Former President Donald Trump’s dominant victory on Tuesday night over Vice President Kamala Harris will be dissected and micro-analyzed. Dozens of arguments will be made for why it happened. Whatever you believe, you have options. You can make a case about policy or personalities, or you can drape yourself in sanctimony and blame America.
So with that caveat, let’s attempt to locate some objective reality about the circumstances of what has truly been the most bizarre election year in recent memory — and particularly the chaotic, almost incomprehensible final four months.
It’s fair to assess that most Americans fully rejected the framing employed by large portions of the mainstream media about the stakes in the election. They didn’t buy that Trump is “the tyrant George Washington feared,” as The Atlantic screamed. They don’t believe that Trump represents “American fascism,” as the New Republic tried to argue.
The core thesis from the Trump-addicted Acela media was that Trump was a threat to “democracy,” and that Harris was positioned as the “unity” candidate. These were the narrative throughlines presented.
And yet there is good reason to see them as antithetical to how the average American views these issues. This fundamental disconnect is why the press failed to convince the country to rebuff Trump on Tuesday.
The “democracy” framing predated Trump’s November 2022 announcement that he was running for reelection. It was central to the Jan. 6 committee's theatrics, which had zero effect in moving the needle for the American public on the issue.
Then the Democrats went and replaced their nominee, the current president, without a democratic process. They just swapped him out — not without good reason, but still — and installed a new candidate no one had voted for, relying on the input of a few thousand delegates rather than voters.
While the media initially showed real interest in doing journalism about the Democratic nominee after the Biden-Trump presidential debate, journalists abandoned that mission as soon as Harris was installed as nominee. There was no attempt to contextualize or explore the discomfort of eschewing “democracy” to try to win the election, thus softening the talking point.
Then there’s the issue of “unity.” The Democrats made former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) a centerpiece of their campaign. She appeared at rallies and town halls under the “country above party” framing. The media gleefully played along, propping Cheney up as a representative of the right to support that narrative. But the reality is that Cheney had been thoroughly rejected by the right in recent years — including by her own constituents — and she and her father have been historically, passionately rejected by the left for decades.
On the other side, Trump built an actual “unity” coalition with former Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who laid out his clear and concise mission with expertly executed stagecraft in his perfectly timed endorsement rally with Trump the day after the Democratic National Convention. Free speech, ending foreign wars, “Make America Healthy Again” — these are liberal or even legitimately progressive ideas. The movement spread, bringing in Elon Musk’s libertarian “government efficiency” plans. The mainstream press either ignored this entirely or scoffed at it, making it a massively under-covered story of this cycle.
The narrative was that “unity” was on the left, but in fact such unity was more objectively forming on the right.
Meanwhile, Trump gained steam while largely ignoring the traditional press, using a unique media strategy that included long-form interviews with comedian podcasters Theo Von and Andrew Schulz, golfing with Bryson DeChambeau and eventually doing a sit-down with the podcaster-in-chief, Joe Rogan (who would endorse Trump on the eve of the election). These interviewers let their intellectual honesty and curiosity reveal Trump in a different light — not one spun by years of negative narrative construction, but one that was obviously authentic and un-fakeable.
There were many mini-hoaxes pushed by the press during 2024, most recently with the lie last week that Trump wanted to assassinate Liz Cheney. The press practically spent more time covering that non-story than the actual assassination attempt of Trump — another clear reality vs. narrative moment that exposed the facade. How is the Butler assassination attempt not a dominant story, except to push a narrative that is at odds with reality?
The 2024 election results are the triumph of reality over narrative — the public understanding, and rejecting, the media’s premise entirely.
And this realization extends beyond just the media. The establishment consensus-pushers across politics, science, academia, tech and more have been thoroughly exposed, and recognized as “Zombie Elites” by a wide and diverse coalition of Americans.
But beware of what comes next as we enter the Trump Era sequel — there will be hysterical flailing over the loss of power and influence by the establishment, which will not go down without a fight.
Steve Krakauer, a NewsNation contributor, is the author of “Uncovered: How the Media Got Cozy with Power, Abandoned Its Principles, and Lost the People” and editor and host of the Fourth Watch newsletter and podcast.
