After all of the dark speculation in the media over whether Donald Trump and his supporters would gracefully accept losing to Hillary Clinton, the reaction of her supporters to the sudden reversal of fortune inflicted by voters has been something to behold. To summarize: The world is literally ending.
We exaggerate only slightly. Twitter was flooded with apocalyptic angst on Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning. (The planet is now doomed by climate change, and so on.) Then there were, of course, the protests across the country. At one point, protesters in Minneapolis made a big show of disrupting the city’s light-rail service—because surely nothing quite discomfits rural blue-collar Trump voters like seeing the disruption of urban public transit boondoggles. And come on, guys—it’s 2016. We stodgy patriotic conservatives still object to flag burning; seeing it on the news, though, is pretty passé these days.
But the rabble will act like the rabble. What’s more remarkable is how many well-known figures among the liberal intelligentsia exchanged dignity for despair, not to mention the willingness of respectable publications to let them humiliate themselves. Columnist Lindy West wrote in the New York Times that she cried so much over the election that she “left mascara-tinged rosettes blooming black in my cereal milk.” It’s safe to say she’s not going to draw any instructive lessons from the voters’ message. “We have proof, in exit polls, that white women will pawn their humanity for the safety of white supremacy,” West writes. “We have abortion pills to stockpile and neighbors to protect and children to teach.” Liberal “comedian” Samantha Bee struck a similarly self-indulgent chord, declaring that white people had “ruined America. . . . Let’s get off the floor and get busy, especially you, white women. We’ve got some karma to work off.” Cable news, as you might have expected, was not a bastion of thoughtfulness. CNN commentator Van Jones declared that the election outcome was the result of a “whitelash.”
Aside from blaming women and white people—otherwise known as a large majority of the country—there emerged amid the panic an odd subgenre of liberal men mansplaining democratic elections to their daughters. The Washington Post‘s Dana Milbank published an open letter to his daughter informing her, and us, that “this is a sad day for our country. I want you to know that I did everything I could to prevent this from happening.” Given that the media’s approval rating is far below Trump’s, Milbank should probably confront the possibility that strident bloviating like this helped elect the man.
But Milbank’s letter was nothing compared to Aaron Sorkin’s letter to his 15-year-old daughter published by Vanity Fair. Aside from being hysterical, it was shockingly crass and ineloquent coming from one of the country’s best screenwriters. “I don’t think this guy can make it a year without committing an impeachable crime,” Sorkin said by way of trying to reassure her. “If he does manage to be a douche nozzle without breaking the law for four years, we’ll make it through those four years.”
Since we don’t want to encourage any more baseless recriminations and panic, we’ll end this by referring you to the letter THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic John Podhoretz posted in response on Twitter:
