It's all over but the deportations and internment camps. It's all over but the days of rage in which Americans chanting "Not my president!" are taking to the streets in LA, Oakland, SF, Philadelphia, New York and elsewhere, giving TV news more stunning visuals of an America divided by race, gender, sexual orientation.
It's all over but the Electoral College vote in December, America's last best hope to keep Donald Trump from the White House and put Hillary Clinton, the winner of the popular vote, into the presidency. It's all over but the what-ifs and finger-pointing and disturbing exit-polling that shows the breadth of the chasm between women and men, white people and people of color in America: 94% of black women voted for Clinton, while only 31% of white men voted for her.
Misogyny and racism ruled this election from Day 1, and TV news, political pundit shows, prime time features, late-night talk shows all quite literally conspired to normalize a fascist. We didn't need Leni Riefenstahl, we had CNN, MSNBC and Fox.
Autopsies are required when things go horribly wrong. This election result is viewed as illegitimate by at least 60 million American voters, if not more Americans than that. 57% of eligible voters voted, 48.8% for Clinton, 48.3% for Trump, the rest for 3rd-party candidates. There has never been a presidential election in our lifetime that resulted in spontaneous protests all over America. This is a first. And so is the TV-personality president-elect.
If ever there were a political story that was driven by TV, it was the 2016 presidential election. Trump, our next president unless our Electoral College fantasy happens, is a reality-TV star. He is known from years on TV talk shows, years of vituperative misogyny and blatant racism on the tube. The Apprentice first aired in 2004, and ran for eight seasons on NBC. It still airs in more than a dozen countries globally. The Celebrity Apprentice debuted in 2008 and ended in 2015 after seven seasons on NBC.
Some have asserted, "But Ronald Reagan was an actor!" Yes, but he was also governor of California, the largest state in the nation, for eight years. Trump is the first presidential nominee in U.S. history to have never served in the military nor held any political office. He's a reality-TV superstar. That's his resume.
TV taught us this election that celebrity matters to many more Americans than competence or acumen. We learned that if you bend the rules repeatedly to accommodate straight white male supremacy, it will eviscerate the rights of women, people of color, LGBT, immigrants and other marginalized people. We learned that if you repeat a lie or a hundred lies, or just refuse to correct them, they will become truths in the minds of voters. We learned that black rights don't matter, women's rights matter least of all, LGBT rights and immigrants' rights and disability rights were never even on the table. We learned that the most accomplished woman in the history of American politics would be presented as equal to a self-declared sexual predator, racist and xenophobe.
The biggest story of the 2016 election is how TV news, particularly cable news, built Trump's campaign and candidacy. TV skewed news coverage of Hillary Clinton, legitimized Trump, and now, mere days after the most shocking political upset since Truman vs. Dewey in 1948, is normalizing a monster with cheery tidbits and excited interviews, even as people are literally rioting in the streets and being arrested by the hundreds.
CBS' 60 Minutes jumped on the bandwagon first on Nov. 13, with an interview of the entire Trump clan, who now run both Trump's businesses and his transition team. After months of claiming the Clinton Foundation's AIDS work was a conflict of interest, we now have the Oval Office as the main office of Trump International. This conflict of interest should be the lead story on every newscast. It isn't.
Nor is the fact that Trump promised his followers that he would "drain the swamp" in Washington by keeping career politicians and lobbyists at bay. Instead, his proposed Cabinet is nightmare white men from our collective political past: Newt Gingrich for Secretary of State, Rudy Giuliani for Attorney General.
Nor is the Electoral College vs. popular vote a story. Consider the numbers. California is the largest state: 38.8 million, 55 EC votes. Wyoming is the smallest state, with 584,000, and 3 EC votes. These small, overwhelmingly white states, like Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, are given disproportionate weight compared with larger, more diverse states in the EC. Why should Wyoming have 3.7 times the weight of California, the most diverse state?
