Chuck Schumer is seldom thought of as an oracle of political precognition, but we have to hand it to the longtime Democratic senator from New York: On Oct. 17, at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in New York, Schumer seemed to realize, before many of his colleagues and cohorts in the Democratic universe, that he would have to get used to the presence of then-former President Donald Trump once again.
At the annual shindig in support of Catholic charities, Schumer found himself seated mere inches from Trump, who was speaking at the podium in what was, for him, a relatively genteel speech. He wished good luck to the mayor of New York City in a pending criminal matter, and he reminisced about accompanying his builder father to Al Smith dinners of long ago. He joked that Vice President Kamala Harris, who made herself unavailable to attend, was busy on a hunting trip with her faux tough-guy running mate, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN). “If Democrats really wanted to have someone not be with us this evening, they would have just sent Joe Biden,” Trump said, who quickly began ribbing the man to his left. “Look on the bright side, Chuck: Considering how ‘woke’ your party has become, if Kamala loses, you still have the chance to become the first woman president.”
Through it all, Schumer was surprisingly staid and did not indulge in Trump “resistance”-style theatrics, such as, for instance, ripping up a copy of Trump’s remarks ala Nancy Pelosi. Although he sat in a hunch as though he was on the verge, at any moment, of springing from his seat, the senator nonetheless remained seated, arms generally folded, through the evening. His pained smile suggested a man who was bound and determined to put on a brave face while waiting for a root canal. In short, Schumer had been mugged by reality: Harris was an awful candidate, Walz was a weird liability, the polls were too close for comfort, and Trump might soon be president-elect.
To function as a lawmaker and perhaps to preserve his own Trump Derangement Syndrome-impaired sanity, Schumer realized that he was going to have to become accustomed to the new normal of a second Trump administration. Schumer arguably arrived at this (for him) bleak conclusion sooner than most, but after the election, his allies in the establishment swallowed this bitter pill with surprising stoicism.
After the election, MSNBC’s Morning Joe co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski apologetically revealed to their bewildered audience that they had traipsed down to Mar-a-Lago for a kind of peace summit with the president-elect. Not since Trump crossed into North Korea had two such dug-in adversaries met. “It was the first time we had seen him in seven years,” Brzezinski said, an admission that, in itself, goes some way toward explaining the myopia in elite media circles: The Morning Joe duo has spent nearly a decade trashing and thrashing the president, ex-president, and presidential candidate, but they have done so largely in ignorance of the man himself and certainly of the millions of people who, to greater or lesser degrees, support his agenda of sensible foreign policy, robust border security, and consistent anti-wokeism. “What we did agree on was to restart communications,” Brzezinski said glumly, sounding more like a police negotiator working with a bank robber than a television personality chatting with the president-to-be.
Despite making their faithful viewers raving mad, the Morning Joe co-hosts’ great reversal represented another Schumer-style mugging-by-reality: The Electoral College had again made Trump president — and, worse from their perspective, the popular vote had rendered that victory unassailable — and a media strategy predicated on incandescent rage against the new administration no longer looked like a smart move.
For years, MAGA voters have been, to revise the immortal words of Timothy Leary slightly, dropping out from legacy media and turning to alternate forms of communication, such as Truth Social, the Daily Wire, or the right-wing-ish anti-“woke” podcasts that played host to Trump and running mate J.D. Vance. Legacy media institutions had surely noted this exodus, but they did nothing to ameliorate it because they had the captive eyes and ears of the people who mattered: the die-hard Democrats. For that demographic, there was no such thing as too much or too heated anti-Trump programming. In hindsight, though, this was akin to a classic error in electoral politics: Like a candidate for office who caters exclusively to his base, the legacy media had hobbled themselves with a message and mandate tailored to a sliver of the country. And, after the election, that sliver suddenly seemed a whole lot tinier.
