This is my favorite aspect of the win by a mile. The mainstream media, social media, and all 3 branches of government all worked in concert to try to tell people to hate this man, and the majority of people said no. That is an actual victory for democracy.
My dude, Trump et al spent the last 5-years straight shouting over the airwaves of every network that aired him (
and most did, whether because they supported him or because he was a public figure making outrageous statements) that if the Democrats win "you won't have a country any more", the last 8 years gaslighting his voter base that the US worked on Fisher King logic and therefore entered a golden age the very moment he entered office, and the last 4 years declaring that any and all efforts to recover from the mess he left behind (Granted, that very prominently includes Covid, which he had limited control over) was all Biden's fault and proved that we entered a dark age the moment he was elected. Never mind that the economic contrast was
not remotely what Trump and his supporters pretend, and the perception to the contrary is largely due to the fallacy of "proof by assertion", with Trump and his allies' oft-repeated claims about the state of the country and economy making more headlines than the actual facts about them over the last 8 years and consequentially dominating perceptions about it.
He has been running his campaign virtually nonstop for the last 9+ years, has a disturbingly large chunk of the media ecosystem fawning over him as practically the Second Coming itself, and created his own "by Trump, for Trump" echo chamber/propaganda machine in the form of Truth Social two years ago.
Concurrently, Musk started abusing his acquisition of Twitter to advance the culture wars that Trump has been running on as he tried to win back Trump as a user, and to that end turned Twitter into one of the more brazen sources of
election misinformation, particularly favoring Trump and using the platform as a central fulcrum for his pro-Trump "America PAC" and started suspending/banning left-leaning journalists for writing articles critical of Trump, while hypocritically
complaining that he suspected that other Twitter personnel seemed favorably predisposed to left wing candidates in other countries.
For the last 8 years straight, the Republican outlets, pundits, commentators, and politicians have all religiously tried to downplay and normalize everything about Trump, while hypocritically clutching their pearls over nothing-burgers that they feel entitled to being seen as worse on principle. Case in point: When Clinton in 2016 and Harris in 2024 didn't concede
before they even officially lost, it was spun as an inexcusable outrage and beyond the pale. But when Trump didn't concede the 2020 election
for 4 years and counting? Complete with repeated meritless lawsuits and storming the capitol to try and get Congress to illegally flip the vote? They went all out on trying to excuse that as him just "exploring his legal options" and much ado about nothing.
They've been explicitly treating Democrat voters as foreign invaders that needed to be repelled, reinforcing Trump's fearmongering that Democratic votes are illegitimate and imported in the form of illegal immigrants, which itself builds off the
constant refrain from Republican campaigns and conservative outlet for
40 straight years - almost nonstop ever since Reagan codified the rhetorical contrast between "Liberals and Americans" during his campaign. And meanwhile the Democrats are cast as spiteful and hyperbolic fearmongers even for highlighting how heavily Trump's rhetoric is rooted in prejudices such as xenophobia and racism (such as using immigrants as his go-to scapegoat and characterizing them as an infestation that is "poisoning the blood of our country"). Trump's supporters got practically coddled as they lived in flat-out denial about his electoral defeat for
4 years, but somehow that's painted as less shameful than Democrats being upset about the 2024 results mere
days after the election.
The situation is not remotely what you pretend. Just look at the
Top Podcasts for a moment: Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk, Don Bongino, Theo Von, Megyn Kelly, Ben Sharpio, Cadance Owens...all in the Top 20, and most of whom have been all-in
for years on promoting Trump, including painting any and all criticism of him (ranging from raised eyebrows to serious allegations) as - on principle - necessarily illegitimate, and characterizing Democrats as unamerican traitors who should be expelled from the country. These are not niche underground voices, they are big names with massive reach. Trump has had the full force of Conservative pundits practically campaigning for him and running interference on anything that could negatively impact his campaign. And then of course there were the churches that were
using their religious services as political rallies that treated Trump as ordained by God and even messianic.
And let's peel back the paint a bit on that narrative that Trump being criticized shows bias against him. While Trump has been subjected to a lot of criticism for his rhetoric and actions, he has also overwhelmingly been treated with
kid gloves and subjected to a
much lower standard than everyone else. E.g. whereas Biden's mental acuity was questioned every time he so much as got a fact wrong, misspoke, or paused a little too long on the podium, Trump got hardly a fraction of that criticism despite routinely spouting
nonsensical non-sequitur like claiming wind turbines kill whales or that magnets don't work underwater, bragging about his ability to pass a basic mental competency test (which he even
implied to be difficult to do, and that he therefore deserved adulation for passing), and just standing onstage at his planned rally silently swaying to music for
40 minutes.
Can you just imagine the red flags that would have gone up if Biden or Harris had answered a question about what they thought was the biggest threat
to manufacturing jobs in Michigan, with "Ok, so I’ll get into another little bit of a long answer. Because when you say major threat, to me we have one really major threat. That’s called
nuclear weapons"? If Biden said it, it would have been treated as further evidence that his brain had turned to tapioca - showing that the only part of the question that his dementia addled-mind registered was the phrase 'major threat', and how that gaffe raised all sorts of alarm bells about his fitness for office. If Harris did it, it would have been treated as a potentially campaign ending gaffe showing how little she even thought about Michigan. But this exact exchange happened with Trump just two months ago and the story petered out as quickly as it appeared with him no worse for the wear.
There has indeed been a very clear double standard at play for the last 8 years, but despite popular rhetoric form you and the rest of Trump's supporters, the bias has been consistently
in Trump's favor. Whereas everyone else actually had to act presidential and any slip-up was treated as a red flag, Trump has been consistently excused - and even celebrated - for not even acting like a functional adult, never mind how he's consistently appeared to be somewhere between grossly inattentive and senile, and having such a cavalier disregard for the truth that his allies coined the term "
alternate facts" to downplay and normalize he and his allies' frequent, bizarre, often petty, and unapologetic breaks from reality. But even so, you and yours treat pushback against even
that as in itself proving that the speakers must have been misled by the media to "just hate Trump" on uninformed principle, and use that assumption to further insist that the criticism must therefore be hyperbolic, when in fact he's typically gotten off considerably lighter than what literally anyone else would have for the same event.
This wasn't a victory for truth and democracy over the forces of the evil media. It was a testament to the sheer power of that double standard. And it's a testament to the reach and influence his supporters have over the popular discourse, never mind the power of being a golden calf, given how even the Religious Right has
started calling out what has increasingly come off as outright idolatry of him.
Trump's 2024 campaign was many things, but by absolutely no stretch of the imagination was it the Cinderella Story you are painting it as. You can certainly argue that he was the underdog in 2016, but ever since then he's been the Republican frontrunner - and its most prominent 'kingmaker' - bolstered by the full power of the party, its congressional politicians, upwards of a plurality of its state politicians, and its media empire (plus his very own echo chamber of Truth Social, and later Twitter) both stumping for him almost around the clock and treating unwavering support for him as a purity test. And all of those counted his "MAGA" base as a core audience that they could not risk alienating, giving them a
strong vested interest both in boosting Trump and pandering to he and his base's victim complex, because that audience's continued patronage of them was predicated on it.
" and settle for the crumbs that fall off the table as Democrats gorge on the promised buffet.