Nightline's Tom Llamas, who was personally targeted by Trump on-air after covering his campaign for over a year, did a disturbingly gleeful interview with Trump's campaign manager Kellyanne Conway on Nov. 11 in which he leaned in smiling as he lobbed a few softballs. Conway did what she's expert at: ignored every salient question.
A few TV news anchors have taken on Trump and his team: Anderson Cooper once famously told Trump that his response to his questions was that of a five-year-old. Cooper has had several run-ins with Conway in recent weeks. But for the most part, it was TV pundits, anchors and other players who normalized the Trump candidacy. Jimmy Fallon grilling Hillary Clinton about emails while ruffling Trump's hair on The Tonight Show. MSNBC's Morning Joe, hosted by former GOP congressman Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, daughter of Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, was heartily behind Trump from the outset. Morning Joe became his home away from home. Not that Trump came into the studio, but he was on-air often daily, as if he were a co-host, not a candidate.
ABC was also an egregious early supporter, allowing Trump to phone into GMA rather than come into the studio like other candidates. CNN was so Trump-heavy that since June, Trump's former campaign manager from Jan. 2015-June 2016, Corey Lewandowski, who has remained on retainer with the Trump campaign throughout, was a paid political consultant on the network. Lewandowski was even seen taking calls from Trump while on air with CNN.
Midway through the primary, Nielsen recorded Trump had received more than twice the amount of TV coverage as all the other candidates combined, 18 Republicans and six Democrats. Sanders was next, but he only received 10% of what Trump did. The candidate with the least coverage? Clinton. But she was also the candidate with the most negative coverage.
This promoting of the Trump candidacy and refusal to address any of the substantive issues that should have halted his candidacy early on was the biggest failure of TV news. More important even than the softballing of Trump was the free media he got. Clinton spent millions more than Trump on ad buys in expensive markets because she wasn't getting the endless interview time Trump received. But ads are not the same as chatting away like pals with news anchors. Trump got that.
The night Clinton clinched the nomination, CNN and MSNBC cut away from her speech to a Trump rally. Trump rallies were regularly aired in their entirety. One of Clinton's most historic speeches in her campaign, where she spoke on systemic racism to thousands of black Americans at the AME Conference, was broadcast only on local news in Philadelphia. Last month, VP-elect Mike Pence said Clinton's continual references to systemic racism "must stop" because they were "divisive."
While Trump was a regular on both Fox and MSNBC, there was no similar arena for Clinton. Maddow hosted Sanders 29 times. She hosted Clinton twice. All these numbers factored into Clinton's high unfavorables. Even after she won the primary in a landslide of four million votes, Sanders remained the guest on the Sunday shows. Clinton was frozen out of that important TV market, while on the other side, Trump was dominant and omnipresent.
This is a story for women first and foremost, since Clinton was the first woman candidate of a major party. The span of 240 years without a female nominee is vast and incontrovertible in its sexism. Out black gay commentator and senior writer for CNN LZ Granderson spoke with Nightline anchor JuJu Chang on Nov. 10 about the election results. Both addressed the misogyny that has been all but ignored throughout the election cycle and even in the post-mortem of the election itself. There has been an all-too-soon normalizing of the Trump win. The exception is MSNBC's Joy Reid, who has addressed issues like Trump's Russia connection and the outrageous FBI "Oops, we did see these emails before, sorry!" from Director James Comey, which altered votes in the last 10 days of the campaign.
Chang opened her Nightline commentary with the scene after Clinton gave her gracious concession speech that aired live on all networks. Chang referred to the ballroom where Clinton gave her speech as "a scene of devastation." Surrounding Clinton had been Bill Clinton and VP nominee Tim Kaine, who both looked shaken. Also on stage was Robby Mook, Clinton's campaign manager and the first openly gay man to run a presidential campaign. Chang said Clinton's loss was a "devastating chapter in what has been a decades-long story of public service."
