The Lesson Leftists Learned From Trump’s Win Should Terrify Us

Since Donald Trump’s landslide victory over Kamala Harris last Tuesday, the legacy press has been hosting a public inquest into her demise. Three competing theories soon dominated the discussions — only one of which accepted the reality that Americans rejected the far-left policies and candidate on the merits.

While some Democrats and media outlets took this somber approach to the post-mortem, a second and more vocal segment of the press and Harris voting bloc instead declared that Trump’s election proves a majority of Americans are racist, sexist autocrats. The election of Barack Obama, Harris’ previous victories as a senator and a vice-presidential candidate, coupled with the increase in support Donald Trump garnered from minorities and women, quickly disprove this theory.

After an intense and nerve-wracking election season, these delusional tirades provided the still-sane populace some much needed levity. But Republicans should also note that at least a small segment of the left plans to double down on identity politics and prepare to counter these messages — not merely to protect their electoral victory, but more importantly to return to the pre-DEI unity that reigned supreme in our country until Barack Obama somehow converted his election as the first African-American president into a launchpad for racial divisiveness.

But it is a third theory for Trump’s resounding victory, posited by many on the left, that should cause grave concern to liberty lovers because it forewarns of an acceleration of efforts to control the marketplace of ideas. Here, Harris’ loss was blamed not on the far-left policies and candidate voters rejected or on the supposed racist and sexist beliefs of the electorate, but on voters purportedly being “misinformed” by the right-wing controlled media.

By the end of last week, this theme had flooded the airways and social media. But it was the New Republic’s article, “Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won?,” that best capsulated this spin. 

The New Republic’s article from Thursday declared the purported “reason” for Trump’s victory: “It wasn’t the economy. It wasn’t inflation, or anything else. It was how people perceive those things, which points to one overpowering answer.” “The answer is the right-wing media,” author Michael Tomasky pontificated, continuing: 

“Today, the right-wing media — Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more — sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.”

This argument was laughable to conservatives and Republicans who, unlike many of their liberal and Democrat contemporaries, do not limit their news intake to coverage from like-minded media outlets. Thus, the right saw what statistics bore out — “that broadcast evening news coverage of the 2024 presidential race has been the most lopsided in history,” with legacy outlets, like ABC, CBS and NBC, providing Harris “78% positive coverage, while these same networks have pummeled former Republican President Donald Trump with 85% negative coverage.” 

The legacy networks also hosted and controlled the presidential and vice-presidential debates, providing even more skewed coverage of the competing candidacies. And these media outlets regularly pushed — or unquestioningly accepted — false and misleading claims about Trump and Vance. 

The repetitive false reporting that Donald Trump had called neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville “very fine people” — a claim even debunked by Snopes — alone proves the point. But ordinary Americans, having lived through the Russia collusion hoax and the false claims that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation, and also having witnessed the blatant bias of the networks during the debate, no longer needed solid proof to question the veracity of the legacy outlets. And the populace then turned to alternative media to assess the truth.

Herein, we saw the difference about 2024: It isn’t that the right controls the media or misinforms the populace, but that the left no longer can — at least  not unimpeded. 

The growth of alternative media, apolitical podcasters, and Elon Musk’s refusal to censor conservative speech have created a counterweight. Or, as Axios founder Jim VandeHei acknowledged during an interview on MSNBC, Democrats “need to come to grips that legacy media is just not as important as it thinks it is.”

Make no mistake, though, the American left will not accept this new reality. Nor will the international community, which depends on the superpower of the United States bending to the will of the new world order — something that can be achieved only if the like-minded control information.

In late October, Matt Taibbi and Paul D. Thacker reported that efforts are already underway to destroy the free and fair marketplace of ideas that gained strength after Elon Musk purchased Twitter. In “Election Exclusive: British Advisors to Kamala Harris Hope to ‘Kill Musk’s Twitter,’” the two independent journalists reported that “internal documents from the Center for Countering Digital Hate — whose founder is British political operative Morgan McSweeney, now advising the Kamala Harris campaign — show the group plans in writing to ‘kill Musk’s Twitter.’” 

Those same internal documents, according to Taibbi and Thacker, reveal the Center for Countering Digital Hate, an “activist ally of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour Party,” planned to “strengthening ties with the Biden/Harris administration and Democrats like Senator Amy Klobuchar, who has introduced multiple bills to regulate online ‘misinformation.’”

With Biden and Harris soon out of office, direct coordination with the next administration won’t happened. Yet, as 2020 proved, the censorship-industrial complex has deep roots in the government, academia, non-profits, and tech companies. So, even with a Trump Administration, Musk supporting free speech on X, and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg claiming a change of heart away from censorship, many players remain, including the near entirety of the international community.

Those seeking to control information have many options yet at their disposal, from foreign countries targeting X and other platforms for civil or criminal penalties, to tech companies using algorithms to limit the reach of the new media in search engines. Foreign government and private efforts to deplatform and demonetize podcasts and alternative media also remain a powerful weapon.

So, while last week the conversation centered on what Democrats need to learn from their electoral defeat, Republicans should study the left’s response because it forewarns of a second wave of attacks on free speech.

Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion, National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.