Israel, Team Obama was meddling with Britain’s country class, with Obama writing an op-ed against Brexit that appeared while he was visiting England in April. Only CBS quoted British politicians such as like Boris Johnson criticizing the interference. “The U.S. guards its democracy with more hysterical jealousy than any other country on Earth,” he stated. “It’s a breathtaking example of do as I say, not as I do.”

Speaking of breathtaking, the New York Times actually complained that British tabloids were “pushing an agenda,” dwelling on their “nationalist and anti-European tendencies.” As another omen of things to come in the States, the “Remain” [in the EU] side on the center-left led in the polls, but the polls were wrong, and the “Leave” side won, 52 percent to 48 percent.

How to explain the inaccurate polls? Fox Business anchor Stuart Varney argued that people had been intimidated by the elites and were loath to express their beliefs publicly: “People who wanted to get out of the European Union were shamed into saying ‘Well, I’m not sure. Maybe we should stay.’ Because, in Britain if you wanted to get out, you were labeled a bigot. You were labeled an Islamophobe. You didn’t like foreigners. You were a hater.”

The media’s reaction to the Brexit victory confirmed Varney’s theory. Over at the New York Times they were especially nauseated by the results. Columnist Roger Cohen said Brexit was a “colossal leap in the dark,” and columnist Paul Krugman called for readers to “grieve for Europe.” Michael Kimmelman, the architecture critic, announced the Brexit polling didn’t capture enough hate. It was “a clear signal, albeit not surprisingly, for increased skepticism when it comes to all polling that involves xenophobia and racism.”

Julie Bort at the Business Insider website summed it up for the ruling class: “Britain is broken beyond repair and the ignorant are officially running the world.” A Financial Times editor tweeted, “I picked the wrong day to stop sniffing glue!”

Trump, the Race-Baiting, Clinically Insane, Neo-Fascist Sociopath

All of this was an early indicator of how badly the elites were going to misjudge Trump. They dismissed him as an unsavory character. They missed the uprising he was leading. In the infamous Republican debate on CNBC in the fall of 2015, lead moderator John Harwood began by asking Trump: “Let’s be honest. Is this a comic book version of a presidential campaign?” But Harwood wasn’t alone. The other CNBC “moderators” got into the act and proceeded to ridicule one GOP candidate after the next, until Senator Ted Cruz reached the end of his tether over their nonstop insults: “The questions asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don’t trust the media. . . . You look at the questions. Donald Trump, are you a comic book villain? Ben Carson, can you do math? John Kasich, can you insult those two people over here? Marco Rubio, will you resign? Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen? How about talking about the substantive issues people care about?” The audience roared its approval. The CNBC crew returned to Washington, D.C., and New York thoroughly humiliated, a case study on how to completely screw up a national debate.

CBS’s Face the Nation brought on Slate writer Jamelle Bouie to smear Trump voters as racist: “Trump’s supporters show all the hallmarks of people with high levels of racial resentment. They are—you know, they seem—a good number believe that President Obama is un-American or maybe even a Muslim and connected to terrorists. A good number referred to him as arrogant and elitist which, for myself, reads very much like ‘uppity’ as an old insult towards African Americans who have achieved some sort of stature in mainstream society.”

PBS host Tavis Smiley threw the race card with more velocity on ABC’s This Week: “Trump is still, to my mind at least, an unrepentant, irascible, religious and racial arsonist,” he screamed. “And so, when we talk about how Trump is rising in the polls, you can’t do that absent the kind of campaign he’s running, the issues he’s raising.”

As Trump’s chances of winning the nomination grew, the historical analogies grew more ridiculous—and offensive. On February 26, the Washington Post editorial board decided to compare Trump’s proposed crackdown on illegal immigration to murderers of millions: “He would round up and deport 11 million people, a forced movement on a scale not attempted since Stalin or perhaps Pol Pot. . . . He routinely trades in wild falsehoods and doubles down when his lies are exposed.” The Post’s editorial writers repeated this Pol Pot slur (equating deportation and execution) on April 22: “Remember that Mr. Trump promised to round up 11 million undocumented immigrants and deport them, in what would be the largest forced population movement since Pol Pot’s genocide of the Cambodian people.”

CNN commentator Sally Kohn lit some warning flares of her own. Even if you couldn’t vote for Hillary, “the woman who’s running with the impeccable and vast record of experience, if that’s not enough for people, at least stopping us from being Nazi Germany would hopefully get Democrats and others to turn out.” CNN anchor Alisyn Camerota left the Nazi smear unchallenged. Three days later on CNN, Kohn drove the hyperbole into Fantasyland. She worried: “When he [Trump] institutes internment camps and suspends habeas, we’ll all look back and feel pretty bad.”

