COMMENTARY: Trump’s victory, through the lens of cable news
On election night, I was switching between CNN and MSNBC for election coverage, because my motto is the same as Ghenghis Khan (or was it Sun Tzu?): Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.
I figured it would be instructive to watch how the networks that have exhibited a visceral hatred for Donald Trump since he came on the political scene described the trajectory of the evening.
The evening started with Jake Tapper and John King, on whom I have an inexplicable but major nerd crush, standing in front of the Big Board and discussing the mathematical possibilities for Trump and Kamala Harris. Unlike some of their colleagues, these guys played it fairly straight and didn’t show their hand about who they hoped would win. Of course, we already knew who Tapper wanted to win, but he was admirably middle of the road, as he had been in the ill-fated CNN debate between Biden and Trump.
And even though I’m sure King is a liberal, I never get the feeling that he’s rooting for a side. Which is why I have a crush on him.
As the evening progressed, however, Trump started racking up electoral votes. The CNN duo explained this away as exactly what had happened in the 2020 race between the former president and current President Joe Biden. It was as if they were calming the nerves of an audience that didn’t want to see Trump with 105 votes and Harris with 25.
But when we started hitting 9 p.m. and 10 p.m., I noticed a definite shift in the way that Tapper was talking. His normally staccato intonations had become a bit more halting, a little flatter. King had to jump in more often with comments such as “Well this precinct is very blue, but it’s still too soon to call because everyone in the precinct is out milking the cows and hasn’t voted yet.”
To be fair, I have to credit CNN for being very even-handed in its coverage, even though their angst and upset became obvious as Trump started collecting more and more states, including big ones such as Texas, Florida and Ohio. And yet they were able to tap dance a bit, because Pennsylvania wasn’t going to go gentle into that good night. The Commonwealth was going to give everyone agida, as it went first overwhelmingly for Harris, then Trump started closing the gap, and then he actually overtook her by a couple of percentage points.
Finally, in the wee hours of the morning, the Keystone State gave its 19 electoral votes to the former president. As this was happening, you could see the color drain out of the faces of Tapper and King.
But CNN was nothing compared with MSNBC.
I switched over to that network around the time Pennsylvania was becoming “too close to call” and then “likely Trump” and then finally “in the Trump column.” At that point, panelists — including the predictable Joy Reid — started explaining why she thought Pennsylvania voters rejected Harris: race and gender.
While it’s no surprise one of the most racist and sexist women on television would immediately pivot to the old demographic tropes, it was still shocking to see how obvious she and her colleagues were willing to be. Bitter that their candidate was going down to defeat, they seized on the only reasons their limited life experiences could proffer: American voters couldn’t bear to elect a Black person, and a woman, to a position of authority.
And it wasn’t just any old group of Americans who were to blame.
Americans who looked like me were the worst culprits, “white women.” Reid conveniently forgot the fact that a majority of American voters, including those nefarious white women, had voted for Hillary Clinton over Trump. Before that, an even larger group of voters put Barack Obama into office, and kept him there for another four years.
A woman, and a Black man, got the popular vote in three consecutive elections. But somehow, the fact that Kamala Harris was unable to convince voters that she was a qualified leader had to be due to her race and her gender. It’s the woke, liberal fiat that it can’t be anything having to do with the resume or character of the candidate. It must be prejudice.
I almost feel sorry for folks who think like that. They are afflicted with a sort of blindness that will make it impossible for them to ever assess the humanity of a candidate, with a necessary X-ray vision that bores through the irrelevant and epidermal characteristics such as biology and ethnicity.
On the other hand, it will continue to make for entertaining viewing on election eve.
Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at cflowers1961@gmail.com.