Election 2020 Losers: Trump, Anti-Trumpkins, and Journalists

So the election returns are in. 

And my hopes, at the time of this writing the morning after the general election, seem to have been answered: Biden will narrowly win the Presidency, and the Republicans will retain control of the Senate. Neither side won, neither side lost. A very close election providing for split governance.

Wonderful!

How many people are there this morning whose wishes have been so answered? Voters like me who seemed to have had their way in yesterday’s election? Not many, I suspect.

But here are the losers, as I see it, in this election:

1. Loser #1: Trump

Without power and the presidency, we shall see how long Donald Trump occupies the public eye with his shitshow. Go find another shitshow to star in, big guy. I’m done.

I saw that in the frenzy of the vote count last night, Trump tried to have the counting of votes stopped and ordered the Supreme Court to intervene on his behalf. Typical.

Sit down, asshat. 

And pack your bags and prepare to depart the Oval Office — a close loss in an election is still a loss.

2. Loser #2: Passionately “Woke” Democrats

There was this belief among committed Democrats that the American people would snap out of it and vote Biden the presidency in a landslide, and also give Democrats control of the Senate. The “good” would defeat the “bad,” in a highly-moralistic passion play set on the stage of American electoral politics in the minds of liberal activists. The 30% of hardcore Trump supporters could be written off as “dead-enders,” according to this belief. America would redeem itself from the 2016 aberration.

Well, that didn’t happen. 

Just under 50% of the voters went for Trump. And they didn’t seem to be apologizing for voting for him.

“Woke” Democrats are now gnashing their teeth and rending their clothes that half the country is “racist” and “hateful. ”After four years of Trump and all he has said and done, they still wanted to vote him in for four more?” they ask themselves incredulously. And these Trump voters don’t look to be coming around to the “woke” point of view anytime soon. Are you kidding me?!?!?

The results of this election will be a hard gruel for Democrats to eat.

The Democrats went into the election telling themselves this: We Democrats are going to take back the Presidency AND the Senate! We will then pack the Supreme Court, get rid of the Electoral College, and admit two more Democratic states to the Union! We will defund the police and mandate “anti-racist” trainings in all workplaces. We will increase taxes, pass universal health care, and craft drastic climate regulations! We will clean house and restore “decency” to America. The future is ours! — but not so fast. Reality intruded. 

None of that is going to happen now — because America is run by “white supremacy” and all that —

We need to talk a lot less about red and blue.
We need to talk a lot more about whiteness.

— Arne Duncan (@arneduncan) November 4, 2020

— or so they say.

Maybe Arne Duncan and his woke-folk should stop talking and start listening — or better yet just shut up for awhile.

Maybe liberals like Duncan should chill the fuck down.

It amazes me to see these liberal zombies flinging themselves over and over against the metaphorical wall Trump never constructed on the southern border yelling “fascist!” They are unhinged. It is almost like the other side voted for Trump to reject these loud obnoxious leftists and their smug complacency that their way is the only and right way —

The Only Middle Finger Available https://t.co/kN16w2vTaK

— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) October 26, 2020

Maybe the Trump voters had their reasons, and maybe it was not because they are “hateful” or “racist.” Maybe the world is wider than these outraged Democrats know, confined to their anti-Trump echo chambers. Maybe these Democrats are narcissistic — maybe the universe doesn’t revolve around only them? There are others who disagree with them — imagine that? Maybe their opinions are not as important as they think. Maybe “the woke” are not as smart as they think they are. Maybe they aren’t even always right. Maybe.

Humility?

Listening to the voice of the American people? Or the voice of approximately half the nation?

So here is a good question for me: Do I dislike Trump more? Or the anti-Trump Democratic left? 

I am not sure.

Do I dislike heart attacks more than I hate cancer?

“A plague on both their houses,” I say. Which seems to have come to pass, amazingly enough.

Wow.

3. The News Media and American Journalists

The American news media has taken a strong line to cover Trump. Trump himself goaded and insulted the news media, and they took the bait. Many of these journalists — especially the younger Millennial ones — will not cover stories or support ventures that make “vulnerable populations” uncomfortable. If a message or a person puts someone at existential and physical risk, as defined by these journalists, then that story cannot be told. Quash it. It is perhaps the thinking they learned at college with “microaggressions” and “de-platforming” and all that over the past two decades.

And who will make this determination on whether a story puts a person or a population “at risk”? The journalists demand “sensitivity readers” for controversial articles so as not to offend. Journalists used to be made of tougher stuff. Now they live in fear of giving offense. They will be crucified online for it. Often journalists are the ones denouncing their peers.