The Nazi smears were all the rage for the outraged. New York Times columnist David Brooks cracked on Meet the Press: “If we’re going to get Trump, we might as well get the Nuremberg rallies to go with it!”

George Stephanopoulos threw Hitler at Trump on Good Morning America. “The number of prominent people comparing you to Adolf Hitler is actually growing by the day. . . . I can’t remember that kind of comparison being used against any other presidential candidate. Does it suggest to you that you should tone down your rhetoric and your tactics?”

CNN host Erin Burnett badgered Florida’s Republican governor, Rick Scott. “The current president of Mexico—two former presidents of Mexico—have compared him to Hitler,” she said. “Vicente Fox, former president, specifically said, ‘He reminds me of Hitler.’ It’s direct. It’s not an allusion. It’s a direct thing. ‘He reminds me of Hitler.’ Do they have a point?”

By March 15, Trump had won nineteen of the first twenty-nine state primaries or caucuses and his opponents were dropping like flies. Jeb Bush had spent $100 million fruitlessly. Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, and Rand Paul were also gone. So too were Jim Gilmore, Chris Christie, Carly Fiorina, Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, George Pataki, Lindsey Graham, Bobby Jindal, Scott Walker, and Rick Perry. All that remained were John Kasich and Ted Cruz, his most serious challenger.

By May 13, as Trump closed in on the nomination, NPR’s On the Media host Bob Garfield lost control of his metaphors and, for a moment, his mind. Trump’s “supposedly courageous candor is contaminated with the most cowardly hate speech—racism, xenophobia, misogyny, incitement, breathtaking ignorance on issues, both foreign and domestic, and a nuclear recklessness, reminiscent of a raving meth-head with a machete on an episode of Cops.”

Trump was no longer a joke. He was a threat, and once the leftists convinced themselves Trump was a national menace, it wasn’t long before some of them started talking up violence. The Huffington Post published an article by Jesse Benn on June 6, 2016, headlined “Sorry, Liberals, a Violent Response to Trump Is as Logical as Any.” Benn argued: “In the face of media, politicians, and GOP primary voters normalizing Trump as a presidential candidate—whatever your personal beliefs regarding violent resistance—there’s an inherent value in forestalling Trump’s normalization. Violent resistance accomplishes this.”

Benn wasn’t kidding. After a radical leftist gunned down Congressman Steve Scalise and several others in June 2017, Benn tweeted the shooter some advice: “For violent resistance to work, it’d need to be organized. Individual acts can be understandable, but likely counterproductive/ineffective.”

Then there was the army of amateur psychiatrists. On June 8, 2016, CBS contributor Nancy Giles insisted to MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell that Trump was “clinically insane.” O’Donnell agreed. “You’re not alone,” he responded. “There’s a lot of clinicians who have been speculating about that.” Unsurprisingly for O’Donnell, he didn’t produce a single name.

New York Times columnist Andrew Rosenthal, a former editorial page editor at the paper, loathed Trump’s proposed travel ban from Muslim countries that support terrorism. “Let’s be absolutely clear,” he lectured. “This is not just about bigotry. The mass arrest and forced movement of large populations has been an instrument of genocide throughout history. That is how the Turks committed genocide against Armenians in the early 20th century, how the United States government decimated some Native American tribes and how Stalin killed millions of his own citizens.”

In a July 12, 2016, interview with Rolling Stone magazine, which is not a place you should go for journalistic integrity and truth telling, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow saw the Führer in Trump’s eyes. “What’s the worst-case scenario for America if he [Donald Trump] wins? It can be pretty bad. You don’t have to go back far in history to get to almost apocalyptic scenarios. . . . Over the past year I’ve been reading a lot about what it was like when Hitler first became chancellor. I am gravitating toward moments in history for subliminal reference in terms of cultures that have unexpectedly veered into dark places, because I think that’s possibly where we are.”

Legendary Washington Post reporter turned crackpot Carl Bernstein kept dropping the political F-word on Trump, as in this CNN interview snippet on October 21, 2016: “This campaign is now about a neo-fascist—I keep coming back to that—sociopath. . . . He is setting himself up as the head of . . . a real neo-fascist movement. . . . Is there going to be remnants of a neo-fascist movement that he leads in this country after this election? It’s a dangerous thing. We’re in a dangerous place.”

Trump was now a racist, a xenophobe, a misogynist, an ignoramus, a neo-fascist, and a sociopath, all rolled into one, clearly a menace and a threat to the future of the United States, if not humankind itself. But one thing was also for certain. It wasn’t going to happen in 2016. The media, like virtually everyone else on the left, were still utterly convinced Hillary had this one in the bag.

