For almost a decade now, the mainstream media has widely claimed or at least suggested that once and future President Donald Trump was unelectable for an ever changing variety of reasons, ranging from his lack of appeal and the legal onslaught against him. They were wrong and in many cases, they lied.
I can’t be the first person reminded of Charlie Brown and football when it comes to progressives and their relationship with the media. We all know the scene by heart: Lucy sets up the football for Charlie to kick. He girds himself for an epic attempt, only to have her snatch the ball away at the last moment, when he can’t stop himself from tumbling, crashing on the ground in shame after the necessary somersault, but rather than pick up the ball and go home, he gives her yet another chance, only to have the very same thing happen again. For almost a decade now, the mainstream media has widely claimed or at least suggested that once and future President Donald Trump was unelectable for an ever changing variety of reasons, ranging from his lack of appeal and the legal onslaught against him. As recently as October, Newsweek was pondering whether President Trump had reached his “polling ceiling” against Vice President Kamala Harris. “New polls released Tuesday by Morning Consult and Reuters/Ipsos show no change in the presidential contest. Former President Donald Trump remains 4 and 3 percentage points behind Vice President Kamala Harris, respectively, in both surveys. Morning Consult found Trump had 46 percent support to Harris’ 50 percent—consistent with last week’s result—while Reuters/Ipsos showed Trump and Harris both up 1 percent from their survey a week ago, at 43 percent and 46 percent, respectively. While acknowledging the race was close, they closed with the usual claim, “Political consultant Jay Townsend told Newsweek that in an election this competitive, polling can sometimes be outdated by the time the results are collected, tabulated and released. But he added that pollsters have ‘long known that Trump has a low ceiling because his unfavorables are well over 50 percent.’” “Thus, the only way he can win an election against an opponent is to drive up their unfavorables to a level that exceeds his. Hard for him to do when he is being outspent,” he told the outlet. In August, The Washington Post put a different spin on the same old story, claiming “Trump was close to breaking his poll ceiling. Then Harris arrived, No wonder the former president wants his old opponent back.” Philip Bump claimed “Donald Trump’s political history is easy to summarize. Polls leading up to the 2016 and 2020 general election underestimated his support. In 2016, that was largely because his support increased sharply in the final week of the contest. In 2020, the polls were simply further from the mark…This pattern actually extends a bit beyond those two general elections, in fact. Trump has the remarkable distinction of being elected president in 2016 after getting less than 50 percent of his party’s primary votes and less than 50 percent of the vote in the general election. He fared far better with his party’s voters in 2020 and 2024, but Trump has otherwise been, rather ironically, a president of the minority.” He concluded that “swapping Biden for Harris clearly reshaped the race. But it isn’t necessarily that the race is now bounded by new parameters and expectations. Instead, it seems as if it is newly bounded by the old parameters; Trump’s unusual strength against Biden seems to have waned against Harris.”