The national news media waged war against Trump for years, and they predicted a Democratic “blue wave” which would give power to the Democrats. In retrospect, was this confirmation bias? See the country as they wished to see it? It was Anaïs Nin who claimed that we don’t see the world as it is, but as we are. Trump losing and “democracy winning” was the personal choice of American journalists, who are almost all Democrats. It seemed clear in a summer of pandemic and racial justice protests/riots, this colored their reporting. American journalism, which is supposed to remain above the fray and report, took sides.

Then the 2020 presidential election happened. The journalists were very much wrong yesterday almost across the board. The professional pollsters and elite commentators in the news media: their credibility is in holes, if not gone.

Our job in the media is to capture reality so that when reality voices itself, like last night, people aren’t surprised. Pretty massive failure. We still are not good at capturing the rightward half of the country.

— David Brooks (@nytdavidbrooks) November 4, 2020

Over time the situation has become clear to me: I now suspect every journalist to be a partisan liberal — secretly, or not so secretly — dedicated to advocacy journalism. There will be a spectrum of bias, as some bias will be slight and some will be more explicit. But almost all liberal journalists inject their own views into their reporting nowadays. You can trust next to none of them to give you the story straight up. 

And they are left this morning with a lot of egg on their faces. They got the 2016 Election wrong. And then they got the 2020 Election wrong. What happened yesterday was not what they were saying was going to happen. Can I trust what they write? Are journalists out of touch with half the country they report about (Republicans)? Do they come from the other half and fight for that side (Democrats)? Will they get the 2024 Election wrong? 

Are journalists all kind of the same in being products of graduate “J” schools and the “woke”-think you will find there in the big cities? It is all sort of a similar elite orthodoxy which does not jibe well with much of a large and diverse nation? Especially blue college voters for Trump in rural areas who did not go to college?

"Unable to admit that a Democratic Party held hostage by liberal arts graduates who write their preferred pronouns on their name tags might be out of touch with working class voters, many cable news talking heads settled on alternative explanations." https://t.co/cc3GXgkvXm

— Robby Soave (@robbysoave) November 5, 2020

The best example of this is: The New York Times. It is now official: it is the newspaper for the Democratic Party in America. It cannot tell the story down the middle; not only the readers, but the reporters, would rebel against a conservative unorthodox message. And it does not understand a good almost 50% of the country which is conservative. So they will speak to the other 50%. Their predictions — and hopes — for Trump’s defeat in yesterday’s election only makes this crystal clear. Journalists saw themselves standing up to Trump and democracy, and they inserted themselves into the narrative and took sides rather than merely telling the story and letting readers makeup their own minds.

I wrote a too long article trying to warn American journalists from surrendering their credibility as non-partisan reporters of the news. Too late now.

So along with Trump and the anti-Trump left, journalism in America was another big loser in Tuesday’s election. Journalism will not exit the Trump era without having been as slimed as everyone else. Another American institution in crisis. Journalists have basement-level approval ratings nowadays, and it is not for no reason.

It will take a few weeks for everything to settle and to make full sense of the election on November 3, 2020. We shall see. Andrew Sullivan later summed up the 2020 election: “They [the American people] removed the nutcase, defanged the woke, showed up to vote in vast numbers, and gave us a constellation of forces in Washington that please no one. And that’s ok.” I agree, except that it is not true nobody was pleased. I was pleased.

Well, I have written two posts in eight days about politics? I apologize.

Everyone, do something more important today than focus on politics! Politics will be like last week’s yellowing newspaper pages lying in the trash. It is transient. Your relationships and your health are what matters. Leave the politics alone for a while, especially if they damage your relationships or your health. Act like a mature adult.

Or, if you are a discouraged Democratic Party activist at risk for political apoplexy, try some Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Or just grow tf up.

To everyone: Stop trying addressing Trump supporters like they’re human beings with basic understanding and comprehension. They’re fucking monsters.

— Give Us Free (@monetxchange) November 4, 2020

So it goes.

As I have always said: there is nothing worse than someone who NEVER thinks about politics, except for that person who ALWAYS thinks about politics.

Try not to be that person.

Enjoy your day, everyone.

And if you want to see it all said better than I can, check out Damon Linker below —

"There will be no court packing. No added states. Nothing from the toxic progressive-fantasy wishlist will come anywhere close to passing," writes @DamonLinker. "Instead, we will have grinding, obstructive gridlock."https://t.co/d8fzbebzVX

— The Week (@TheWeek) November 4, 2020

“So please, Democrats, look in the mirror and show a little humility. You’re not nearly as self-evidently wonderful or widely loved as you’d like to believe. You are not destined to prevail anywhere. You share a country with a large group of people who hate your guts, and who aren’t going to submit to your rule or go along with your giddy plans to remake the nation in your image. It’s time to start acting like you understand this implacable fact and all it implies about the limits of your power and the parameters of the possible.”

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WRATH OF THE “WOKE” DEMOCRATS