I can hear it now, starting on Nov. 9:
"Hillary Clinton isn't really the President. She got elected only because she ran against Donald Trump, the worst candidate in history. She didn't destroy him; he destroyed himself. Nobody wanted to vote for her. They had to vote for her."
This is a direct extension of the media narrative we hear now about Clinton: that no one trusts her, no one likes her. That is a media lie, a manipulation and the result of lazy journalism. When was the last time you heard the voices of the millions of enthusiastic Clinton voters reflected in media? This is how media will be accessories to the Trump, alt right, and GOP crime of attempting to delegitimize another American Presidency.
Media already began the process by abnormalizing Clinton. You've heard this:
"Yes, Donald Trump is a misogynist and has admitted committing sexual assault and he is a bigot who has attacked Mexicans as rapists and murderers and Muslims as terrorists and he has defamed African-American communities as hells ruled by crime and drug-dealing. But in our next segment, we will tell you for the thousandth time about Hillary Clinton's emails.
"Yes, Donald Trump's foundation is a sham that he uses to settle his personal debts and enrich his ego, and he defaults on his promises to charities and causes. But when we come back, we will cast aspersions on Hillary and Bill Clinton's foundation, even though we have no journalistic evidence of wrongdoing, even though the Clinton foundation does immense good work saving lives and helping people, and even though we in media won't tell you about all that good work.
"Because balance."
Of course, at the same time, media normalized Donald Trump, giving him attention that was wildly disproportionate to his popularity at the beginning of the campaign -- making his campaign a reality -- and later refusing to call ignorant ignorant and evil evil. NPR won't call Trump a liar because that is a "volatile" word. Media fell over itself praising The New York Times for calling his lies lies; why did we not expect that all along? Media knew he was a misogynist, a sexist pig, yet they had to wait for the Clinton campaign to do their reporting for them to break into their narrative with incidents that told the story. Media have seen his racism again and again but refuse to call him a bigot. That, too, would be too volatile.
So in their effort to find balance -- as Jay Rosen points out, in their effort to cope with the asymmetry of this campaign (and years of political imbalance leading up to this) -- media raised up Donald Trump to the nearest definition of normal they could muster and they pulled Hillary Clinton down to as near as his level of mistrust and mendacity as they could get away with because that serves the dynamics that drive their business: conflict and suspense.
And along the way, I keep hearing media doing the democratically irresponsible: suppressing voter turnout by predicting it. (That supports their narrative: Nobody trust, likes, or cares.) And now leaders of the GOP are giving their own reprehensible civics lesson: At last, at long last, some of them are repudiating Donald Trump -- not because he has been a racist to Latinos, Muslims, and African-Americans, not because he is a misogynist, not because he lies, not because he is ignorant, not because he is dangerous, but because he finally crossed the White Woman Line. Yet those same politicians now legitimize the idea of not voting for president. That also delegitimizes the victor, Hillary Clinton. You'll hear this, too:
"Well, we didn't vote for her. We didn't have anyone to vote for. So we're not going to work with her. We're going to continue what we've done for a generation: only working against her, only blocking anything she proposes to do. For we will never let her win, not the White House, not a single battle, not so much as a bill."
This is why it is critical that we defeat not only Donald Trump but also the party that put him where he is and the politicians who were his accessories. Every politician who supported him -- no matter whether that support is now withdrawn -- has the stench of Trump and the alt right on them and that cannot be washed away with a press release and a tweet. The party that fertilized the fetid ground that spawned Trump with its years of insurgent obstruction must be held to account for not caring to defend Latinos, Muslims, and blacks, let alone our military -- and responsible government -- but only white women.
We do need balance in a democracy or else there can be no dialog and legitimacy of negotiated compromise. We need for conservatives to be represented in the political process and heard in media. We need a new conservative movement to rise from the ashes of the fire that not just Trump but a generation of GOP leaders and right-wing media set. We on the left should support the rebuilding of a responsible, loyal opposition. I am writing another post with a call to build responsible conservative media as well, to fill the vacuum that liberal -- yes, liberal -- media left, which was exploited by political movements masquerading as media: Fox News (now 20 years ago -- everything I lament here is the fruit of their labor) and its foster children Breitbart and Drudge.
Consider this: In losing, Trump the disgusting movement behind him will win. Their goal is to bring down institutions and they have already succeeded. They have destroyed the Republican Party. They will continue to delegitimize the Democratic Party and its victory. They will thus delegitimize government. They have lowered the quality of political discourse in this country to their level. Yes, they have won.
That is why it is so vital that we take back our victory from them. That is why I am going to Pennsylvania every chance I get to register voters. That is why you must vote and push every sane and civilized family member, friend, neighbor, and coworker to vote. That is why every fellow Hillary Clinton supporter out there must loudly proclaim her or his support. That is why we must defeat every politician who cynically supported Trump -- whether or not they then cynically withdrew that support. That is why we must recapture the American dream from the Trump nightmare.
My friend Rafat Ali -- an immigrant, an entrepreneur, an American citizen, a voter -- just posted this quote by Bertolt Brecht from The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941):
Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again.
Rejoice in her victory. But do not allow the bastard's fathers to snatch victory from their defeat.