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      Trump was no longer a joke. He was a threat, and once the leftists convinced themselves Trump was a national menace, it wasn’t long before some of them started talking up violence. The Huffington Post published an article by Jesse Benn on June 6, 2016, headlined “Sorry, Liberals, a Violent Response to Trump Is as Logical as Any.” Benn argued: “In the face of media, politicians, and GOP primary voters normalizing Trump as a presidential candidate—whatever your personal beliefs regarding violent resistance—there’s an inherent value in forestalling Trump’s normalization. Violent resistance accomplishes this.”

      Benn wasn’t kidding. After a radical leftist gunned down Congressman Steve Scalise and several others in June 2017, Benn tweeted the shooter some advice: “For violent resistance to work, it’d need to be organized. Individual acts can be understandable, but likely counterproductive/ineffective.”

      Then there was the army of amateur psychiatrists. On June 8, 2016, CBS contributor Nancy Giles insisted to MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell that Trump was “clinically insane.” O’Donnell agreed. “You’re not alone,” he responded. “There’s a lot of clinicians who have been speculating about that.” Unsurprisingly for O’Donnell, he didn’t produce a single name.

      New York Times columnist Andrew Rosenthal, a former editorial page editor at the paper, loathed Trump’s proposed travel ban from Muslim countries that support terrorism. “Let’s be absolutely clear,” he lectured. “This is not just about bigotry. The mass arrest and forced movement of large populations has been an instrument of genocide throughout history. That is how the Turks committed genocide against Armenians in the early 20th century, how the United States government decimated some Native American tribes and how Stalin killed millions of his own citizens.”

      In a July 12, 2016, interview with Rolling Stone magazine, which is not a place you should go for journalistic integrity and truth telling, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow saw the Führer in Trump’s eyes. “What’s the worst-case scenario for America if he [Donald Trump] wins? It can be pretty bad. You don’t have to go back far in history to get to almost apocalyptic scenarios. . . . Over the past year I’ve been reading a lot about what it was like when Hitler first became chancellor. I am gravitating toward moments in history for subliminal reference in terms of cultures that have unexpectedly veered into dark places, because I think that’s possibly where we are.”

      Legendary Washington Post reporter turned crackpot Carl Bernstein kept dropping the political F-word on Trump, as in this CNN interview snippet on October 21, 2016: “This campaign is now about a neo-fascist—I keep coming back to that—sociopath. . . . He is setting himself up as the head of . . . a real neo-fascist movement. . . . Is there going to be remnants of a neo-fascist movement that he leads in this country after this election? It’s a dangerous thing. We’re in a dangerous place.”

      Trump was now a racist, a xenophobe, a misogynist, an ignoramus, a neo-fascist, and a sociopath, all rolled into one, clearly a menace and a threat to the future of the United States, if not humankind itself. But one thing was also for certain. It wasn’t going to happen in 2016. The media, like virtually everyone else on the left, were still utterly convinced Hillary had this one in the bag.

       The Angry Aftermath: A “Moral 9/11”

      As the campaign entered the final days, the media’s overconfidence in a Clinton victory was everywhere. On MSNBC, Chris Matthews was gleefully reading from one of those anonymously sourced Washington Post reports: “A wave of apprehension and anguish swept the Republican Party on Thursday, with many GOP leaders concluding it is probably too late to salvage his flailing presidential campaign. Republicans privately acknowledge it could be a landslide victory for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.”

      A few days later, CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley proclaimed, “Time is running out for Donald Trump. . . . No candidate down this far, this late has ever recovered.” Two days later, ABC’s Jon Karl warned, “Donald Trump is down 17 points among women. You do not get elected president of the United States if you are down 17 points among women.” On MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson gushed over a Florida poll that claimed that 28 percent of Republicans were voting for Clinton and declared that “if it’s anywhere near that then this election, not only that Florida fall to Hillary Clinton but this election overall could, you know—we could be talking landslide.” (Trump won Florida.)

      With six days to go, former Bush and McCain staffer Nicolle Wallace insisted she was bringing the “cold hard truth” to the table on NBC: “The best case scenario, if [Trump and Co.] do everything right? They lose with 266 electoral votes.”

      On the Sunday before the election, ABC political analyst Matthew Dowd (another former Bushie) called it for Hillary. “She’s got about a 95 percent chance in this election, and I think she’s going to have a higher margin than Barack Obama in 2012.”

      The Huffington Post proclaimed that Hillary Clinton was 98 percent likely to defeat Trump.

      Ryan Grim of HuffPost argued, “It’s not easy to sit here and tell you that Clinton has a 98 percent chance of winning. Everything inside us screams out that life is too full of uncertainty, that being so sure is just a fantasy. But that’s what the numbers say.” Grim later repeated, “If you want to put your faith in the numbers, you can relax. She’s got this.”

      On the morning of Election Day, Eleanor Clift was measuring the drapes for a woman president in the Daily Beast: “There are likely to be more than 20 women in the Senate after Tuesday, and together with Clinton in the White House, they will send a strong signal to women and girls that nothing is holding them back, that the future is there for them.”

      This arrogant, elitist overconfidence is precisely what made election night so enjoyable for Trump voters. On the CBS Evening News shortly before the polls began to close, reporter Nancy Cordes claimed that after being “dogged by her e-mail troubles, a restless electorate, and an unorthodox opponent,” Clinton aides insisted Hillary’s “perseverance through all of it, Scott, shows she’s prepared for the nation’s toughest job.”

      As ABC’s prime-time election night coverage began, they turned to former evening-news anchor Charles Gibson, who promptly whacked Trump for not being as classy as his opponent, referring to Hillary Clinton’s 2014 memoir Hard Choices: “The chapter about when you should apologize, I think Donald Trump missed that chapter somewhere along the line.”

      Every single major news outlet picked Hillary Clinton to win a month before the election. Ironically, one of the worst prognosticators was Fox News. On the October 21 edition of Special Report, Bret Baier proclaimed that Hillary was going to trounce The Donald. The FNC electoral map had her winning the Electoral College 307–181, with 50 toss-up votes.

      But on election night things weren’t going according to the script. Hillary was supposed to pick up some red states while sweeping the battleground states. She was supposed to win Florida early, which would seal the deal—but

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