CNN’s Stephen Collinson frequently repeated the same idea, that somehow President Trump might have prevailed against President Biden, but Vice President Harris was out of his league and giving him fits. In early September, he claimed that President Trump was on a “hardline new quest to destroy Harris’ momentum,” insisting “Trump is not simply being true to his ill-disciplined self. He’s illustrating his struggle to respond to Harris’ transformation of the race. Increasingly brazen attempts to puncture Harris’ bubble of hope also betray frustration in the Trump camp that she’s managing to distinguish herself from her boss and is presenting a fresher option than her 78-year-old GOP rival.” As he saw it, “It may make some sense for Trump to throw everything he can think of at Harris. In two presidential elections, the ex-president has never risen above 49% of the vote in the so-called blue wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin or in the national popular count. So his chances in November may depend more on destroying the current feel-good factor around Harris and depressing her prospects among small groups of persuadable voters in swing states than on holding out hope of winning over new voters himself.” A few weeks earlier, he was opining that “Trump’s fury over Harris’ switch with Biden is increasingly driving his campaign.” “Deep into his ranting news conference on Thursday,” he wrote, “former President Donald Trump told a truth that explained everything : ‘I’m very angry at her.’ He was referring to Vice President Kamala Harris, whose late entry into the general election race has left him bitter, disoriented, and mourning the loss of the old campaign — the one he was winning against President Joe Biden. Trump’s discombobulation was laid bare in a self-pitying and raging stream of consciousness delivered at his New Jersey golf club that raised serious questions about the future trajectory of his quest to return to power.” On a more granular level, there was rarely an event throughout the campaign that wasn’t interpreted as a stumble for Donald Trump and a win for Kamala Harris. There was the ridiculous claim that an off-color joke by a comedian would somehow de-rail President Trump’s entire effort, the bizarre insistence that he wanted Representative Liz Cheney to face a firing squad, the perhaps even weirder notion that referring to President Trump and his running mate Senator JD Vance as “weird” was some kind of potent attack, and who could forget the several week long discussion about cat ladies all while pretending no one knew what the term meant in the first place? As a result, many in the media settled on the idea that – whatever the polls might say – there were legions of hidden Kamala Harris voters out there, mainly women who were afraid to tell their husbands they planned to embrace the joy and the vibes. The Hill claimed, “Democratic strategists alarmed by former President Trump’s track record of outperforming the polls are hoping Vice President Harris will benefit from a surge of Democratic ‘ghost voters,’ young women they hope will turn out in large numbers for Election Day but are not being captured by recent polls.” They continued, “The women who could become a surge of ‘ghost voters’ for Harris aren’t usually engaged in politics or don’t follow campaign developments though traditional news outlets.” “Normally, why we miss them is because they are people without vote history, or they have a very irregular vote history,” explained Democrat pollster Celinda Lake, who also suggested why these voters aren’t normally included in the polls. “One, they have the wrong turnout estimate, which is the hardest thing to get. These people are often registered but with very irregular, if any, vote history.” The final tally had President Trump increasing his vote share to 49.9%, earning close to 77 million votes, two million more than 2020 and 24 million more than 2016. Vice President Harris meanwhile declined from President Biden’s rather unbelievable 81,283,501 votes in 2020 to barely over 74 million.
Of course, the idea that President Trump didn’t have a chance began long before the campaign, when many claimed he either wouldn’t be able to run or would likely have to run from a jail cell as early as 2023. Last year, CNN reported on supposed “Legal scholars [who] increasingly raise [a] constitutional argument that Trump should be barred from presidency.” Supposedly, this group included even “prominent conservatives.” “Prominent conservative legal scholars are increasingly raising a constitutional argument that 2024 Republican candidate Donald Trump should be barred from the presidency because of his actions to overturn the previous presidential election result. The latest salvo came Saturday in The Atlantic magazine, from liberal law professor Laurence Tribe and J. Michael Luttig, the former federal appellate judge and prominent conservative, who argue the 14th Amendment disqualifies the former president from returning to the Oval Office.” “The people who wrote the 14th Amendment were not fools. They realized that if those people who tried to overturn the country, who tried to get rid of our peaceful transitions of power are again put in power, that would be the end of the nation, the end of democracy,” Mr. Tribe told CNN’s Kasie Hunt on State of the Union. “All officials, federal and state, who have a responsibility to put on the ballot candidates for the presidency of the United States are obligated under the Constitution to determine whether Donald Trump qualifies to be put on the ballot,” Mr. Luttig added. Others were of the same opinion. “In our view, on the basis of the public record, former President Donald J. Trump is constitutionally disqualified from again being President (or holding any other covered office) because of his role in the attempted overthrow of the 2020 election and the events leading to the January 6 attack,” law professors William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen wrote for the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. “The case for disqualification is strong,” they added before the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 against their opinion. Legal experts were equally certain that the Supreme Court wouldn’t intervene in any of President Trump’s various prosecutions, believing that entirely novel cases applied to the president already had legal precedent somehow. “I am leading in all Polls, including against Crooked Joe, but this is not a level playing field. It is Election Interference, & the Supreme Court must interceded. [sic] MAGA!” The Hill reported on a post President Trump made to Truth Social last August, claiming, “Legal experts, however, say it’s highly unlikely the Supreme Court will review Trump’s criminal cases before they reach verdicts, which could happen later this year or sometime in 2024,” they concluded at the time. “I don’t think it’s actually likely that the Supreme Court would intervene, because it seems like most of the purely legal issues are … about statutory interpretation points that have already been decided by the Supreme Court in the past, and the Supreme Court has a pretty strong presumption about overturning statutory interpretation,” explained Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University,” shortly before they ruled the President had immunity for public acts.