The Angry Aftermath: A “Moral 9/11”

As the campaign entered the final days, the media’s overconfidence in a Clinton victory was everywhere. On MSNBC, Chris Matthews was gleefully reading from one of those anonymously sourced Washington Post reports: “A wave of apprehension and anguish swept the Republican Party on Thursday, with many GOP leaders concluding it is probably too late to salvage his flailing presidential campaign. Republicans privately acknowledge it could be a landslide victory for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.”

A few days later, CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley proclaimed, “Time is running out for Donald Trump. . . . No candidate down this far, this late has ever recovered.” Two days later, ABC’s Jon Karl warned, “Donald Trump is down 17 points among women. You do not get elected president of the United States if you are down 17 points among women.” On MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson gushed over a Florida poll that claimed that 28 percent of Republicans were voting for Clinton and declared that “if it’s anywhere near that then this election, not only that Florida fall to Hillary Clinton but this election overall could, you know—we could be talking landslide.” (Trump won Florida.)

With six days to go, former Bush and McCain staffer Nicolle Wallace insisted she was bringing the “cold hard truth” to the table on NBC: “The best case scenario, if [Trump and Co.] do everything right? They lose with 266 electoral votes.”

On the Sunday before the election, ABC political analyst Matthew Dowd (another former Bushie) called it for Hillary. “She’s got about a 95 percent chance in this election, and I think she’s going to have a higher margin than Barack Obama in 2012.”

The Huffington Post proclaimed that Hillary Clinton was 98 percent likely to defeat Trump.

Ryan Grim of HuffPost argued, “It’s not easy to sit here and tell you that Clinton has a 98 percent chance of winning. Everything inside us screams out that life is too full of uncertainty, that being so sure is just a fantasy. But that’s what the numbers say.” Grim later repeated, “If you want to put your faith in the numbers, you can relax. She’s got this.”

On the morning of Election Day, Eleanor Clift was measuring the drapes for a woman president in the Daily Beast: “There are likely to be more than 20 women in the Senate after Tuesday, and together with Clinton in the White House, they will send a strong signal to women and girls that nothing is holding them back, that the future is there for them.”

This arrogant, elitist overconfidence is precisely what made election night so enjoyable for Trump voters. On the CBS Evening News shortly before the polls began to close, reporter Nancy Cordes claimed that after being “dogged by her e-mail troubles, a restless electorate, and an unorthodox opponent,” Clinton aides insisted Hillary’s “perseverance through all of it, Scott, shows she’s prepared for the nation’s toughest job.”

As ABC’s prime-time election night coverage began, they turned to former evening-news anchor Charles Gibson, who promptly whacked Trump for not being as classy as his opponent, referring to Hillary Clinton’s 2014 memoir Hard Choices: “The chapter about when you should apologize, I think Donald Trump missed that chapter somewhere along the line.”

Every single major news outlet picked Hillary Clinton to win a month before the election. Ironically, one of the worst prognosticators was Fox News. On the October 21 edition of Special Report, Bret Baier proclaimed that Hillary was going to trounce The Donald. The FNC electoral map had her winning the Electoral College 307–181, with 50 toss-up votes.

But on election night things weren’t going according to the script. Hillary was supposed to pick up some red states while sweeping the battleground states. She was supposed to win Florida early, which would seal the deal—but she lost. She was supposed to capture North Carolina—but she lost. “As Ohio goes, so goes the nation,” and she was going to pick up that state—but she lost that one too. A shell-shocked national media saw the impossible developing. And then the roof caved in when blue states considered impregnable by the pundits started to fall. First Pennsylvania, then Wisconsin, and then, sealing the deal, Michigan.

Donald J. Trump had been elected the forty-fifth President of the United States.

Liberals found themselves talking to themselves. They tried being temporarily apologetic on NBC, with Chuck Todd admitting that “we have overlooked rural America a bit too much.” Former anchor Tom Brokaw backhanded Trump’s voters as miscreants who “have to pull a pin on a grenade and roll it across the country, whatever it takes. ‘We want change, and we want big change!’” Leftist journalism professor Jeff Jarvis at New York University hyperventilated, choosing to blame the media for not being harsh enough: “I fear that journalism is irredeemably broken, a failure. My profession failed to inform the public about the fascist they are electing.” Just as New York University fails to teach journalism when it employs the likes of Jeff Jarvis.

It was the same thing with comedians on election night. What was supposed to be a knee-slapping funfest became no laughing matter. Expecting a Hillary Clinton victory, CBS late-night host Stephen Colbert was given an hour on CBS-owned Showtime for a we-won trash-talk special. They titled it Stephen Colbert’s Live Election Night Democracy’s Series Finale: Who’s Going to Clean Up This Shit? Colbert came out to a big standing ovation and cracked, “Please have a seat. You don’t need to stand for me. You don’t need to chant my name. America doesn’t have dictators . . . yet!” But then a worried Colbert proclaimed that the race was far too close: “This one is a nail biter and a passport grabber. It feels like we are trying to avoid the apocalypse and half the country is voting for the asteroid.”

