Why Journalists Are "Mystified" by Trump's Victory

And how disconnected they are from Middle America.

Maybe because I’ve been a working journalist my entire adult life, I’m not nearly as interested in who’s to blame for Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss as I am in seeing how President-elect Donald Trump’s victory revealed (once again) how out of touch so many journalists are — how disconnected they are — from all those folks who live between Manhattan and Malibu.

When it became obvious that Trump was going to win, David Ignatius, the well-respected columnist at the Washington Post, wrote, “This election makes me realize how little I understand the American character in 2024…I am mystified by this outcome.”

Ignatius is a smart man, a perceptive journalist. Yet he may very well know more about Outer Mongolia than he does about Middle America — which may explain why he’s “mystified” by how Trump, a man we’ve been led to believe is a fascist who would usher in the Fourth Reich, could possibly have won.

Some elite journalists, ensconced inside a comfortable liberal media bubble, actually do venture, every now and then, into uncharted territory, also known (dismissively) as flyover country. But they don’t really know or understand people who live there — people who eat lunch at diners, who bowl on Thursday night and have supper (not dinner) at Applebee’s on Friday night, people who go to church on Sunday and don’t have a nanny from Central America watching the kids.