Otherwise, keeping track of all the criminal cases certain to derail him is something of a cottage industry in the media. Politico, CNN, the BBC, The Atlantic, PBS, The New York Times, and others all have interactive guides devoted to the topic, guides which haven’t been taken down even after his victory. Following a conviction on 34 counts in the New York City “hush money” case, Politico empaneled 22 experts to claim President Trump was doomed. While not everyone agreed with this assessment, there were many who were completely convinced. Mike Madris, supposedly a GOP political strategist of all things, insisted, “There’s no question this verdict is bad politically for Trump.” Mona Charen from the notoriously anti-Trump Bulwark insisted, “Trump is now a convicted felon, with consequences that are impossible to predict but that cannot be good. Some portion of the electorate will be unwilling to elevate a felon to the Oval Office. We cannot know how many. But with an election as close as this one, any diminution of support could be crucial.” Allan Lichtman, the professor whose prediction that President Trump couldn’t possibly win has become fodder for even the left, was confident that was the case immediately following the verdict, though he had not yet released his infamous model. “This jury’s guilty verdict is of great historical and political significance…Although I have not made a final prediction, I have noted that a lot would have to go wrong for Biden to lose reelection.” Charlie Sykes, a Never Trumper from day one, claimed “Trump will now be running as a convicted felon. He will be nominated by the GOP as a convicted felon. And he will go before the voters in November as the first former president convicted of a crime. In many states he is no longer eligible to vote. He would not be allowed to own a gun. He would be barred from serving on the board of any publicly traded company, ineligible for any position of public trust and absolutely barred from getting a security clearance. Some voters — and no one knows how many — may think that’s relevant when they choose the next president of the United States.” Sarah Longwell, also of anti-Trump Bulwark, “Republican voters aren’t going to abandon Trump en masse because of this conviction. On the margins, though, it could make some reluctant Trump voters stay home, not vote in the presidential race or even vote for another candidate — maybe even Biden. The number of people who might be swayed away from voting for Trump because of his conviction might be small, but with the election poised to be decided by a few thousand voters in a few states, that could be enough.” Vanity Fair’s Molly Jang-Fast claimed, “A lot of pundits said it was a weak case, but it wasn’t. A lot of pundits will say it’s not going to matter, but the presumptive Republican nominee is a convicted felon. This is the party of law and order running a felon. It’s going to matter in November.”
Of course, we all now know that none of it mattered, except perhaps to benefit President Trump, who broke through his ceiling, stayed on the ballot and out of jail, and was the first Republican in 20 years to win the popular vote, improving his margins in every state and demographic except for Washington. This even after “the walls” have been closing in for seven years now, except they haven’t. After President Joe Biden was ousted from the race in the equivalent of a political coup, I asked when progressives became trained seals clapping for their masters. The sight of millions upon millions of people who were lied to by Democrat politicians and the media about the mental capacity of a sitting President suddenly switching their allegiance to a Vice President complicit in the cover up was shocking to me, but I sort of understood it as part of the overall desire to beat President Trump at all costs. Now that they have failed in this quest – having been misled by the media both before and after President Biden’s ouster – one would think a reckoning was coming. How many years were they going to waste insisting that President Trump is one step away from being defeated forever, either politically or legally, without it coming to fruition and indeed he’s now more powerful and unleashed than ever? Sadly, we do not seem to have an answer. The headlines claimed that viewership at MSBNC plummeted and yet the same networks are still pumping out the same slanted, anti-Trump propaganda as fast as humanly possible and then some. It seems the old adage fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, no longer applies to progressives.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 