As the real possibility of a Trump upset began to unfold, panic hit the set. Comedy Central Daily Show host Trevor Noah was in full hysteria, telling Colbert: “I don’t know if you’ve come to the right place for jokes tonight. Because this is the first time throughout this entire race where I’m officially shitting my pants! I genuinely do not understand how America can be this disorganized or this hateful!”

Comedian Jena Friedman picked up on Colbert’s voting-for-the-asteroid metaphor: “It feels like an asteroid has just smacked into our democracy! It is so scary and sad and heartbreaking and I just wish I could be funny. Get your abortions now because we’re going to be fucked and we’re going to have to live with it!”

MSNBC hosts Mark Halperin and John Heilemann (who also had a Showtime election series called The Circus) were on scene to add expert analysis to the comedy. Halperin clearly lost control as he wildly proclaimed, “Outside of the Civil War and World War II, and including 9/11, this may be the most cataclysmic event the country’s ever seen!” Colbert cooed his appreciation, “I’m so glad you guys are here. I wouldn’t want to be alone right now.” In the midnight hour, CNN analyst (and former Obama White House aide) Van Jones took to crying racism in defeat: “It’s hard to be a parent, tonight, for a lot of us. You tell your kids, ‘Don’t be a bully.’ You tell your kids, ‘Don’t be a bigot. . . .’ And then, you have this outcome. . . . How do I explain this to my children? This was a ‘white-lash.’ This was a ‘white-lash’ against a changing country. It was a ‘white-lash’ against a black president.”

National Public Radio was still in anger mode after the election on Wednesday’s Morning Edition news program, bringing on black author Attica Locke (who also writes for the Fox drama Empire), who rudely implied that each and every Trump supporter is a racist. NPR anchor David Greene politely suggested that it was not every one of them, but Locke refused to concede that there was a single nonracist: “I’m out with that. There’s a part of me that honestly feels like that level of politeness, where we’re not calling things what they are, is how we will never get forward.” Locke then went on Twitter to promote her taxpayer-funded radio rant: “Me on the election on NPR. The ‘R’ word is the new ‘N’ word, I guess. Why are folks afraid to say racist?” NBC Nightly News correspondent Richard Engel chronicled a global panic on the Wednesday night after Trump won: “There were gasps around the world. Headlines, ‘Trumpocalypse’ and ‘Disunited States.’ And echoes of the Brexit vote too, against the European Union establishment. But there are deeper concerns tonight that the world’s shining light of democracy has gone dark.”

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman echoed Halperin’s 9/11 metaphor on Friday night on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher: “This is a moral 9/11! Only 9/11 was done to us from the outside and we did this to ourselves.” Hillary losing was now the moral equivalent of losing 3,000 Americans in a terrorist attack.

That verdict came after Maher’s own angry rant against Trump voters, who he believed had sealed their own doom: “Enjoy your victory, Trump voters. Because when you’re dying because you don’t have health insurance to treat the infection you got for a back alley abortion you had to get because of fetal lead poisoning, you can say to yourself, at least I didn’t vote for someone with a private e-mail server.”

When Democrats win, it’s a victory for hope and change and national unity. When Republicans win, it is a sad day, a victory for dark forces, their vicious lies and flagrant fouls, manipulating the unruly throng. As Peter Jennings infamously said after the 1994 Republican wave election, it was “a nation full of uncontrolled two-year-old rage,” a stomping, screaming temper tantrum, not a serious verdict on the future of America. These voters would need to see the error of their ways and know the damage they had committed.

They saw Trump’s voters just as the Clinton campaign saw them: a basket of deplorables. All season long the pro-Hillary press treated Trump’s followers with utter contempt. This was the country class showing its utter temerity in challenging the ruling class. These were extra-chromosomed rednecks in MAGA hats. As Hillary put it, they were “irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.”

But those deplorables carried the day.

The pundits got it all wrong. They had accepted the comforting prophecies of the national media, not just regarding the coronation of Hillary Clinton, but on America’s repudiation of Donald Trump. It was a resounding rejection of the ruling class—themselves. But these elites were not going silently into the night. The media would only double down, and triple down, and quadruple down as Trump made his way to the White House. All the rules learned at journalism school were tossed aside. If the news was harmful to this man, it was to be magnified; if it was favorable to him, it was to be ignored; and if needed, the “news” was faked.

The ruling class was not about to concede an inch of turf to the peasants.