The anti-Trump media are still in denial

We woke up to a new American reality last Wednesday morning. The citizenry had delivered a clear message to the corporate media. That message was: get bent. The media have not taken it well.

The results of the 2024 presidential election were unequivocal. Voters rejected divisive identity politics. They turned their backs on talent-free Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, who had been installed by party bigwigs. They voted against gross economic mismanagement, men in women’s spaces and an unprecedented surge in illegal immigrants pouring across the border. After years of being silenced, fired and socially ostracised for holding common-sense views, millions of Americans roared back in support of Donald Trump, now president-elect.

What was Van Jones of CNN’s take on this crystal-clear message? ‘It’s bitter in the mouth’, he announced ruefully on election night. ‘What do we have to do to be acceptable?’

The ‘we’ to whom he was referring are black Americans. Jones is incapable of comprehending why all the plebs out there in Nowheresville failed to treat vice-president Harris like the political genius Democrats so desperately tried to make her out to be. According to Jones, the reason voters rejected her was not because they disliked her platform or personality – but because they are racists.

America’s most famous race-baiter, Joy Reid, also stuck to this well-worn script. ‘Black voters came through for Kamala Harris, white women voters did not’, she said. ‘This would be the second opportunity that white women in this country have to change the way that they interact with the patriarchy.’ But, according to Reid, they failed to take it once again.

Why? After all, Harris’s campaign was ‘picture perfect’, Reid claimed. It was only America’s deep ‘anti-blackness’ that stopped such a formidable political dynamo, apparently.

To be fair, white folks aren’t taking all of the blame. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough (the man who famously told us earlier this year that Biden was intellectually ‘better than he’s ever been’) wasn’t letting the 46 per cent of Hispanics who voted for Trump off the hook, either. He blamed their supposed racism and misogyny for Harris’s loss – a move that’s unlikely to bring them back into the Democratic fold. Trump’s win could have been down to ‘race issues with Hispanics’, Scarborough surmised, without offering any specifics. ‘They don’t want a black woman as president of the United States.’

Among all the more familiar smears, a new narrative appears to have dropped: the ‘garbage’ and ‘deplorable’ plebs are actually worse now than they were in 2016.

As the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser writes: ‘In 2016, perhaps it was conceivable for voters upset with the status quo to see Trump… as the outsider. But this is the post-2020 Trump… whose campaign will go down as one of the most racist, sexist and xenophobic in modern history.’

On panel after panel, cable news scrambled to make excuses for the dismal campaign run by the Harris team. For a moment, I thought I was witnessing a moment of accountability over on MSNBC, when Atlantic writer Tom Nichols said:

‘This is what 51 per cent of the American people wanted. This isn’t an accident, it’s not the Russians, it’s not some fluke… He is the legitimately elected president of the United States.’

Could this finally be some real self-reflection, a sober reckoning? Alas, no. Nichols then went on to fully absolve the Democrats of any blame in this train wreck, saying: ‘I’m not sure anything could’ve been done because I think there’s been something changed out there in America that’s really concerning.’ Of course, this terrifying ‘change’ he speaks of is the will of the people being duly recognised as part of the democratic process.

There is much talk of how supposedly dark and ominous this election result is. The New York Times’s frontpage described Trump’s ‘stunning return to power after [a] dark and defiant campaign’.

This is not the election many Americans saw. The most memorable moments of the campaign were Trump driving a garbage truck and serving McDonald’s fries with a massive grin on his face. Though perhaps if you are a Manhattan-based journalist, those things are a fate worse than death.

The election results have shown that the relentless fear-mongering about Trump and all the Kamala ass-kissing from the corporate media were a spectacular error and self-own. As it turns out, the American people are not buying what these overpaid clowns are selling.

Jenny Holland is a former newspaper reporter and speechwriter. Visit her Substack here.