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I have now read 587 pieces on why Kamala Harris got clobbered, so I consider myself an expert.
I have also watched endless cable segments in which left-leaning pundits either grappled with the fallout from the Democratic wipeout, or urged their colleagues to become part of the Resistance, with Rachel Maddow telling the "free press" to "stand and fight."
As Donald Trump moves quickly to fill top administration posts – and newspaper pieces warn of the horrors to come – the denigration of Harris, and Joe Biden, has reached fever pitch.
And yet, many of the media liberals who praised the Kamala operation as "flawless" and "incredible" now basically say it was a no-good, horrible, very bad campaign. That makes clear they knew this all along, but wouldn’t say so, because they were protecting the vice president as a way of trying to keep Trump out of the White House. This is yet another blow to the media’s plummeting credibility.
BIDEN, HARRIS TEAMS IN LEAK WAR AFTER KAMALA HARRIS' 2024 ELECTION LOSS
Here are some of the media post-mortems:
Andrew Sullivan: "How could an entire left-liberal worldview be more comprehensibly dismantled by reality? And yet, the primary response among my own liberal friends was rage at the electorate. They texted me to insist that Harris lost because of white people — white women, in particular."
Maureen Dowd: "Some Democrats are finally waking up and realizing that woke is broke…
"Kamala, a Democratic lawmaker told me, made the ‘colossal mistake’ of running a billion-dollar campaign with celebrities like Beyoncé when many of the struggling working-class voters she wanted couldn’t even afford a ticket to a Beyoncé concert, much less a down payment on a home."
Nellie Bowles, the Free Press, said Harris "made me furious, because she’s a good and fine person who ran a truly terrible campaign. It was a campaign that exemplified all of the delusions of the modern Democrats: that you never need to say what you stand for (because people should just assume you know what’s best for them), that you should never answer hard questions or appear with questionable figures, and that the only issue any American woman should care about is abortion…
"The real villain of this story is Zombie Biden and his corrupt family, who the media treated like heroes the whole way through."
David Brooks: "There will be some on the left who will say Trump won because of the inherent racism, sexism and authoritarianism of the American people. Apparently, those people love losing and want to do it again and again and again…
"Can the party of the universities, the affluent suburbs and the hipster urban cores do this [disrupt the Republicans]? Well, Donald Trump hijacked a corporate party, which hardly seemed like a vehicle for proletarian revolt, and did exactly that. Those of us who condescend to Trump should feel humbled — he did something none of us could do."
Politico: "How can Harris’s defenders grumble about being dragged down by Biden when she could not find one substantive policy issue on which to break from the unpopular incumbent? She waited three months, blurted out on ‘The View’ that she couldn’t think of any difference with Biden."
National Review: "She was a lousy candidate with an even lousier message, if you can call it that. The only thing she had to do was sell herself, and she couldn’t manage even this fundamental task."
COLUMNIST CALLS OUT KAMALA HARRIS FOR NOT BEING ABLE TO ANSWER CRITICAL QUESTION ON ‘THE VIEW’
Well, you get the idea.
In a 107-day campaign, Harris couldn’t convince enough Americans that she was authentic, that she could be commander-in-chief, or that she had abandoned the far-left policies (such as legalizing border crossings and backing inmate trans surgeries) of her last campaign. She foolishly hid from the press for a month, fostering the impression that she couldn’t go off script.
Now just about everyone – except those blaming her loss on racism and sexism – is saying what I’ve been saying for three months. Harris never should have picked Tim Walz, who did nothing for the ticket. The trans issue hurt her and she never picked an issue, that or something else, to separate from the left wing of her party. She worried too much about hurting Joe’s feelings.
The VP tried to focus on kitchen-table economics, such as with her price-gouging plan. But despite low inflation and unemployment right now, many Americans still felt they were paying higher grocery prices and liked Trump’s economic record better than Biden’s.
It may well be there’s nothing Harris could have done to stop the Trump juggernaut, given his hijacking of working class and minority voters.
Now the president-elect is moving quickly to tap his top appointees, having immediately named campaign manager Susie Wiles as his chief of staff – the first woman ever to hold the job.
Tom Homan, who was ICE director in Trump’s first term, will be the border czar, not a big surprise. Homan will be in charge of the mass deportation program, and when asked if there was a way to avoid separating families, as happened last time, he said sure – deport them all together.
Stephen Miller, who ran the hard-line immigration policy in the first term, is expected to be named deputy chief of staff – a promotion, first reported yesterday by CNN, that probably doesn’t convey the clout he’ll have as a trusted member of Trump’s inner circle.
I had been told days ago that Elise Stefanik, a GOP congresswoman from upstate New York, would go into the administration. And yesterday, Trump tapped her to be U.N. ambassador. She has experience in the George W. Bush White House.
Then there are insiders who are the subject of speculation. Howard Lutnick, a Wall Street CEO, is being touted by some as a possible Treasury secretary, but has his hands full as a co-chair of the transition.
Late yesterday, Trump chose former Long Island congressman Lee Zeldin to run the EPA. He’s a mainstream conservative who has crusaded against excessive environmental regulations and gotten a lifetime score of 14% from the League of Conservation Voters. The choice of Zeldin was first reported by the New York Post, and he told Fox News that the administration will "roll back regulations" that are causing businesses to "struggle" and are "forcing" them to move overseas.
After that, he tapped Florida GOP congressman Mike Waltz as White House national security adviser, which doesn’t require Senate confirmation. As the Wall Street Journal first reported, he’s a China hawk and Ukraine skeptic. "Stopping Russia before it draws NATO and therefore the U.S. into war is the right thing to do," Waltz wrote. "But the burden cannot continue to be solely on the shoulders of the American people, especially while Western Europe gets a pass." (Trump has now reduced by two the House Republicans’ expected small margin.)
Oh, and Politico says some Dems are already jockeying for 2028 (Josh Shapiro and Gavin Newsom) or being talked about (Pete Buttigieg and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear). Already? Can’t we get a break?
So my takeaway is that for all the media chatter about a lack of guardrails, Trump is so far picking serious people with serious experience. (Wiles hasn’t worked in Washington since the Reagan years, but her role is different.) They are, of course, also loyalists who will do his bidding.
RFK Jr. will get a big title, but it’s not clear whether Trump will follow his far-out advice on vaccines and fluoride.
And Elon Musk will be in charge of just about everything, and the world’s richest man has deluged X with hundreds of pro-Trump posts (and some high-profile liberals are bailing).
But the most striking moment was Trump’s post saying Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo would not be joining the administration – not that anyone was expecting they would be.
In his posting, the president-elect said he enjoyed working with both of them and thanked them for their service.
My reaction was: Did somebody steal Trump’s phone? The words idiot and moron did not appear.
Maybe this is a new tone from an incoming president who finally feels vindicated. We’ll see how long it lasts.
