Convinced of its moral superiority, the response from the left to Donald Trump’s triumph has been a mixture of petulant horror and sheer disbelief. It’s really been quite amusing.
In America, there was a liberal meltdown, with even TV anchors and newsreaders dropping their professional detachment and revealing denial followed by misery. I watched CNN for some of the night and was left in absolutely no doubt where its barely concealed sympathies lie. Meanwhile, over on MSNBC, analyst Jen Psaki veritably spat out her outrage that Elon Musk, whom she termed a “disinformation propagandist”, could now have “a direct line to the Oval Office.”
In the UK it’s been as bad. Far from celebrating an exercise in democracy involving 138 million Americans, ITV’s Tom Bradby responded by quoting those who label the new US President “a fascist” and by asking: “are there reasons to worry what a President Trump might do?”.
Over on Sky, lefty analyst Lewis Goodall started the evening by posting on X his misplaced confidence that the polls, which we now know hopelessly overstated Harris’s support, were “spot on” Later, presenter Mark Austin looked like he’d just sucked a particularly sour lemon when he cut to the breaking news that Trump had taken the swing state of Pennsylvania.
Most childish of all was Channel 4 News, where Emily Maitlis got completely carried away and swore live on air, prompting a reprimand from Krishnan Guru-Murthy and her reported removal from the coverage. At another point in their night from hell, and displaying an extraordinary sense-of-humour failure, the same pair lashed out at Boris Johnson, who was jovially referring to his new book.
Time after time, the lefty media establishment makes the same mistake. Unable to conceive of a reason why anyone might vote for anything to the right of the woke left, they overstate their chances of victory and then face crushing disappointment like a kid who suddenly discovers Santa doesn’t exist.
You don’t have to be a Trump fan to find it all hugely entertaining.
