Enjoy this brief moment of self-reflection and candor from the media while it lasts. Regardless, they need to pay a heavy price this time.

We’re watching the immediate post-2016 election aftermath happen all over again. The news media are reluctantly conceding defeat to Donald Trump and finally admitting the obvious.

On the New York Times’ “The Daily” podcast, reporter Astead Herndon was one such illuminating case. “I just feel as if, whether it is ‘democracy,’ whether it is lecturing Americans, saying inflation is actually not that bad, that there has been a tone coming from Democrats to tell people the problems that they had are not legitimate,” he said. “And I think that is at the core of their problems in this race. It’s hard for me not to go back to the fact that when these issues were most clear and they had a chance to speak to those concerns, they decided not to and they decided to double down on this administration, to double down on the incumbent.”

That’s true but not so fast, sweaty. The media don’t get to act like mildly concerned bystanders now positioned to offer a sober account of what just happened. Kamala Harris’s defeat is every bit theirs as it is the Democrat Party’s, arguably even more so. The media banked that they still had enough cachet, even just by a sliver, to do the impossible — insist to American voters that what they could see and feel wasn’t real in order to

Former President Donald Trump has definitively won the 2024 presidential election. Even the lachrymose corporate media have begrudgingly conceded that fact. 

But it seems Vice President Kamala Harris has entered the witness relocation program. 

The Democrats’ replacement candidate was missing in action on election night, when she skipped her scheduled post-election appearance at her alma mater Howard University. 

Even as the writing was on the wall, as Election Day turned to the day after, Harris’ campaign chief Jen Brigid O’Malley-Dillon (the ultimate elitist-white-female-sounding name), told the dejected stragglers — by email — that Harris had left the building. Closing time. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here. A campaign staffer brusquely told news film crews to shut her down and pack it up. 

But O’Malley-Dillon assured supporters and the sycophantic corporate press that while Trump may have clearly won, the election was far from over. 

“We’ve been saying for weeks that this race might not be called tonight. Those of you who were around in 2020 know this well: it takes time for all the votes to be counted — and all the votes will be counted. That’s how our system works,” she wrote in an email. 

In other words, no concession speech. Harris supporters at the Howard election night watch party stumbled away, confused. 

Even as the Democrats’ once-vaunted “blue wall” crumbled  — first electorally essential Pennsylvania, then red-again swing-state Wisconsin — it was crickets from Harris and her team. 

As the wee hours of

Montana Republican Tim Sheehy, a Navy SEAL veteran, has unseated long-time Democrat Sen. Jon Tester.

Sheehy won 53 percent of the vote to Tester’s 45 percent, according to The New York Times, with 93 percent of the votes in at the time of publication. Tester served three terms since 2007.

“We the people made our voices heard, we completed our mission, and now we will secure our children’s future and save America together,” Sheehy posted to X on Wednesday. 

THANK YOU, MONTANA!!

We The People made our voices heard, we completed our mission, and now we will secure our children’s future and save America together!! 🇺🇸🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/tAhb05grPG

— Tim Sheehy (@SheehyforMT) November 6, 2024

Former President Donald Trump, who just won the first nonconsecutive reelection since President Grover Cleveland, endorsed Sheehy as an “American hero” in February, according to Fox News. Prominent Republican senators, including Marco Rubio of Florida, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, and Tom Cotton of Arkansas, also backed Sheehy’s bid for the seat.

Sheehy also got support from the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America Candidate Fund in January, the organization noted in a Wednesday press release. The group celebrated his victory, saying pro-life canvassers made more than 114,000 visits across Montana this election.

“We congratulate Senator-elect Tim Sheehy and look forward to working together to protect children before birth and help moms,” said SBA Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser in the release. “Montanans aren’t on board with the Harris-Tester agenda of painful late-term abortions of healthy babies