Inevitable Forensics - But Then What?
IT’S QUITE EXTRAORDINARY HOW MUCH, here at a full nine days after Election Day, so many of the American mass media are still engaged in effort after fresh effort to come up with explanations for how the sweeping victory for Donald Trump could have happened. The atmosphere of bemused wonderment, and in many cases angry incomprehension, show little sign of dissipating any time soon. That’s in spite of how essentially uninformative and unhelpful all these different attempts at analysis can be – many of them fully contradictory of each other.
I couldn’t help but find that a tongue-in-cheek approach has worked much better. Best of all was the resident humorist among the Washington Post’s many columnists, Alexandra Petri. Her post-landslide column was headlined “I’m the only one who knows what really went wrong with this campaign”, meaning of course the Democrats’ campaign.
You almost didn’t need to read the copy underneath that boastful headline, since the best joke lay in simply the writer’s own identity, as a jokester … but I’ll tell you that one gem of a reason she gave for the Harris-Walz failure was: “Not enough texts and emails from the candidates.” To her possibly greater credit, Petri also – days before the vote - did some powerful skewering of her own paper’s top management, and ownership, who’d decided unusually not to back any side in the contest; she chose to step in to the vaccuum and struck a rather heroic stance: “It has,” she wrote, “fallen to me, the humor columnist, to endorse Harris for president.”
NYT’s proposed page for 2016 election. Triumphant Hillary Clinton photo still to come.
The predominant feeling of shock among so much of the mainstream media was also in a way foreshadowed by an illustrative piece of history-writing provided, before the vote, by that other national beacon of liberal journalism, The New York Times. It too had a ring of media self-criticism. It was a piece by the paper’s in-house historian David Dunlap (who’s a dear friend of mine, I should say in the spirit of full disclosure).
Dunlap brought to pubic view for the first time the Special Edition of The Times that had been planned - and set up in type - for the expected triumph in 2016’s election going to Hillary Clinton, with several weighty articles analyzing aspects of her success gathered around a big gray, empty square intended to accommodate a victorious Clinton photograph, which of course never arrived. The simple, evocative headline above it all was “Madam President”. Extra-poignant now, perhaps, in retrospect, after two female candidates’s defeat.
Of course newspapers and other media outlets have always been prepared, often in very great detail, for big historic events that may or may not happen. How could we do otherwise, in practical terms? But it’s very telling that in 2016 no such special edition was prepared for the eventuality that did happen – the Trump Win.
This time, in 2024, the Times was well cued-up with a frontpage ready for either candidate to win – and indeed for a possible tight deadlock too. But since that tumultuous night The Times has been as full as all the other media with its puzzled-sounding, extended Monday morning quarterbacking -- extended, as I said, through these nine long days.
The baleful facts of the matter that so many commentators evidently didn’t want to see or confront was that Trump won, won decisively and across so many different demographics that it blew apart a lot of fondly-cherished beliefs.
One of the frequently voiced appeals against the bigotry and cruelty of Trump’s rhetoric – and his actions, too, we should remember from when he was previously in office – took the form of that proud complaint from Democrats: “This is not who we Americans are.” The brutal truth is that that this is exactly what many Americans are - enough indeed to win a majority of the popular vote, as well as railroading a whopping domination of the Electoral College vote. Yes, this is what Americans are … and even the most idealistic of us, even those isolated in our information bubbles and echo-chambers … will probably know more than a few such Americans. They’re a lot bigger, a lot more numerous than the caricatured trope of the grumpy, prejudiced uncle who has to be pussyfooted around at our Thanksgiving table.
I HAVE MY OWN TELLING memories of the 2016 convulsion … not a single one of my black friends was at all surprised at the Trump victory – in fact many had voiced confident if sour predictions that it would indeed happen. I myself wrote a perhaps over-simplistic phrase … that Trump’s chances of winning back then depended entirely on “how many angry/fearful White men are out there – and whether they’ll vote.” I think that notion still applied, or came back again, in 2024 … with the added rider of angry/fearful Latino men, as well as some, though many fewer, angry/fearful Black men, too.
