If you’re reading this, chances are good you woke up to bad news. “What kind of world will my daughter grow up in,” news. “So do I move to Pennsylvania or Canada,” news. And you are mainlining any and every feed you have for The One Take™ that will reassemble this ripped up Constitution of democracy in your mind.
And I’m here—media “expert” I guess?—to very earnestly assure you it doesn’t exist. Nobody really knows. But even if they did—and this is the real depressing part—it wouldn’t matter. None of this right here matters. Nothing you’ll see on your screen today matters. And it hasn’t in a long time.
This take, and all others, is a bunch of white noise rendered in blue and red.
America is reelecting Donald Trump. A convicted felon. Sexual assaulter. MAGA man. Orange makeup enthusiast. Tyrant apologist. Environmental and human rights weapon of mass destruction. Objectively shitty president the first time around. And what’s now abundantly clear is that the past six months of dissecting any of it, any part of the race or the policy or the news cycle—has been nothing but filling time before an inevitable conclusion.
The skeuomorphism of democracy
We’ve been told it would be a “tight race.” That was lie one. It seems that Trump made consistent, and in some cases, sizable gains in counties across the country. That’s not tight, it’s an unaccounted-for trend. A reality the media is still unable to observe. Like the movement of quarks or the mycelium network, it’s all right in front of our eyes but somehow out of sight.
I watched the election play out on YouTube TV’s four split screen channels while gorging on the NYT, X, and Instagram. All while paying tribute with my vote to the Electoral College while forgetting gerrymandering never got fixed.
These are not the takes.
The media analyzed policy as Harris ceded guns, fracking, immigration, and Gaza to the right. “Here you go! May a minority woman have your vote now?” And gosh, it’s tempting to list every possible mistake the Dems made. I find myself fantasizing: Is there a time loop where Harris Groundhog Days herself to victory? Then I find myself spin from fantasy to spiral, reeling about how chief macaroni and cheese Tim Walz was tasked to gush about his experience with IVF (be sure you don’t say abortion!) instead of stumping to fellow down-home middle Americans about cereal prices. Or that Harris spent her precious time telling America to “turn the page” in an era where nobody reads books. The skeuomorphism of democracy is real!
Thoughts like these are mistakes.
We’ve never lived in a time of more literacy. Or more mass misinformation. Russian actors (from what we think we know now) shutdown polls, not with new fangled AI tools, but with prank phone calls straight out of an 11-year-old’s birthday party. Meanwhile, the traditional media as you know it has been experiencing a mass extinction event for two decades. Nobody really cares about this trend (and that’s fine, we’ve established at the top that takes like this one don’t matter, and that premise stands). “Journalist” is now a bad word, not just to conspiracy theorists on the right, but to a jaw-dropping amount of liberals, too, who I see attempting to Big Brain the media on every you-just-wrote-that-for-clicks claim they don’t like, while the last of us arm ourselves with pay gates and chase Google’s latest SEO trend to keep the business going.
But the truth is out there. It’s all over legacy media along with social media, too. Whether you are a journalist or just a social poster, that Project 2025 explainer just doesn’t matter. None of this matters when most of Trump’s base is voting for policies objectively more likely to bring them less benefit than the alternative party. Any promise of some single, magic bullet issue mattering (to Republicans, at least) appears to be an illusion.
Yes, people are sick about paying two bucks more for milk than they did a few years ago, regardless of the “slowing rate of inflation.” Yes, Harris’s soft response to Gaza cost Democrats some votes. But Florida voters sided with abortion rights and with Trump. Is it OK to say the words “racism” and “misogyny,” or does that demonstrate my own lack of understanding around the true, deep-seated fear half of Americans are experiencing as they tick Trump/Vance on the ballot.
Inside the bubble
The media is fellating a bunch of mics that have been cut off by self-curated bubbles, social algorithms, subscriptions, exhaustion, or just deaf ears. Peak media navel gazing is exemplified by the “mass” (and by mass I mean, ultimately below the threshold for bar trivia) outrage about The Washington Post not endorsing Harris. Do we actually think anyone cares who a newspaper endorses for president anymore? Could there be any greater self-aggrandizing waste of time? We’re worried that a billionaire shut down one story that would be read by fewer Americans than will watch the latest Mr. Beast video? We’re actively telling half a population of America that strongly distrusts us what to do? Who to vote for?
Leading up to the election, those on the left were fist-pumping at the Democrats, again. Remember the DNC? The Harris brand sprint? The camo hat? The blue dots? All that garbage (too soon?) no self-respecting Trump voter would look at, let alone touch without revolt? It’s all stuff that we deemed “brilliant” while Elon Musk launched Dark MAGA and 2,367 of 3,244 counties in the U.S. shifted right in their votes.
Whatever this system is—and by system, I mean the structure of media and information dissemination and all of our hearts and minds and culture—it’s immovable. We act like algorithms are constantly changing our perspectives, when it fact, last night it felt more to me like we were frozen in 50/50ish partisanship, each of us ultimately consuming the same repackaged crap we have since 2016 or probably earlier.
There is no reaching across the aisle, be it from the media or the modern political machine. A friend of mine campaigned door-to-door in Wisconsin. She reached a person open to talking, and asked, why support Trump? They said, “immigration!” My friend asked, did they realize Trump killed a pretty significant bill on immigration that Harris backed. They hadn’t! $3.5 billion spent on ads. And they hadn’t.
Because nobody hears white noise.
That is not the take, either. But I showed up to talk today, lost and confused and furious and culpable and irrelevant, because it’s my job. I, like you, will not get much done.
All I know, all I really know, is that there’s no task more futile today than writing about this election. Other than reading about it.