Democrats and the media aren’t taking the election results well after former President Donald Trump made a triumphant White House comeback complemented by a new GOP majority in the Senate.
Leftist supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris posted videos of themselves crying about the results on the internet, while the talking heads on CNN and MSNBC reflexively blamed racism for the Democrats’ historic loss.
“I am profoundly disturbed,” said The View’s Sunny Hostin on Wednesday, “that the 14th Amendment of the Constitution did not prevent someone who participated in an insurrection from becoming president of the United States.”
“I’m surprised at the result, but I’m not surprised,” Hostin added. “As a woman of color, I was so hopeful that a mixed-race woman married to a Jewish guy could be elected president of this country, and I think that it had nothing to do with policy. I think this was a referendum of cultural resentment in this country.”
On election night, CNN’s Van Jones held back tears when he similarly characterized Harris’ loss as a rejection of the left’s victimized form of identity politics.
“It’s not the elites that [are] going to pay the price,” Jones said. “It’s people who woke up this morning with a dream and are going to bed with, with a nightmare.”
Left-wing podcast host Cenk Uygur screamed on air as Trump neared the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the Oval Office.
“These Democratic leaders are the most useless people on earth!” he said. “If they’re not all fired, the Democratic Party is out of its mind!”
On MSNBC, Jen Psaki, President Joe Biden’s former White House press secretary, immediately sought to assuage the anxiety of the network’s viewers when she called the race for Trump.
“For so many of you watching right now that news is, to say the least, a lot to digest,” she said. “I understand that, personally.”
Psaki went on to outline the myriad charges against the former and future president at the center of the Democrats’ lawfare campaign against him.
“After he lost four years ago, he refused to accept the outcome and incited a violent insurrection on our nation’s Capitol. He’s campaigned while facing criminal indictments related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 results, and he’s run as a convicted felon,” she said. “Donald Trump is an anti-democratic force, but he’s just been elected democratically in our country.”
“Here’s what might be the hardest part to hear, but we have to talk about [it],” Psaki added. “Donald Trump was elected by expanding his support over a number of key groups.”
Trump captured a second term after making significant inroads with black and Hispanic voters in particular, after both groups had been reliably Democrat voting blocs for decades.
On the network’s “Morning Joe” program, Joe Scarborough and Al Sharpton called Hispanic voters racist for backing Republicans.
“Democrats need to be mature, and they need to be honest,” Scarborough said, blaming sexism among “Hispanic men” and “black men” for Harris’ demise. “They do not want a woman leading them.”
“[It] might be race issues with Hispanics!” Scarborough added. “A lot of Hispanic voters have problems with black candidates!”
“You’re absolutely right,” Sharpton said. “It’s not simplistic, and we’ve got to have real honest conversations.”
Their MSNBC colleague, Joy Reid, complained on Tuesday night that Florida, once a pivotal swing state with razor-thin margins, had become home to an “extremist right-wing fascist government.”
MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell threw a fit about the Electoral College, even as Trump remains on track to win the popular vote in addition to the majority of electoral votes required to win.
“An apology to all of those states that we have not mentioned. It’s not our fault; it’s the Founding Fathers’. They decided on this thing called the Electoral College, which, interestingly, no other country in the world decided to copy,” O’Donnell said. “In effect, on nights like this, you have a right to think that it feels like no one cares about your vote, if you’re in California or if you’re in New York. And when you think about how enormous a force that can be in voter suppression, there may be nothing quite like it.”
Former Democrat Sen. Claire McCaskill from Missouri worried on election night about Trump’s second presidential term in light of GOP control of the Senate.
“This is very depressing,” she said. “I’m sorry to do this to everyone — but it means maybe the worst instincts of Donald Trump as to who he would appoint to the cabinet can become real.”
Jonathan Last with the Bulwark, meanwhile, said the Biden-Harris administration “should have been quite radical.”
“They should have made D.C. a state. They should have actually expanded the Supreme Court. They should have done a whole bunch of stuff that would have been deeply unpopular,” Last said, “and would have caused enormous Democratic losses but would have restructured the framework in such a way as to make it harder for the next authoritarian attempt.”