It's not too simplistic, as we constantly hear about the Democrats’ postmorteming, to ponder carefully the redolence of that determined battle-cry slogan from Kamala Harris, “We are not going back” which referenced not just the vital abortion issue, of course, but also the threat to women’s rights considered even more broadly. It earned a high-volume response. We need to recognize how a loud and blunt a retort it could trigger from retrogressive white males. And we now know how much the same reaction was echoed among Latinos. Ruben Bonilla, a former leader of the League of United Latin American Citizens, known to reporters as possibly the most conservative of Latino groups, made a simple assessment: “Hispanic men were reluctant to vote for a woman. It is almost a throwback.” I would question only the word “almost,” for throwback it certainly was. The utterly gendered nature of the result – right across different ethnicities - was clear the day after we voted. Men preferred Trump 55 to 42 percent. Women favored Harris 53 to 45 percent. Almost an exact mirror image of each other, and Trump’s men won.
There was a time back in the twentieth century, when women who ruled countries were an extreme rarity. For a long time there was only Sirimavo Bandaranaika, in the island nation of Sri Lanka. But then came along Indira Ghandi in India, and even in stuffy old, tradition-bound Britain there was Margaret Thatcher, and in time a steady sprinkling of female leaders in Europe and Latin America, Africa and Australasia. It’s horribly ironic that the supposedly global torch-bearer of progress and freedom, the USA, has been so slow, no, simply resistant to embrace female leadership.
And younger American men have been prominent among the hold-outs. That can seem a deep paradox, since pollsters have found them to be in the forefront of many progessive issues, and most ironically of all perhaps that includes abortion rights. But - and this is displayed most obviously in their role as a media audience - they belong all too comfortably in what these days is often called the manosphere (what we might have once dismissively labeled just an old-fashioned boys’ club).
The younger elements are picking up on their male elders’ cussedness and amplifying it in the arenas in which they gather online -- gaming networks and in the surging tsunami of podcasts. One clear indicator of this came from Trump’s own close circle, when Trump called to the microphone during his victory speech to supporters, another president, one called Dana White. He’s the President of UFC, the Ultimate Fighting Championship franchise. White’s exact quote is worth repeating in full: “I want to thank the Nelk Boys, Adin Ross, Theo Von, Bussin' with the Boys. [These of course were all podcasters and so-called influencers who gave their platforms over to Trump, some of whom exhibit, shall we say, questionable political outlooks, with misogyny and racism slopping around in erratic currents.] And then White went on to say “And last but not least … the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan.”
Trump, we might remember, kept his rally in Michigan waiting restively for him through three long hours so he could sit chewing the fat – for those three hours – with Rogan (left) the onetime stand-up comedian and game-show host who now numbers eighteen million as his podcast listenership. Four-fifths of them, we should note, are male, and more than half of these males are younger than 34. Many of them regard Trump more as an anti-hero rather than merely a villain. One self-proclaimed Rogan-follower posted a grinning selfie in which his shirt proclaimed “I voted for the convicted felon.”
IT WAS EARLY ON that this year’s campaign gained the nickname ‘the podcast election’, on analogy with the Kennedy vs Nixon contest of 1960 being labeled the first television election, and George W Bush vs John Kerry in 2004 being called the first real internet election. I confess to having been a bit surprised myself by the sheer power, a greatly diversified, scattershot kind of power, of this mini-medium. It’s been made clear as I’ve been sitting for interviews on podcast after podcast promoting my new memoir. They often have very niche audiences, but they’re just as often vast though maybe specialized, like the Road Dog trucker radio network channel that I talked to this week (– and it almost goes without saying that this was another audience that tilts significantly, but not exclusively male).
Harris, too, was courting the world of podcasts and influencers, though possibly not as assertively as Trump. As many media postmortems have been pointing out, she did decline an offer to appear with Joe Rogan.
As the Democratic Party faces the inevitable process of adapting to being in opposition once again, given Trump’s return to the White House, the world of media, too — the “legacy media,” as they’re being called more than ever now, especially by victorious Trumpists — will also have to work out just what role to adopt in the next four years.
There is talk across many newsdesks and opinion conference rooms that it’s simply time again to lean into the self-confessed “Resistance” mindset. Many practitioners will recall that such an approach was kind-of successful in 2016 to 2020, in that it generated big ratings and sizable gains in subscriber-bases. It paid off to be vigorously reporting on and calling out Trump and his administration.
On the other hand, the message for the media in the thudding election results could well be that such content or programming, based around Trump’s inevitable outrageousness in office, might well have very considerably shrunk. But that, of course, can be no excuse for the press not doing its job to the utmost: holding the next president to full public account.