Trump Victory Media Roundup: Establishment Goes Through the Stages of Grief

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Donald Trump has been reelected, and the self-appointed arbiters of acceptable opinion in the establishment media are struggling to adjust to new realities. As they do so, they’re giving us a textbook display of what it looks like to go through most of the classic stages of grief: denial, anger, depression, and acceptance. And even though Trump’s victory was comprehensive and inarguable, we know from long experience that they’re going to have the hardest time with that last one. 

Denial was on abundant display on Monday, the day before the election, when PBS told us happily that “Harris has a 4-point lead over Trump in final PBS News/NPR/Marist election poll.” NBC crowed: “Trump’s once enthusiastic crowds dwindle in election’s closing days.” The UK’s Express took aim at a supposedly failing candidate, saying: “Donald Trump baffles with incomprehensible ramble as North Carolina rally fails to fill up,” and “Donald Trump suffering ‘memory lapse’ and ‘butchering’ speeches ahead of election.” 

See? It was going to be all right. PBS quoted Lee Miringoff of the Marist Center for Public Opinion, assuring jittery leftists that we were in for a repeat of 2020: “We’ve gone through all of this to get back to… pretty much where you ended up four years ago.”

When that didn’t happen, the anger began. On Wednesday morning, the New York Times was full of headlines revealing the Paper of Record’s barely concealed rage that the American people had dared to reject their expert guidance. Voters had made a bad choice and needed to be scolded, and the Times was ready with the wagging finger. 

“Donald Trump Returns to Power, Ushering in New Era of Uncertainty,” one headline warned. “America Hires a Strongman,” said another. The rest of the world was unhappy with our recklessness: “Four More Years of Unpredictability? The World Prepares for Trump’s Return.” The Washington Post was just as enraged, noting on its homepage that Trump “Becomes second president to win nonconsecutive terms, first felon.” 

The classic stage of grief that follows anger is bargaining, but the leftist media blew by that one completely. These people, after all, are the ones who polarized and embittered American political discourse in the first place, painting Trump in such lurid terms that massive segments of the population are utterly terrified at the prospect of this neo-Hitler returning to the Oval Office. They’re not interested in compromise or any kind of bargaining; as always, they’re out for total control and the absolute destruction of those whom they consider their enemies.

And yet their foremost enemy defeated them. So they skipped right on to the next stop in the grief scale: depression. “Democrats in disbelief at Trump’s win,” lamented the WaPo. “The mood at Harris’s watch party at Howard University started joyful but turned darker,” the Post reported sadly. “At 12:45 a.m., Cedric L. Richmond, the co-chair of the Harris-Walz campaign, came to the microphones to tell the crowd that the vice president would not speak until the morning. The remarks are expected to be her concession speech.” Violins up. 

MSNBC, meanwhile, had massive sads over what Trump might do now, and the fact that there didn’t seem to be any way to stop him: “We can expect Trump will pardon the Jan. 6 rioters and summarily fire the prosecutors who tried to hold him accountable. Having been immunized by the Supreme Court, he may instruct the Department of Justice to go after his political opponents. He will likely abandon Ukraine and begin the process of weakening our alliances. A newly empowered Trump can, if he wishes, go about trying to gut or kill Obamacare outright, while also trying to impose massive new tariffs on the economy.”

But surely, decent folk could stop Bad Orange Man, no? No: “We also know that the guardrails will not be sufficient, because they were not before. If they had been, none of this would have happened. Neither the impeachment process nor the justice system blocked his return to power. And now the ultimate guardrail has failed.” Yeah, you’re going to have to put up with a president who doesn’t share your socialist internationalist values; cry harder. 

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Amid all the lamentations, there was at least one hint of the final stage. Former Sen. Claire McCaskill showed it, however grudgingly, on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” saying: “I think we have to acknowledge that Donald Trump knows our country better than we do.”

This is not to say that McCaskill was giving Trump credit for political acumen; she was just saying that the country itself was as evil as Bad Orange Man. “I think he figured out that anger and, frankly, fear were way more powerful than appealing to people’s better angels. Anger and fear were going to work in this election. Whether you’re afraid of immigrants or afraid of people who are trans, he figured that out. And I think we all thought everyone’s better angels would prevail. Turns out the angels went on vacation since Donald Trump came down the escalator, and they haven’t returned.”

In those graceless and insulting words, however, there was a glimmer of acceptance. McCaskill may have been the first establishment leftist to admit, however backhandedly, that Trump might know something they don’t. Could this be the pathway to the left backing away from the insanity, hatred, and deviance it has embraced, and coming back to something close to reasonable values? Nah. Not a chance. But at least they are beginning to realize what happened to them on Tuesday.