https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/10/the-aftermath-trumps-victory-sparks-media-outrage-and-national-introspection/
What a difference a week makes.
Last week, I reiterated the prediction I had been making since at least July: the polls were wrong. Kamala Harris was going to lose, and Donald Trump would win by a landslide. His campaign, I said, would be like George Patton’s Third Army racing across France in 1944.
All that elicited a certain amount of scoffing, of varying degrees of politeness, from the commentariat and assorted grumblers. The actual results of the election—the biggest victory since Reagan’s blowout in 1984—seem to have precipitated the “national mental health crisis” that Mark Halperin forecast in October. As James Piereson has noted, the response of many commentators has been to blame the voters. How could they vote for a man they had identified as evil, an incipient dictator, a fascist, the reincarnation of Hitler who would trample on the Constitution, etc.?
Thus we have The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser, who declared that Trump’s election “is a disastrous revelation about what the United States really is, as opposed to the country that so many hoped that it could be.” The people are sorry they could not rise to your level of smugness, Sue!
Peter “Mr. Moralism” Wehner weighed in with a similar threnody: “This election was a CAT scan on the American people,” he wrote, “and as difficult as it is to say, as hard as it is to name, what it revealed, at least in part, is a frightening affinity for a man of borderless corruption. Donald Trump is no longer an aberration; he is normative.” How could we have disappointed you, Pete?
And then there is the genius loci of NeverTrump agitation, William Kristol, the former conservative. Writing at The Bulwark, Kristol thundered that “The American people have made a disastrous choice. And they have done so decisively, and with their eyes wide open. . . . After everything . . . the American people liked what they saw [in Trump]. At a minimum, they were willing to accept what they saw.” Oh, those awful American people.
One of the most amusing, if inadvertently amusing, eructations came from The New York Times, which put together a histrionic video in which a series of discredited Timesmen (and Timeswomen) somberly hold forth about how “extreme” and nasty the next Trump administration is likely to be: dictatorship, camps for ideological enemies, economic recession, etc., etc. As one commentator observed, it’s as if “Jonestown had recorded a final video.”
There was a fair amount of that infantilized insanity wherever the fetid pools of wokeness oozed. Thus we had Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, incubator of future diplomats and policymakers, advising their tender charges that “Coloring and Mindfulness Exercises,” “Milk and Cookies,” and “Legos and Coloring” were on offer to offset the trauma of Trump’s victory.