Thus, we have entered an era of frantic, near-instantaneous media course correction. About two weeks before the election, the Washington Post announced that it was heretofore declining to issue presidential endorsements. “Our job at the Washington Post is to provide through the newsroom nonpartisan news for all Americans, and thought-provoking, reported views from our opinion team to help our readers make up their own minds,” publisher and CEO William Lewis wrote, perhaps not realizing that this newfound mandate was at odds with his paper’s Trump-era branding as an instrument for social change: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
Indeed, in a perverse sense, the huffy 250,000 Washington Post subscribers who became nonsubscribers in the wake of their paper’s nonendorsement had a right to feel aggrieved: Like those base voters who find their niche priorities sidelined during the general election, Washington Post readers had become accustomed to having their anti-Trump obsession amplified in print. And what was this — the newspaper attempting to broaden its tent and grow its readership to reflect the other half of the country? To invoke Greta Thunberg, how dare they!
The New York Times even came under attack for being too sympathetic in its coverage of Trump. “In the view of its critics, The Times has been far too distracted as of late by worries over President Joe Biden’s age, allowing it to steal attention away from the larger and far more serious danger posed by a second Trump administration,” CNN reported in March.
Yet media consumers who have come to regard pandering from their preferred news outlets as the norm may be in for a rude awakening. The Los Angeles Times not only skipped the whole presidential endorsement thing, but its owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, announced he was fashioning a new editorial board that actually reflected the concerns of the public that had catapulted Trump to the White House: “When the President has won the vote of the majority of Americans then ALL voices must be heard,” Soon-Shiong wrote on X. “Coming soon. A new Editorial Board.”
Even those outlets that remain committed to full-fledged anti-Trump hysteria seem to be subtly recalibrating: On ABC’s The View, Whoopi Goldberg has insisted that she will remain faithful to her pledge never to utter the president-elect’s name, a vow of silence that treats Trump like Beetlejuice: If you say his name three times, evidently, he will magically appear on set. Notwithstanding such vestigial anti-Trump performance art, most of the other View co-hosts seem off their game: The ladies have been compelled to read multiple “legal notes” to correct assertions they had confidently made about various Republicans, including nominees for the Trump Cabinet. Forgive me for wondering if it will be long before Tomi Lahren replaces Joy Behar. While we’re at it, is it too much to hope that the tediously partisan Jimmy Kimmel be replaced with the funnier and more apolitical Jim Gaffigan?
Of course, we should not overstate the legacy media’s sudden, resigned openness to Trump or misinterpret its root cause. Something like this happened eight years ago, when many legacy outlets fleetingly expressed anthropological curiosity about Trump’s win. Remember when Vance was not a “weird” vice presidential contender but a kind of seer who could interpret the inscrutable MAGA voter? USA Today headline, Aug. 17, 2016: “Best-selling ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ helps explain Trump’s appeal.” The Guardian, Dec. 7, 2016: “Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance review — does this memoir really explain Trump’s victory?” As early as Russiagate, though, the legacy media’s alleged curiosity in comprehending Trump had shifted to a rooting interest in deposing Trump.
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This time, there is good reason to think that full-fledged Trump panic might be delayed a bit longer, but if that is the case, it is not due to the good intentions of MSNBC talking heads or even the owners of the Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times. It is a question of survival. MSNBC is being detached from its parent company, Comcast. CBS is cycling through evening news anchors with alarming rapidity. Troubles in the newspaper business are endemic. The View generates big ratings, but one has the sneaking suspicion that it’s ultimately headed for an audience closer to the size of a daytime soap opera than, say, that dragon guy called Joe Rogan. In other words, the present mealy-mouthed attempts to learn to get along with Trump represent the death rattle of these shows and these institutions — a last-ditch attempt to make peace with the public they have been offending or ignoring for so very long.
In the end, the legacy media’s course correction is too far overdue to make a difference. The Morning Joe fiasco in Mar-a-Lago may prove to be a representative example: Joe and Mika have likely not won back a single Trump-sympathetic viewer and have demonstrably eroded their Trump-bashing fanbase. No wonder Chris Wallace wants to start a podcast. Maybe Schumer can be his first guest.
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.