She continued, "Even from her earliest days, young Hillary Rodham seemed destined for greatness. Across the country tonight, stunned Hillary Clinton supporters are mourning and raising their voices after winning the popular vote, but being shut out by the electoral college." Chang followed the protestors in New York: "Fighting for what's right is a line straight out of Clinton's speech this morning where she was calling for unity and embracing a Trump administration. But clearly her supporters are still very upset. We are hiking up the canyons of Manhattan following this protest. It's a smattering of Black Lives Matter, Southern Poverty Law Center, a number of colleges."
Chang asked Granderson, "After a hard-fought race, the highest office in the land proved beyond her pioneering grasp. Where does she go from here?"
Granderson said, "This is a woman who basically has been in the public spotlight nonstop for more than 30 years, and skewered for most of it. The first thing I would be telling her is hang out with your family, go on vacation with Bill, stay out of the public spotlight. Then begin to figure out, how do I want to serve? Serving's obviously a part of her heart. She won't ever stop that."
LGBT Americans would have benefitted from that service. Peter Thiel's smug solipsism notwithstanding, LGBT are among the biggest losers this election. There was never any discerning reportage about Trump's LGBT "platform." How many know that Pence voted to de-fund HIV research while he was in Congress? Or that as governor, Pence shut down the only access to HIV testing in parts of Indiana where the only test sites were Planned Parenthood, which led to a CDC-recorded surge in HIV cases there? Or that in Congress, as governor of Indiana, and now as VP-elect, Pence promotes the use of conversion therapy for all LGBT people, particularly youth?
We were forced to undergo conversion therapy in a mental hospital at 16 after being expelled from our all-girl high school for being a lesbian. Conversion therapy is brutal, it is actual torture. It should be treated as a crime, not a viable mental health treatment. Even NJ Gov. Chris Christie repealed the practice in his state. But NJ, NY, Connecticut, Illinois, Oregon and California are the only states that have banned the practice. It is legal everywhere else. Conversion therapy is written into the GOP platform, but Pence was one of the nation's top proponents long before he became Trump's VP pick. Trump chose Pence because of his extremist views. TV pundits lauded the choice, sans any reportage of Pence's record, as a sign of mainstreaming of the GOP candidate. It was anything but.
Conversion therapy was never mentioned by any TV news reporter or debate moderator in the election cycle. Elaine Quijano asked no questions about LGBT issues during the VP debate. Clinton was the only candidate to continually mention LGBT people and issues throughout the campaign.
The weekend that Clinton was speaking to a group of LGBT supporters and made her all-too-accurate and prescient "deplorables" statement, Trump and Pence were headlining the Value Voters Summit, the first GOP candidates to actually attend. That was widely reported on Fox News, but who among us, save reporters, ever watched Fox? VVS is sponsored by the Family Research Council, which the SPLC lists as an anti-gay hate group.
In 2008 John McCain declined to attend. Sarah Palin (take that in) declined to attend. In 2012, Romney declined to attend. But what did ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and MSNBC report on Sunday morning? No mention whatsoever of Trump and Pence speaking at an event promoted by a certified hate group. Instead it was the deplorables, and how Clinton was speaking to a "private" group of gay elites in NYC.
Election Eve in Philadelphia, CSPAN broadcast a Clinton event at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. The Democratic National Convention, which we covered (it was remarkable and LGBT inclusive right down to the gender neutral bathrooms) for another publication, had been held in Philadelphia.
The Philly event was like a pre-inauguration for Clinton, the passing of the baton from the first black president to the first female president. Philadelphia police and the National Parks Service estimated the crowd at around 50,000. After Obama introduced Clinton, he put a box down for her to step up on, because she is short. He said, "Going forward, this will always be there for you." That dream of shattering the glass ceiling has ended, What shattered was the dream of broadening inclusion in the halls of power: Mook's gayness, Huma Abedin as the first Muslim American woman, all those women and people of color that would have changed the face of power for all of us.
We'll never see that on our TV screens. Instead it will be a vast sea of straight white men. As if Hillary Clinton had never been there. TV gave us Donald Trump. TV grabbed us by the p*ssy. That's where we will be for the next four years. Stay tuned.