No Truce With Kings

Like many – probably most – people in the U.S., I was surprised to learn this morning that Mr. Trump had won the election. I have to admit that I’d drunk the Kool-Aid: I believed the polls and the betting sites would predict the election’s outcome.

In fact, I’d wondered about why the odds weren’t more in Clinton’s favor at FiveThirtyEight.com. (Turns out the Huffington Post wondered too.) Now we both know. You could have knocked me over with a feather, as they used to say.

I ran across a lot of interesting reading this morning as journalists and bloggers wrote about their own surprise at the election results. Here’s a sampling (with my emphasis):

Margaret Sullivan in The Washington Post:

The media didn’t want to believe Trump could win. So they looked the other way.

To put it bluntly, the media missed the story. In the end, a huge number of American voters wanted something different. And although these voters shouted and screamed it, most journalists just weren’t listening. They didn’t get it. […]

Journalists — college-educated, urban and, for the most part, liberal — are more likely than ever before to live and work in New York City and Washington, D.C., or on the West Coast. And although we touched down in the big red states for a few days, or interviewed some coal miners or unemployed autoworkers in the Rust Belt, we didn’t take them seriously. Or not seriously enough. […]

(This sort of lends credence to Dana Loesch’s thesis, doesn’t it?)

Bret Stephens in The Wall Street Journal:

2016’s Big Reveal
Donald Trump is a demagogue. Period. The right’s failure to see it is a disgrace.

Someday, maybe, when I’m old and a child asks me what I remember about the awful election of 2016, I’ll say: It was the Big Reveal.

Revealed: That the guiding spirit of the modern conservative movement is neither Burke nor Lincoln. It’s Marx. “These are my principles,” Groucho once cracked, “and if you don’t like them, well, I have others.” Everything Republicans once claimed to advocate — entitlement reform, free trade, standing up to dictators, encouraging the march of freedom around the world — turns out to be negotiable and reversible, depending on Donald Trump’s whims and the furies of his base. […]

Caleb Howe at RedState (a typically Republican political blog):

TRUMPTASTROPHE

[…] So yes, you may consider this election a disaster, and you would be right. But you are wrong if you consider the disaster a surprise. We told you that both options were terrible. We told you that no matter who won, it would suck.

One of them won. It sucks. Nailed it. […]

Also from RedState, something I thought was pretty amusing:

The Canadian Government’s Immigration Site Crashed Tonight

Robby Soave at Reason’s Hit & Run:

Trump Gives Victory Speech, Liberals Rediscover Appeal of Limited Government
Has there ever been a more powerful case for limited government?

There hasn’t been a better case IMO. But I’m hoping, like Robby does, that the Democrats will get the drift this time.

But my favorite is by Sarah Baker, writing at The Liberty Papers:

Election 2016: Thoughts in the Aftermath

1. This is how libertarians feel after every election. We learn to live with it. So will you.

2. I believe in free trade. Trump doesn’t. I’m for a strong First Amendment. He isn’t. I want to reduce the size of government. He wants to make more of it. I think he’s divisive and mean and uniquely unfit to be president. He emboldens an unnerving group of racists, xenophobes and misogynists better relegated to the fringes. And since he will be serving with a Republican-controlled House and Senate, I won’t even get gridlock. […]

Like Ms. Baker, I was disappointed in the lack of gridlock.

And the "group of racists, xenophones and misogynists" she mentions seem to appear more and more frequently in Twitter feeds these days. See Identity Evropa, and Nathan Damigo, and (Trueborn) European Americans. They’re coming out of the woodwork, it seems. No need to "identify" further, folks. We’ve got the idea.

Finally, a little humor.

And Madonna is probably very relieved.

Update 11/10/16:

A tweet from November, 2012 that Trump would probably like to forget:

And Paul B sends a link to a post at Scott Adams’ blog: I Answer Your Questions About Predicting President Trump.

Man, am I glad I didn’t make any bets with Adams. I could be eating serious crow.