wave of apprehension and anguish swept the Republican Party on Thursday, with many GOP leaders concluding it is probably too late to salvage his flailing presidential campaign. Republicans privately acknowledge it could be a landslide victory for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.”
A few days later, CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley proclaimed, “Time is running out for Donald Trump. . . . No candidate down this far, this late has ever recovered.” Two days later, ABC’s Jon Karl warned, “Donald Trump is down 17 points among women. You do not get elected president of the United States if you are down 17 points among women.” On MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson gushed over a Florida poll that claimed that 28 percent of Republicans were voting for Clinton and declared that “if it’s anywhere near that then this election, not only that Florida fall to Hillary Clinton but this election overall could, you know—we could be talking landslide.” (Trump won Florida.)
With six days to go, former Bush and McCain staffer Nicolle Wallace insisted she was bringing the “cold hard truth” to the table on NBC: “The best case scenario, if [Trump and Co.] do everything right? They lose with 266 electoral votes.”
On the Sunday before the election, ABC political analyst Matthew Dowd (another former Bushie) called it for Hillary. “She’s got about a 95 percent chance in this election, and I think she’s going to have a higher margin than Barack Obama in 2012.”
The Huffington Post proclaimed that Hillary Clinton was 98 percent likely to defeat Trump.
Ryan Grim of HuffPost argued, “It’s not easy to sit here and tell you that Clinton has a 98 percent chance of winning. Everything inside us screams out that life is too full of uncertainty, that being so sure is just a fantasy. But that’s what the numbers say.” Grim later repeated, “If you want to put your faith in the numbers, you can relax. She’s got this.”
On the morning of Election Day, Eleanor Clift was measuring the drapes for a woman president in the Daily Beast: “There are likely to be more than 20 women in the Senate after Tuesday, and together with Clinton in the White House, they will send a strong signal to women and girls that nothing is holding them back, that the future is there for them.”
This arrogant, elitist overconfidence is precisely what made election night so enjoyable for Trump voters. On the CBS Evening News shortly before the polls began to close, reporter Nancy Cordes claimed that after being “dogged by her e-mail troubles, a restless electorate, and an unorthodox opponent,” Clinton aides insisted Hillary’s “perseverance through all of it, Scott, shows she’s prepared for the nation’s toughest job.”
As ABC’s prime-time election night coverage began, they turned to former evening-news anchor Charles Gibson, who promptly whacked Trump for not being as classy as his opponent, referring to Hillary Clinton’s 2014 memoir Hard Choices: “The chapter about when you should apologize, I think Donald Trump missed that chapter somewhere along the line.”
Every single major news outlet picked Hillary Clinton to win a month before the election. Ironically, one of the worst prognosticators was Fox News. On the October 21 edition of Special Report, Bret Baier proclaimed that Hillary was going to trounce The Donald. The FNC electoral map had her winning the Electoral College 307–181, with 50 toss-up votes.
But on election night things weren’t going according to the script. Hillary was supposed to pick up some red states while sweeping the battleground states. She was supposed to win Florida early, which would seal the deal—but she lost. She was supposed to capture North Carolina—but she lost. “As Ohio goes, so goes the nation,” and she was going to pick up that state—but she lost that one too. A shell-shocked national media saw the impossible developing. And then the roof caved in when blue states considered impregnable by the pundits started to fall. First Pennsylvania, then Wisconsin, and then, sealing the deal, Michigan.
Donald J. Trump had been elected the forty-fifth President of the United States.
Liberals found themselves talking to themselves. They tried being temporarily apologetic on NBC, with Chuck Todd admitting that “we have overlooked rural America a bit too much.” Former anchor Tom Brokaw backhanded Trump’s voters as miscreants who “have to pull a pin on a grenade and roll it across the country, whatever it takes. ‘We want change, and we want big change!’” Leftist journalism professor Jeff Jarvis at New York University hyperventilated, choosing to blame the media for not being harsh enough: “I fear that journalism is irredeemably broken, a failure. My profession failed to inform the public about the fascist they are electing.” Just as New York University fails to teach journalism when it employs the likes of Jeff Jarvis.
It was the same thing with comedians on election night. What was supposed to be a knee-slapping funfest became no laughing matter. Expecting a Hillary Clinton victory, CBS late-night host Stephen Colbert was given an hour on CBS-owned Showtime for a we-won trash-talk special. They titled it Stephen Colbert’s Live Election Night Democracy’s Series Finale: Who’s Going to Clean Up This Shit? Colbert came out to a big standing ovation and cracked, “Please have a seat. You don’t need to stand for me. You don’t need to chant my name. America doesn’t have dictators . . . yet!” But then a worried Colbert proclaimed that the race was far too close: “This one is a nail biter and a passport grabber. It feels like we are trying to avoid the apocalypse and half the country is voting for the asteroid.”
As the real possibility of a Trump upset began to unfold, panic hit the set. Comedy Central Daily Show host Trevor Noah was in full hysteria, telling Colbert: “I don’t know if you’ve come to the right place for jokes tonight. Because this is the first time throughout this entire race where I’m officially shitting my pants! I genuinely do not understand how America can be this disorganized or this hateful!”
Comedian Jena Friedman picked up on Colbert’s voting-for-the-asteroid metaphor: “It feels like an asteroid has just smacked into our democracy! It is so scary and sad and heartbreaking and I just wish I could be funny. Get your abortions now because we’re going to be fucked and we’re going to have to live with it!”
MSNBC hosts Mark Halperin and John Heilemann (who also had a Showtime election series called The Circus) were on scene to add expert analysis to the comedy. Halperin clearly lost control as he wildly proclaimed, “Outside of the Civil War and World War II, and including 9/11, this may be the most cataclysmic event the country’s ever seen!” Colbert cooed his appreciation, “I’m so glad you guys are here. I wouldn’t want to be alone right now.” In the midnight hour, CNN analyst (and former Obama White House aide) Van Jones took to crying racism in defeat: “It’s hard to be a parent, tonight, for a lot of us. You tell your kids, ‘Don’t be a bully.’ You tell your kids, ‘Don’t be a bigot. . . .’ And then, you have this outcome. . . . How do I explain this to my children? This was a ‘white-lash.’ This was a ‘white-lash’ against a changing country. It was a ‘white-lash’ against a black president.”
National Public Radio was still in anger mode after the election on Wednesday’s Morning Edition news program, bringing on black author Attica Locke (who also writes for the Fox drama Empire), who rudely implied that each and every Trump supporter is a racist. NPR anchor David Greene politely suggested that it was not every one of them, but Locke refused to concede that there was a single nonracist: “I’m out with that. There’s a part of me that honestly feels like that level of politeness, where we’re not calling things what they are, is how we will never get forward.” Locke then went on Twitter to promote her taxpayer-funded radio rant: “Me on the election on NPR. The ‘R’ word is the new ‘N’ word, I guess. Why are folks afraid to say racist?” NBC Nightly News correspondent Richard Engel chronicled a global panic on the Wednesday night after Trump won: “There were gasps around the world. Headlines,
