CNN, MSNBC, and the whole lot of uppity, establishment apparatchiks may never recover from this.
I hesitate to overstate the matter, but I’ve never been more certain that the American media-political complex hates us. And by “us,” I don’t mean MAGA people. I mean the American people.
That is why Kamala Harris lost. Or, to put it positively, that is why Donald Trump, the “unhinged, racist, fascist threat to democracy,” won.
The former and now incoming president of the United States has been through a lot since he came down that elevator: multiple investigations, two impeachments, an FBI raid, 34 felony indictments, and two assassination attempts. But so have his supporters.
Over the past nearly ten years of Trump-era politics, the media has done its job remarkably well — that is if its job was to delegitimize, stigmatize, and denigrate support for Trump. “Make America Great Again” became virtually unsayable in polite company. Hollywood’s biggest stars worshipped openly at the altar of Clinton, Biden, and Harris, while those who so much as breathed a less than scathing word about Trump were relegated to the ash heap of washed-up D-listers. Trump voters were made the laughingstock of the entire nation. (Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Colbert, and everyone at The Daily Show made sure of that.) They were branded every name in the book — “weird,” “deplorables,” “racists,” “Nazis,” and, courtesy of Biden, “garbage” — even as the schoolmarms in the media clutched their pearls about Trump’s unconventional rhetoric.
The intended effect was to make you feel stupid: stupid if you voted for Trump, stupid if you complained about inflation, stupid if, before June 27, 2024, you subscribed “to the idea that an aging President Biden is mentally incompetent.”
Stupid, in short, if you did not politely nod your head every time some college-educated media motormouth waxed eloquent about The Narrative.
As Bret Stephens wrote for the New York Times in response to Democrats’ “humiliating defeat,” “I’ve lost track of the number of times liberal pundits have attempted to steer readers to arcane data from the St. Louis Federal Reserve to explain why Americans should stop freaking out over sharply higher prices of consumer goods or the rising financing costs on their homes and cars. Or insisted there was no migration crisis at the southern border. Or averred that Biden was sharp as a tack and that anyone who suggested otherwise was a jerk.”
“Yet,” he added “when Americans saw and experienced things otherwise (as extensive survey data showed they did) the characteristic liberal response was to treat the complaints not only as baseless but also as immoral. The effect was to insult voters while leaving Democrats blind to the legitimacy of the issues.”
You can begin to see how this becomes more than just a “MAGA people” problem but a problem of pervasive contempt vis-à-vis the American people at large. The media might laugh in our faces 24/7, but we could not deny that grocery prices were soaring. We could not deny that 13 American servicemembers had been killed in Afghanistan — that world leaders were snickering at us.
And what happened when undecided voters began to consider those factors? They were called Nazis. They were called garbage.
Revenge of the average, everyday working class American. My reaction to Trump’s crushing victory on @cnn pic.twitter.com/JkhixYVGLS
— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) November 6, 2024
As The Daily Wire CEO Jeremy Boreing pointed out, Trump might (frequently) say things with which I disagree. But he doesn’t have a monopoly on distasteful language. Far from it. The media routinely “say things far worse” — only their insults are directed at everyday people.
And those people — as November 5, 2024, made resoundingly clear — have had enough.
Far from delegitimizing Trumpism, the media helped spawn a disillusioned coalition, which, in turn, likely delivered for Trump the first popular vote victory for a Republican presidential candidate since 2004. As it turns out, pontificating about the alleged idiocy of your opponents might not be the best plan of action.
The New York Times said it all in a headline announcing (or bemoaning?) the former president’s return to power as a “Populist Revolt Against Elite’s Vision of the U.S.”
Notably, voters didn’t just reject the elite’s vision for America; they rejected their vision of America. From the ruling class’s point of view, we’re all just a bunch of bitter clingers and Nazis. But since when did we let the media define us?
“Most mainstream media in America is polluted with off-putting, fist-pounding, Harvard-educated, holier-than-thou highbrows who reek of pretension and pat themselves on the back at hoity-toity correspondence dinners,” I once wrote. This election day, 72 million Americans and counting taught that supercilious class of eggheads and party hacks a lesson:
Call us names for long enough, and we will strike back. Suggest that we are on the wrong side of history, condemned to oblivion in our own country, and we will politely, at the ballot box, prove otherwise.
“The assumption that Mr. Trump represented an anomaly who would at last be consigned to the ash heap of history was washed away on Tuesday night by a red current that swept through battleground states — and swept away the understanding of America long nurtured by its ruling elite of both parties,” the Times confessed. “Populist disenchantment with the nation’s direction and resentment against elites proved to be deeper and more profound than many in both parties had recognized.”
To that, the American people say Amen and amen.
