On January 20, 2025, Donald Trump will become the forty-seventh president of the United States and the only president other than Grover Cleveland to win a second, non-consecutive term. I won’t lie, he wasn’t my first choice as the Republican Party’s nominee, but that’s all in the past. When it came time to vote, I dutifully ticked my ballot for Trump/Vance, said a prayer for Kamala Harris’ ignominious defeat, and went home to binge on YouTube political commentary and, once the polls closed, watch ABC News for the returns. The night was, even for a lukewarm Trump supporter, a pleasure.
Not so for many of the mainstream media’s talking heads. On NBC, as the votes poured in, Jen Psaki, former Biden White House press secretary and Obama deputy communications director, looked shellshocked as she mechanically tried to make sense of the Harris debacle. Had the Vice President’s campaign, a mere hundred and one days, been too short? As Falstaff memorably said, a question to be asked—especially when one considers how a few short weeks ago many of the same talking heads (perhaps Psaki among them?) were musing that Trump might not have enough time to stall Harris’ joyful juggernaut.
On The View, Sunny Hostin, similarly stunned, declared Harris’ campaign “flawless.” How could it have failed? The answer to that question later came from MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow who opined that America instead of being an historically exceptional country (“exceptionalism,” at least Maddow’s brand, was for one brief moment “in”), it is, with this election, no different from the authoritarian monstrosities that swell the pages of history. Joy Reid’s comments, echoed also by Hostin and Van Jones (on CNN), concluded that Harris had lost simply because this country would not embrace a woman, especially a woman of color.
That last point proved rather popular as the waning hours November 5th passed, and the early hours of November 6th confirmed the horror of the wicked American will. The most thoroughly absurd version came from MSNBC’s Claire McCaskill. You may remember Claire as a former senator from Missouri. She was deemed the most vulnerable of Democrats in 2012, but the Republican’s gave her a pass by fielding a bumbling opponent that guaranteed her another six years. Happily, Josh Hawley easily whipped her in 2018, and now she carries on insulting our intelligence on a network that would make Stalin proud.
What did she have to say of Harris’ humiliation? Tearfully, she declared, “I’m so proud of her. I don’t think people realize how hard it is to get to where she was, uh, as a woman. Getting elected D.A. It’s not easy, guys. People don’t trust women to be in charge of making decisions about life and death and crime and being, frankly, a supervisor over police.” Kamala’s rise in California was “very tough.” She “lost her footing” in her failed 2019 presidential run apparently because she listened to consultants (undoubtedly men) and “didn’t really exude who she was.” And then she became Vice President and found herself in a very difficult situation where she had to support Biden and “maneuver . . . I mean, such political skill! It is just inspiring.” And the tears flowed.
Indeed, there was a time when a woman would have found it difficult to rise in politics, a world traditionally dominated by men. Ask Sandra Day O’Connor, Jean Kirkpatrick, or Condelezza Rice. Ask Nikki Haley. Yet the truth is, these days, being a woman and a woman of color with political aspirations is hardly a stigma. Far from it. It’s not only the cake; it’s the icing and the candles—provided as the woman in question is a “progressive.” Harris, as the media declared, was the next Obama, only better: she was a woman.
Most of us have not forgotten why Joe Biden selected Kamala as his running mate in 2020. She ticked the boxes: woman (check), woman of color (check). Those weren’t debits or, as Claire McCaskill would have it, “hard” peaks to scale; in the eyes of the Democratic Party’s king- (and queen-) makers, they were twenty-four-karat-gold qualifications. Harris didn’t need talents or accomplishments to clear that low bar. All she had to do was enter the world with the right genes. The media in the disgraceful Harris/Trump debate and through nightly commentary did everything they could to amplify her virtues—a hard thing to do—and sweep her failure with the border and her radical stances on gun control and abortion under the rug.
Fortunately, American voters weren’t fooled and voted accordingly. And that’s why I’m smiling even as I write these words.
