When it was announced that Donald Trump pulled a Grover Cleveland and was elected president again after having been "defeated" in 2020, people took to social media to watch the inevitable and oh-so-entertaining meltdown from leftists.
We weren't disappointed. People were screaming, women were shaving their heads, celebrities stomped their feet, tears were shed, and grand accusations of every ism and phobe known to the English-speaking world were thrown around.
But as the screams faded and the tears dried, one thing was noticeably absent. Back in 2016, after Trump was elected, there were riots and mass marches. There was a real energy to the "resistance" that sprang up after the defeat of Hillary Clinton, and that energy could be felt in a Democrat Party that was ready for war.
But now, that energy seems to be all but gone.
As my colleague Bog Hoge recently wrote, "The Resistance" seems MIA for this second round of MAGA. There are no pink genitalia hats as women take the streets en masse, no Antifa tipping over cars and destroying property, and not a lot of hype for expressing their hatred of the bad orange man. Why? Hoge notes that the left has "lost its mojo":
This time Democratic voters, particularly women, were just as disappointed but less shocked, says Lisa Mueller, a political science professor at Macalester College.
- "So they didn't have the same acute trigger to rush to the barricades that they did the first time," says Mueller, who studies why social movements succeed or fail. "It's very likely that there is some disillusionment with activism."
- Mitchell Brown, professor of political science at Auburn University, says one big factor is what cognitive psychologists call habituation.
- "When you first see something unexpected, it's really jarring and you react strongly," she says. "But the more you see and normalize something that was unexpected ... the more habituated you become to it."
He's not wrong, but I think we can look a bit deeper and find some details, wherein the devil resides.
One thing I'm noticing in a huge way is what I call "media fatigue."
The largest ingredient in anti-Trump sentiment is media-born outrage. When you look back at the media's handling of Trump, the thing that stands out the most is that it was rife with breathless outrage and claims of wrongdoing being done by Trump at every turn. The guy couldn't sneeze without the media proclaiming it was a sinister act.
CNN, MSNBC, and all the alphabet networks were continuously reporting that Trump was bringing about our doom, and every criminal accusation brought against him was covered on a nonstop loop, whether there was solid evidence for it or not. It almost appeared like it became an addiction for the media, and it was one that brought with it a feedback loop where Trump was reportedly more evil every day. MSNBC's Joe Scarborough was suggesting people were stupid if they didn't see how Trump was just like Hitler.
That's how deep into their own bulls**t they were. They believed their own reporting to the point where they brainwashed themselves.
Yet, despite all the fearmongering, nothing they proclaimed about Trump was actually true. It became pretty clear that Trump was the adult in the room all along, and despite his dalliances and rough-around-the-edges mannerisms, he was the far better leader. This contrast to Democrat Party leadership only grew more obvious as the economy worsened, and the illegal migrant problem grew out of control.
In the same way a horror movie desensitizes its viewers with too many jump scares, the media numbed the people through insubstantial fearmongering. The corporate media became noise that people grew tired of hearing. Now, it's like the media doesn't even know which of its own narratives to follow. You have reporters even saying the reporting of its own network is wrong, simply because they can't bring themselves to admit that their reality isn't reality.
(READ: Scott Jennings Pulls Hilarious Reversal During Argument About X With Fellow CNN Panelists)
I think the people are exhausted, for sure, but also think the media is exhausted. They don't have it in themselves to mount a solid offensive anymore. They burned themselves out. There's nothing left in the tank. All they can really do is grumble and complain to a dwindling audience who cares even less than they do.
Everyone is tired, and it doesn't help that the corporate media system is old hat.
I'm not sure what will happen when corporate media will catch its breath. I do know that they will eventually regain their footing and an offensive will occur, but the question is, how many people will it actually affect this time around? Will enough people care for it to matter? What will the corporate media complex do to regain its supremacy over a much faster, more agile, and more well-balanced X?
Time will tell, but for now, people are just burned out on the media.
